Not in the mood to write, so I’ll just plug a few interesting items from the past week that I missed.
First, Voice of Reason’s Robert Stark’s interview with Robert Lindsay on the War on Men is up. It’s a VERY interesting hour-long podcast in which they talk about game, the sexual revolution, the “Sodini phenomenon” and more. Go listen, like now, man.
Second, Asian of Reason has penned a post denouncing calculus. I don’t disagree with him – calculus is a scourge on academia, a horrific bizarro world where the normal laws of mathematics don’t seem to apply. Only a small number of people – mathematicians and certain types of engineers – really need to know it. But I recall that FeministX, one-time darling of the Steveosphere, wrote a similar post on calculus a while back. (Link goes to my LIGFY post linking her post, because she made her blog private after quitting to pursue an online career of vandalizing Blogger comment sections with an avatar of a white chick stroking an Indian guy’s blatantly photoshopped dong [link NSFW, unless your employer likes huge dongs].)
Since the ass-end of last year, FeministX has been accused of being Half Sigma’s sock puppet, a Libertarian Girl-esque project he cooked up to make fools out of us all. AOR has also been accused of being HS in disguise – they’re both ethnic minorities who became known for blogging about human biodiversity. I never bought into the conspiracy theories about either one, but things like this can make you wonder.
Finally, I’ll add to the heaping praise that Eastern European women get in the Roissysphere with this video of Russian girls ballroom dancing:
Real women still exist, guys. Go forth and find them.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
This is going to end well.. NOT!
—–
Japan resort draws men with virtual girlfriends
http://www.physorg.com/news202359650.html
One recent sweltering summer’s day, a tour bus from Tokyo pulled up at a sun-kissed beach at Atami, a Pacific coast resort southwest of the metropolis, and disgorged more than a dozen excited, iPhone-clutching young men. The determined youngsters, paying scant attention to the bikini-clad girls frolicking on the sand, instead headed straight for a bronze statue that depicts Kanichi and Omiya, a couple from an old love story set in Atami. The focus of the men’s attention — and of their smartphone cameras — was a tiny black and white square, a two-dimensional barcode that, thanks to “augmented reality” (AR) software, brought to life the object of their desire.
Not to make me seem special, but it seems like she’s only really trolling my blog.
Um, how did you come to the conclusion that my post was centered around “denouncing calculus”? I spent most of that post discussing ways of learning calculus.
["Regardless of what Obama's position on the issue may be (has he ever taken calculus?), calculus is by no means for everyone, and might be strictly limited to those with mathematical ability bordering on or exceeding genius level. I think people with spatial ability above the 90th percentile but below the 98th can be taught calculus in the way that I was taught, and do fairly well. But what use is it for calculus to be learned in such a restricting way? It is limiting, and quite honestly, a waste of time for these students to be pursuing calculus." - you. - ed.]
Oh well, take what it what you will.
Teach calculus as a tool for solving engineering problems. People who master that can then go on to use it to either a) engineer stuff, or b) abstract math. But if they go on to use it for abstract math, at least they’ll have first learned how it works in a concrete, real-world fashion.
Re: JackAmok: I think the problem AoR was getting at was, people *don’t* learn how they work in concrete, real-world fashions. People end up thinking: “Derivative? Yeah, you take the exponent down in front and subtract one…” I.e., they totally miss the entire point -_- For a lot of the students who go through a calc course, that really is all it is, memorizing (what seem like) arbitrary procedures to pass a test.
In India in high school, Calculus is mandatory from the 10th grade onwards, for anyone who chooses ‘science’ as a field. This includes aspiring Doctors and Dentists.
Everyone also had to disect huge frogs the size of a newborn baby. I am not kidding – these were huge. It cost only 20 cents in 1992 to buy one to take home for additional disection practice.
The illogic of a system where aspirant Dentists have to learn substantial calculus, while aspiring electrical engineers and software programmers have to disect giant frogs, that too from the ages of 15-17, was absurd.
If nothing else, it makes the student very, very sure of what line not to go into, as everyone got an immersive experience in vastly different subjects of ‘science’.
The content of the Stark cast was good but it was messed up by the awful audio quality.
I read somewhere that all of Calculus was the idea of the derivative, and the integral, and 498 pages of variations on the two ideas.
Oh Sweet Jesus. That thing in Japan with virtual girlfriends was vomit inducing. What, all their balls were taken away. What is going on over there?
“In India in high school, Calculus is mandatory from the 10th grade onwards, for anyone who chooses ‘science’ as a field. This includes aspiring Doctors and Dentists.”
Being a part of physics, bio students(w/o maths) are taught calculus, but in the exact same way that Xamuel mentioned. (ISC board)
For the PCM guys, it was pretty comprehensive.