It’s the Thought that Counts

The fourth Carnival of the Elitist Bastards went up during our absence, over at Blake Stacey’s blog Science after Sunclipse. Blake does a great job demonstrating that it’s possible to be a physicist and simultaneously have an impressive command of the English language. I haven’t read that much iambic pentameter in one sitting since high school.

Speaking of English fluency, I was particularly happy to see in the carnival a thorough explanation of elitist bastard language. Even though I’m generally against trying to live up to the “bastard” title, I do hate when people use “begging the question” to mean “making one wonder” rather than “employing circular logic”! Plenty of my other pet peeves are covered there as well — read and grumble along with me. Of course, all the posts at the carnival are worth a read, and I’m glad to see my post about the realities of the LHC found a place among them.

Tags: carnival

We at It’s the Thought that Counts are happy to be hosting the 39th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics.  The carnival is published biweekly and includes a wide variety of articles about math — everything from general-interest posts about math in society to advanced technical proofs. This edition has been plagued by some organizational difficulties — many weren’t aware that we were hosting this time, and the Blog Carnival submission form was down — so if you didn’t get your submission in in time, I’d be happy to hear from you and add things to the carnival. Just email me at a@thoughtcounts.net.

Although I study theoretical computer science and my coauthor Z studies physics, our posts here are more often about math and science policy considerations than about specific topics in our fields.  I nevertheless couldn’t resist taking this opportunity to pose a clever math problem in honor of the number 39:

39 people are attending a large, formal dinner, which must of course occur at a single, circular table.  The guests, after milling about for a while, sit down to eat.  It is then pointed out to them that there are name cards labeling assigned seats, and not a single one has sat in the seat assigned to them.  Prove that there is some way to rotate the table so that at least two people are in the correct seats.  (update: answer in the comments)

While you’re mulling that problem over, if you’d like to see another with no solution yet posted, head over to Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere for one that Sam Shah wrote. It’s based on a problem he found from 1896, and it’s definitely a challenge.

Several of you took the opportunity this time around to teach some math. If you’re looking for advanced and technical math writing, the clear winner this week is Charles Siegel at Rigorous Trivialities with a post on algebraic geometry. He’s written about how to explicitly construct curves of arbitrary degree with specified nodes.

Catsynth offers us a taste of knot theory. Knot theory is one of those areas of math lucky enough to have associated with it lots of cool pictures, some of which you can see in this post. There’s also an introduction to some potentially interesting but unanswered questions about prime knots.

There are even more pretty pictures available at Jon Ingram’s blog, Lessons Taught; Lessons Learnt. In “The Joy of Hex,” Jon shows lots of tilings using rotations of a single hexagonal shape, and poses some interesting questions about relationships between the tilings. He also describes how tilings can be a useful educational tool to show students that not all math looks like algebra.

In other educational news, Larry Ferlazzo points out a new website which gives step-by-step instructions for a wide variety of high school math problem types. He also points out the extensive glossary, useful for students learning English along with math.

If you’re still not convinced that the internet provides many great opportunities for teaching and learning math, check out Maria Andersen’s post on “Teaching from the Online Calculus Trenches.” She showcases the 100 slides she made for a presentation on online teaching software and its promises and limitations.

Speaking of software, there’s a poll going on at Walking Randomly concerning what mathematical software you would use if you could pick whatever you wanted. These competing software packages generate some fierce and probably irrational loyalty among users, so I’m happy to see a growing collection of opinions. If you feel qualified you should definitely weigh in. Otherwise, check it out to see what might be worth learning.

We’ll close with two posts on math in the Olympics. John Cook at The Endeavor gives us a statistical model of Olympic performance by athletes of different genders. He points out that the difference in performance could be the result of a difference in variability across genders rather than a difference in average ability, and gives a quantitative illustration of this possibility.

Finally, while following the Olympic pole vaulting coverage, Xi at 360 notes a silly consequence of the official USATF system for converting between Imperial and metric units. Apparently, the convention is always to round down, which means that by converting back and forth it’s possible to get hilarious results.

That’s all for now. Don’t forget, we’ll continue to update this over the weekend to accommodate new submissions.

Tags: carnival, math

It’s carnival time again.  My post on reasons for learning math has been featured in the Carnival of Education.  This carnival has plenty of interesting stuff, especially if you teach.  There are a couple more general audience articles as well, including this cool post adding a bit of reality to the classic teacher-inspires-troubled-youth genre of movies.

Tags: carnival, education

Ever since PZ Myers’ tongue-in-cheek hosting of the last Carnival of the Elitist Bastards (as well as my post about reclaiming slurs, which followed soon after) I’ve been thinking that it’s time we at It’s the Thought that Counts write the essay that everyone else did back on CEB #1 and #2 — that is, to answer the question, “What does it mean to be an elitist bastard?”

I was a little bit distraught when I read PZ’s carnival post, basically because it wasn’t crystal clear whether he was joking, and I know plenty of readers wouldn’t get the joke. The idea was to take the term “elitist bastard” and run with it, to proclaim his superiority over all the contributors and to make fun of all of us for being insufficiently elitist or bastard-like… as a tool to sort of underhandedly point out that we had worthwhile and intelligent things to say and are actually a group of good people, deep down. It was an amusing and clever way to structure the post. Still I wonder if, given the cult of personality that’s grown around PZ Myers, if it didn’t come across as a little too believable in its on-face message.

I’m all for dispelling the myth that being knowledgeable and willing to use that knowledge makes you an “elitist bastard.” (There are ways for that term to be appropriately applied… about a person complaining that the Evian poured for them at a private golf club is a few degrees off the right temperature, or something… but most of the time it’s used with entirely the wrong sense.) It’s not “elitist” to make the observation that, in some quality such as general education level or expertise in a particular area, you are above average — assuming that you’re right. It’s no more elitist for an economist to share an opinion about economic policy than it is for a construction worker to build a sturdy wall, a janitor to wax the floors until they shine, or a figure skater to execute a triple axel. If someone feels bad about having less expertise about something than you, they should rectify it by improving themselves, not by calling you a “bastard.”

Now, I’m all for reclaiming words used as slurs. But there’s reclaiming, and then there’s prophecy fulfillment. Sometimes slur words are just sounds, and sometimes they’re descriptive terms. “Elitist bastard” is one of the latter. I don’t want to deal with this term by saying, “Oh yeah, I’ll show you an elitist bastard!” and being as much of an elitist and a bastard as I can be. It might seem funny to me at the time, but the joke is going to go right over the heads of the very people whose minds I’m trying to change. (Want another example? It’s one thing to pull the rug out from under the derogatory “hebe” and name a Jewish magazine “Heeb.” It’d be quite another thing to try to embrace the term “dirty Jew,” because embracing it would seem to require one to be extra dirty in whatever ways seemed most stereotypical. There’s a reason this doesn’t happen.)

I don’t believe the CEB philosophy is about embracing the term “elitist bastard” as such, so much as it is about pointing out its absurdity by juxtaposing it with ourselves. We’re proud and happy to be intelligent people with carefully thought-out opinions, and we believe we can improve the “marketplace of ideas” by sharing those opinions rather than being shamed into silence by people who equate education with evil. At least, that’s my interpretation, and based on the “What It’s About” section on the carnival blog I’m inclined to say that the rest of the crew would agree with me.

You can help raise the level of our public discourse from the subgutter of stupidity in which it currently resides. All you have to do is celebrate your own intelligence.

You don’t have to be erudite or loquacious. You don’t have to be particularly learned or expert. Just say what you think. What do you think about the dumbing down of the media? Education? Politics? Why do you suppose our cultures celebrate jocks, but not genius?

…Saving the world is a noble goal. Savoring it may be just as important. As Elitist Bastards, I think we can manage both.

To me, being part of the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards means saying, “If by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who isn’t embarrassed to enjoy learning new things… if by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who takes pride in making reasonable and logical decisions… if by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who seeks to use their skills to make the world a better place, then yes, I suppose I am an elitist bastard.”

It’s not about trying to be bastards. It’s about trying to do what we believe is good and right, while acknowledging that we’re probably going to be called bastards for it.

Tags: carnival, culture

The 38th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics went up at Catsynth on Friday. It includes A’s recent post about typical math teachers’ efforts to make their classes seem relevant to students. There’s a bunch of other neat stuff in the carnival — you should go and check it out! Of particular interest to me was Jon Ingram’s post on winning and losing at Nim. Nim is a very simple game, but there are a lot of really interesting results associated with it, and it’s the foundation for a lot of stuff in combinatorial game theory. His post is easy to understand even if you don’t have a lot of background in math.

We’re looking forward to hosting the 39th edition of the carnival here at It’s the Thought that Counts. To submit your entry, fill out the submission form by August 21.

Tags: carnival, math

The second edition of the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is up today here at home port — and we’re in it!

The Elitist Bastards are a neat bunch, and all the posts Dana’s featured are interesting and worth a read, but a couple caught my eye in particular.

One is Epi Wonk’s post on questionable research practices. Proponents of “alternative” medicine and associated pseudoscience often point to incidents of scientific misconduct as a reason why modern science and medicine can’t be trusted, and that line of argumentation sounds persuasive if you’re unfamiliar with the scientific community. Epi Wonk explains why a couple bad apples don’t actually spoil the whole bunch.

I also enjoyed the good advice at Decrepit Old Fool on “elite” transportation (that is, muscle-powered). If we’re going to talk the talk about environmentalism and the rising price of oil, we ought to make an effort to walk the walk — or pedal the bicycle, as the case may be.

Tags: carnival