@ChaosEngine Corporations are a creation of governments, not people or free marketers. If we want to do away with legal protections for corporate entities, fine by me, I have been calling for it for quite some time. Then again, that means you will most likely have to work for yourself in the future, which is a less lazy way to live.

And saying you can't apply the idea of individual rights to influence all following decisions is to disallow any conversation beyond the surface of any subject. You can't talk about calculus unless you already have a working foundation of simple algebra, everything has a foundation from which is erects more complexity. To build any functional, rational structure, it has to be continually built on one foundation or it will be inconsistent, IE trying to apply the rule of math to the rule of friendships or something. Are you making this an appeal to be inconsistent, or an appeal to a different base of measure? If you wish a different base of measure, then purpose one, but I refuse to make believe that an inconsistent building is a better one to make, that can be steered to very evil ends, as many large corporate bodies have had. But even private people have done so too, look at prohibition of alcohol. People can be just as evil as corporate bodies.

I'm really excited about the possibilities of this type of educational tool.

I've been using the Khan Academy to brush up on my Calculus and Linear Algebra for a few months now.

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

I love how Bill Nye had to break it down into cupcakes so this moron could understand! Then right after Bill says "if you wanna get into mathematics and algebra"...woah there Bill Nye....remember, youre on FOX!

The quadratic equation is now considered to be the intro to intermediate algebra.

Tags for this video have been changed from '314, math, music, algebra' to '314, math, music, algebra, pi' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^notarobot:

Magnets? How do they work?


I think you missed a "fu&king" in there somewhere.

Can someone tell me how an integral, derivative, trigonometry, algebra, geometry, division, multiplication, adding, subtraction works and what these constants are (the ones I keep hearing about)? I've figured out the square root of -4 so no issues there.

We should cut these things out of school. THEY NEVER HELP YOU!!1!

/extreme sarcasm...

Your points are both well made and entirely pointless regarding the video. I say that not as an insult but as someone who sees things much as you suggest. The crux is, though, that the same can be said for all of science together. The dissecting of space into abstracts of meaning is no different from any other abstraction that people do. The trouble is, and where I think your description is too simple is that the abstraction and the dynamics are one in the same. The geometry they're trying to get down to in the video here describes the base dynamics of gravity throughout the universe. In that sense, it isn't just a structure applied to the universe by human minds but something fundamental. Describing gravity as a curvature in space time could be considered a human abstraction (like the electromagnetic field or the wave function in quantum mechanics) but the issue of whether the mean gravitational background of the universe is flat or not goes beyond that. Just like the mass and charge of the electron. It's a fundamental; it is the dynamics, the flow.


>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

More over, what is it say it isn't changing or is due to change, or is always in a state of flux. There might be some other more fundamental rule governing that overall shape...or what if the same isn't consistent through the galaxy. And is shape something you need to confine to matter and not the container in which mater is in? If both have a shape, and ones shape is affecting the others shape, what does shape even mean anymore. Is the shape the thing you have, or is it the thing you have after the thing above you is taken into account. What is shape?
My metaphysical interpretation of the universe is non-dimensional. Space having depth, IMO, is a result of the minds interpretation of the details of the universe. While the elements (heheheh) of Euclid's geometry are completely sound, and thus, trying to talk about the shape of the universe as humans experience it will be a question that has an answer, it doesn't answer the more important question, does existence itself have dimension. In the same way that I don't believe color is a property of light, I think you can reduce space and time (though time gets interesting) to an experience of minds.
Even without my own metaphysical framework built up, all interpretations of space (lines, squares, rays) derive their existence from one essential element, the point. A point has no dimension. A line is essentially a collection of dimensionless points. It is not necessary to interpret them as something with dimension. For example, y=x. Algebra, in general, allows for a dimensionless explanation for the interaction of points. Y=x doesn't have to look like anything, per say, for it to be solved in algebra. While humans will retain the contextual information of space and shapes when working for algebra, those are interpretations that correlate back on the human reality. In other words, much akin to a computer program, the universe could (and I believe does) operate without a property of space. Space is a result of minds in the same way monitors construct visual images from a computer. Both are interpretations of dimensionless data.
Seeing in spaces helps us be better hunters, but as that confers to the ultimate truth of reality, I am less certain. The real story might be less about space and gravity, but the overall governing dynamics which exist as a simple set of seemingly arbitrary rules. The reality of the universe might be very closely understood as a computer program or a very sophisticated algebra expression.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

Misleading. He is saying density is directly related to shape. What exactly qualifies as flat in the view of shapes? That implies that the Earth if flat too. I have a feeling there is quite a bit of debate about the process used here to determine it is flat and not saddled.


More over, what is it say it isn't changing or is due to change, or is always in a state of flux. There might be some other more fundamental rule governing that overall shape...or what if the same isn't consistent through the galaxy. And is shape something you need to confine to matter and not the container in which mater is in? If both have a shape, and ones shape is affecting the others shape, what does shape even mean anymore. Is the shape the thing you have, or is it the thing you have after the thing above you is taken into account. What is shape?

My metaphysical interpretation of the universe is non-dimensional. Space having depth, IMO, is a result of the minds interpretation of the details of the universe. While the elements (heheheh) of Euclid's geometry are completely sound, and thus, trying to talk about the shape of the universe as humans experience it will be a question that has an answer, it doesn't answer the more important question, does existence itself have dimension. In the same way that I don't believe color is a property of light, I think you can reduce space and time (though time gets interesting) to an experience of minds.

Even without my own metaphysical framework built up, all interpretations of space (lines, squares, rays) derive their existence from one essential element, the point. A point has no dimension. A line is essentially a collection of dimensionless points. It is not necessary to interpret them as something with dimension. For example, y=x. Algebra, in general, allows for a dimensionless explanation for the interaction of points. Y=x doesn't have to look like anything, per say, for it to be solved in algebra. While humans will retain the contextual information of space and shapes when working for algebra, those are interpretations that correlate back on the human reality. In other words, much akin to a computer program, the universe could (and I believe does) operate without a property of space. Space is a result of minds in the same way monitors construct visual images from a computer. Both are interpretations of dimensionless data.

Seeing in spaces helps us be better hunters, but as that confers to the ultimate truth of reality, I am less certain. The real story might be less about space and gravity, but the overall governing dynamics which exist as a simple set of seemingly arbitrary rules. The reality of the universe might be very closely understood as a computer program or a very sophisticated algebra expression.

I've used these for Linear Algebra as I have a shitty teacher that says—and I quote: "I don't need to draw visual examples for you on the board, you need to be able to determine what is happening using just logic." What a prick...

I have definately used these videos for matrix algebra and some Calc. It was one of the best moments trying to figure out how to go through an equation and remembering that it can be explained on the internet.

OMG OMG OMG What does it mean.


She may have studied physics and chemistry but apparently didn't do well at basic algebra. And she thinks that the c in E=MC*2 is some kind of measure of an amount of light rather than a velocity. I think I need an aspirin.

It wasn't Algebra 101.

Looked like a liberal arts thing, maybe even acting.

Need more info.

Will this movie have a lot of math? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved.html

The funny thing to me, as a bit of a math dork, is that 2+2=4 is only certain because mathematics more or less starts with the assumption that addition works that way.

Why do we assume that? Because it's a pretty basic scientific observation that if I have two of some object, and then get two more, I will have four.

We don't really know why that is the case, but we observe it, and can come up with a theoretical framework for predicting it -- otherwise known as addition.

If Muslims really had the same kind of easily accessible, reliable scientific observations backing up their position on the nature of the universe, it seems to me that there would be about as many non-Muslims in the world as there are people who genuinely believe that 2+2=3.

That said, there's no reason to censor people who would want to argue that 2+2=3 to those who choose to listen (as would happen in a Church or Synagogue), but I probably wouldn't want that person teaching math in an elementary school. However, if it was a college-level course introducing algebraic structures and the concept of mathematics based on different axioms, that would probably be a fine starting point for getting students to question what they think is unquestionably true.