jarvist

I've always had watch history off, but my searches now return a couple of pages of short form nonsense, before my actual results.

Absolutely. Key for me was to invite children's friends (and family) along, host it in our house and make it a recurring weekly thing. The books (presumably you also have these from the MSRI's 'Mathematical Circles Library') are great, but week-to-week I've found the free online NRICH resources much more directly useful: https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich

It's been really rewarding. I definitely recommend jumping in. I started with my reception-age child (+ school friends), and have just extended it to their younger sibling (+ friends from nursery). Your 3.5 year old will have started the EYFS (Early Years Foundational Stage) syllabus at nursery if they attend (which is also what they do in the 'Reception' year at primary school, before starting the national curriculum in the first year), so they will now be exposed to counting and comparisons. The perfect time to get started, in other words!

The NRICH material is really good: https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years

There's some NRICH funded research that showed that exposure to symmetry and reasoning at this level was much more predictive of future abilities than numbers and counting. I think when parents try and help at the early stages, they often try to e.g. get their kids to count to 100, which is conceptually identical to counting to 10.

For number fluency there is the free White Rose '1 minute maths' app, which does a very nice job of gamifying subitising & etc. A lot of primary schools in London seem to have adopted the White Rose teaching resources. https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths

Practically speaking (running a little maths circle in the UK for my children, and some of their friends from nursery and primary school), I have found the Nrich website to be the single best source of resources: https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich

There is also https://parallel.org.uk/ by Simon Singh, but this is aimed at ages ~10+.

The book by Rozhkovskaya has some really nice activities in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956

The book by Zvonkin described in the article is a very good motivator, particularly for the honest descriptions of lessons gone badly wrong, and staying up late cutting out pieces of cardboard! But it's quite difficult to use as a teaching resource.

What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). I suppose you could try and do it with more commonplace trigonometric functions, but then you lose the simple vector interpretation of adding the contributions. Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex numbers and the Euler identity to avoid strained analogies?

That's great! Their motivation & updates seem very sensible. Calculus Made Easy is a very nice compact book for university students who have started to forgot their high school training, and I will certainly point people in the direction of this project.

Water is incredibly efficient at transmitting sound.

The mug will attenuate almost all the signal. Maybe try with a disposable plastic cup?

This is super useful to know about! The sprite designer & waveform editor / tracker is a really good creative introduction to computers for small children. And you can jump straight in to doing this with the above web link.

(For those new to Pico-8, hit 'esc' from the Lua console to bring up the editor tools, then click on the icon in the top right.)

But it is theatre. A single £0.01 Zener diode can generate vastly more guaranteed (by quantum mechanics!) randomness, without all the possibility of failure, entropy leaking etc.

Yes, but what you are missing is that behaviour has changed! We have that level of net road deaths today, given that kids are being driven everywhere.

So you can't state from your data that it has got safer: you need the child deaths/km or deaths/hr walking.

The speed of sound does not depend on pressure, only temperature.

I suspect this is occurring because the (sonic) flow through the nozzle cools as it expands, therefore the speed of sound drops, making the same flow now supersonic in the cooled gas.

There's also a fantastic Youtube video in a neutron beam facility of a Moka pot, in which you can see the full process of brewing. The water and plastic handle appear 'black' as hydrogen scatters neutrons so strongly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VESMU7JfVHU

A key quality of life improvement for me was to realise that you can eject the grounds from the filter funnel by putting the tube to your lips and blowing gently, ejecting the coffee puck into the food waste / compost bin. The Moka pot then becomes an almost zero-cleanup way of making coffee.

You need to do this after the pot has cooled enough that the aluminium won't burn your lips, but soon enough that the coffee grounds haven't continued to swell and wedge themselves in place.

I'm certain all the reactors will SCRAM (shut down the nuclear chain reaction), but then every large (i.e. all) power reactors need active cooling to remove the decay heat and prevent a core meltdown. (This is what happened at Fukushima - even with all the staff on site, they couldn't cope with a station 'blackout' (no external power grid) event.)

Strangely this piece doesn't mention nuclear power plants: with 400 or so operational nuclear power plants worldwide, that's a lot of core meltdowns.

Similarly I would imagine there would be a lot of oil in the sea, if suddenly all the oil rigs and refineries were instantly abandoned.

My experience is a first implementation / novice programmer will write Julia code of a similar speed to python. But then an intermediate Julia programmer can adapt that same code to be of order C / Fortran performance, without stopping the novice programmer from being able to work on the code base. So it's this ability to iteratively improve and collaborate across very different skill sets that's really important.

This is quite a different situation to traditional scientific computing.

Why would you want control? That means more bureaucracy you need to do yourself.

In the UK (and I believe everywhere with a well functioning research culture), the 'Haldane principle' means that research funding is decided by researchers (not politicians / the civil service). https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmdi...

Funding UK science via the ERC, means you are making use of the network effects for peer review & processes. So the individual funding applications are being reviewed to a higher standard, and better decisions are made about what science to fund.

https://github.com/whitead/paper-qa

This is a minimal package for doing question and answering from PDFs or text files (which can be raw HTML). It strives to give very good answers, with no hallucinations, by grounding responses with in-text citations.

Interestingly, in the UK I get this:

Me: As a part of Google, do you have my personal info?

Bard: I do not have your personal information. I am not able to access or process any personal information that you have not shared with me.

GDPR legislation saving us from AI?

It's certainly not perfect (still a bit coarse, doesn't state what % of the work is done, doesn't state which parts of the paper the author worked on), but CRediT statements are gaining increasing traction in the published literature: https://credit.niso.org/

I don't think this is true, at least in the UK. The BBC computer literacy project meant that there were BBC Model Bs in every UK school, with tie-in educational materials. In the early 90s my entire class at a run of the mill state primary school took turns pair-programming LOGO on the school's BBC Micro. I don't think you can get more ubiquitous than every single human having programmed a loop and subroutine.

Well write it up and put it on the ArXiV / send it to the author for version 2!

The web plugin actually falls back to 'web page with snapshot' if it can't detect a journal paper, which in many ways is better than trying to drag around big PDF binaries.

You're also missing 'soon' and 'imminent' (along with 'later' have a very specific and important meaning).

And no 'sea states'? Currently there's 'Very rough or high, occasionally very high later in northwest Rockall.'

Nice stuff!

Physics is really a working knowledge, like computer programming. You have to be able to solve problems. All the 'practical' and 'intuitive' aspects of theoretical physics are built by working on problem sheets. A lot of progress in understanding (both personally and for the field!) is in tackling apparent paradoxes.

Susskind's courses are very much overviews / appreciations. For each of these areas (GR, StatMech, Quantum etc.) you would expect several 30-hr lecturer courses + problem sheets (or equivalent working through a textbook) to gain a deep knowledge.

Could you point me in the direction of a single YouTube channel that goes into more depth than a Masters program?

Other than occasional captured lectures, everything 'educational' on YouTube seems to me to be optimising for that TED-style sense of wonder / happy familiarisation with the content, which is poorly associated with learning outcomes.

The issue that I find with Google scholar is that it seems very biased by my publications. So it's very good at telling me the latest work related to what I used to work on, but not necessarily what I am currently interested in.

There is something general: https://arxivist.com/

Interface is much less polished than ArXiv-sanity. It can also send a daily email of the top 5 for you, which I find very useful.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is basically this. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400/