Better Living Through Chemistry(!); Making Word Problems Interesting

My friend mentioned how boring word problems are in Math classes.  Considering the importance of understanding the meaning of the math concepts, instead of just the calculation, I think this is a critical issue to solve.
My first idea is to incorporate some sly misdirection into your problems.  Hinting at one question, and then asking another is a great way to keep students on their toes!  You may say that trick questions aren't fair.  On the contrary!  Trick questions allow you to insert some fun into your tests or quizzes!
For example:

 "Jenny is an astronomy enthusiast, and loves watching the stars at night. But her husband always turns on the garage flood lights at night so she will go to bed. Jenny is trying to figure out the blue-shift for a binary system in the NGC 1357 galaxy. If Jenny calculates the wavelength of Cesium (K) emission spectra of the system as 3935.8 Angstroms, the Hydrogen (H) emission spectra as 3969.9 Angstroms, and the Hydrogen Alpha (Hα) emission spectra as 6561.0 Angstroms, how hard should she throw a rock at her husband in order to ensure a quiet, dark night for stargazing?"

See?  With just a few extra steps, Learning can be fun!

Why the Conservatives may actually lose, for once.

Jonathan Chait's post offers a beautiful clarification of my argument from yesterday:

Democrats don’t need to lure Republicans into negotiations in order to raise taxes on the rich. They can just wait until January first and it happens automatically. The more clever of the Republicans realize this and want to strike a deal now, before the Bush tax cuts expire, when they can negotiate from the lower baseline. That’s why some members are floating a willingness to submit to a slightly higher tax rate if Obama will agree to a revenue target “well below” the $1.6 trillion he is asking for.

....

Republicans are only contemplating this method because it follows the path of least resistance, a path dictated by the conservative movement's paranoia about a budget sellout. It doesn't require an agreement with Obama or an affirmative vote to raise taxes. But it also gives Obama the strongest leverage to ultimately set revenue levels. Republicans have constructed all their anti-tax defenses against a bipartisan budget deal, never imagining that higher taxes would transpire through legislative inaction rather than action.

Republicans are following a path that is likely to lead to higher taxes because the entrenched methods of anti-tax politics are preventing them from maneuvering. The conservative movement is designed to prevent a compromise, when compromise is the thing Republicans most need in order to hold taxes low.

Way to one-up me Chait.  Now I look like a vengeful, partisan dick. I suppose after years of conservative madness, that is how I feel.

No Country for Obstructionist Men

Image from Andrew Sullivan (Marry me!). His coloring, the Washpo's graph.

The GOP can suck it.

As surprising as it is, I think a good number of Americans are catching on to the Republican strategy of 2001 to current:

• If Obama wants to avoid the (fiscal-cliff / expiration of Bush tax-cuts / debt ceiling), he has to compromise.  
• If Obama wants to compromise, he has to offer his suggestions in public, so we can savage him for the inevitable hard decisions.  
• If Obama wants more revenues, he has to cut everything we want.
• If Obama wants more revenues, they have to be balanced by tax-cuts in other areas we want.
• If we don't get these things, we will not compromise, except in a way that is barely compromising.  We will only call this "bi-partisanship", and not compromise, because that way we can dupe independents while being able to claim victory on Fox news.
• We will not compromise in any way that exposes us to attacks from our batshit-insane radical base.
• If anything breaks, it's Obama's fault.
• If it's not Obama's fault, it's mostly Obama's fault.
• If it's definitely not Obama's fault, it's Obama's fault because he's made politics too partisan.

This strategy, though nihilistic and somewhat evil (malicious, Machiavellian, mommy-he-hit-me whatever you want to call it), has been working pretty well up through the election.  During a severe recession, throwing a stick in any of the fixes the administration proposed worked pretty well; the economy probably didn't recover as fast, and all that low-information, undecided voters see is partisan hair-pulling.  Rinse and repeat, and you can portray the President as a dead-beat, clueless guy who is Out Of Ideas (no, I don't think they know what that phrase actually means either).

Eventually though, the GOP was bound to run up against a situation like the present, where the ball is in their court and if something isn't done, it will Republican asse(t)s on the line.

But they have a problem: over the last four (or more) years they've steadily built up a base that won't accept compromise.  Fox news has drilled its viewers for years that America(tm) is a land of moral infallibility unless the liberals take charge.  It is also a country of True Conservatives(also tm), who cannot lose elections unless they are not conservative enough.  In this world, ACORN hasn't been dissolved, it helped Obama steal the election.  In Foxland, the only way to save the America that has been besieged by socialists, is to leave it.  In this type of world, it doesn't make any sense for the GOP to compromise with Obama.  Perhaps Tea Party republicans would stomach a compromise to to avoid the fiscal cliff in theory, but in practice it would involve letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the rich, cutting defense spending, and cutting social entitlements that most Republicans actually like, Social Security and Medicare chief among them.

The citizens of Foxland (or 'Foxians' as I will now refer to them) don't want a messy legislative battle.  They don't want to see the GOP compromising, or cutting popular programs, or raising revenues in any way, shape or form.  They want to see Obama crushed, and the Great Liberal Menace pushed back.

Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like helping the country.  They can't be bullied, reasoned, or negotiations.

Yes I'm using hyperbole.  Get over it.  -tryingsense

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The latest in teat-cup milking technology.

Watch this.

Think about this: somewhere there is a marketing exec who can present a chart with the hits for this video and web site.  That marketing exec can say, with no exaggeration, that this is the most successful ad for teat cup silicon liners for milking that has ever existed.  

And probably ever will exist.


So what did you do today?

A Most Dangerous Question

The more troubling question is why we like them.

What did the Founders think about Killer Robots?

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, 
the right of the people to keep and bear War-Mechs shall not be infringed."
Therefor, FDR shall ride a Mech onto the battle of the Bulge.
Image by sharpwriter.

The problem with 'originalism' is that most often 'originalism' is simply a cover for the ideological choices the Supreme Court Justices take. A friend I know who is a very conservative constitutionalist pointed out that more than half the time when Scalia defends a stance based on originalism, it's because he couldn't come up with anything better and is post-hoc self-rationalizing himself.



Which is not to slam originalism so much as to point out it's very inconsistent use.



That said, we live in an era of previously-legalized torture, where killer invisible robots roam the skies and blacks are now considered people, the government can mandate healthcare but can't tell people not to buy 50-caliber rifles. I don't think the founding fathers really thought this far ahead.

Ad-World: Skinner's Xbox

American Express has a new advertising scheme in which they're offering various amounts of cash withdraw from their Amex bill if they finish Halo 4: $25 for the first difficulty level and so on.  They're using the classic trick of the super-fantastic-non-monetary-status-prize for the kick: the first few to beat the hardest difficulty level will get tickets to E3 - the videogame version of the Paris Fashion Week.

I feel like you could just add some pigeons and this would be right out of B. F. Skinner's playbook.  I won't claim even basic fluency in the current consensus on Skinner's psychological theories, but it seems functional enough to me.  By playing a videogame that they were going to play and enjoy anyway, but be rewarded with cash, players are receiving a double whammy of positive reinforcement; the pleasure of playing the game and the pleasure of getting free money (for doing something they enjoy enough to pay for).

For young, moldable minds that is a lot of conditioning for the buck, and I would argue that the propensity for gamers to find ways to find shortcuts or capitalize on a reward system would even make this more effective.  I see this as a two pronged attack: get 25 bucks if you do this things now that you enjoy and were planning on doing anyway, and also here is a semi-impossible goal which still gives the dream of winning a ticket to the Valhalla of videogame culture.

All this aimed at a target group of young males with some amount of discretionary income (enough to buy a $60 game, which will rapidly depreciate in price) who are already committed to the franchise and may already have their banking system directly wired to this beautiful box of endless entertainment (for a price, of course).

It's quite the setup.