Johnson Tries To Avoid McCarthy's Fate In First Speakership Showdown Of New Congress

[mch]

Thank you for your thoughtful, detailed response – just wonderful. Clear, too (at least, I followed it as I read it – I could not recreate it).

I’m interested in this whole discussion for many reasons. For one, it takes me back to college and grad school, when my boyfriend and many of my friends were in Physics and Astronomy (as that field was happy to call itself once – “Astrophysics” was just coming into use). As a Classics prof, I have had a number of mathematician and scientist friends. (A close one is a “physical chemist” – his degree in Physics but he teaches in the Chem Dept.) Anyway, I’m familiar with how mathematicians look askance, or with wry humor, at the way scientists use math. I’ll stop here on this line of discussion except to note that Chemistry must “use” math in its own ways. In my last 20 years of so of teaching, a lot of us in language and literature areas began to notice how we enjoyed having Chem majors in our classes – they were so smart, good readers, and wrote so well. (The scientists always insisted, in discussions about writing requirements, that lab reports provide an excellent opportunity for honing writing skills.) And I’ll add another note: analytic philosophy and linguistics, where mathematical reasoning is essential.

Second source of my interest: mathematical education in primary and secondary schools. My own children in the '80’s and '90’s, and now my grandchildren. My children’s elementary teachers were ahead of the curve, I think. Middle and high school math teachers weren’t. The elementary school was committed to an approach to math which meant that students scored in a mediocre way on national tests in 3rd or 4th grade but went off the charts on the 6th grade tests. Coordination with the middle school math teachers wasn’t great, unfortunately (though it was in other areas), but at least my children did well in their math courses, and my son went on to use his math skills in Philosophy, Linguistics, and medicine.

As for my grandchildren, we shall see. I don’t know the overall shape of the math curriculum in their school. But so far I’ve been impressed by what I think is what you are referring to when you say, " If a teacher teaches arithmetic as a set of pattern recognition practices, that’s one thing and it would be helpful to kids when they move onto symbolic manipulation in ‘real’ math. But if the pattern recognition isn’t emphasized as pattern recognition, it’s not so helpful. Maybe the kids come back later and put all that stuff together, but more likely not." We shall see.

Mathematics embraces so much (everything?) that devising curricula for it, from K-12 to college, is, well, shall we say, challenging?

Thank you again!

[mch]

Checking our Math and Statistics Dept.'s course offerings, I learned that several things have changed since I retired nearly 7 years ago. Now there are Math courses for humanities/social science students seeking ways to satisfy distribution requirements without just doing the real thing. Such courses are not prerequisites for “real” math courses. (The sciences have done this since I was in college – I took two of three great science courses of this kind to satisfy my college’s distribution requirements this way a million years ago, btw – but this is new in Math since I retired.) There are several courses that Math offers, this one this Spring. It’s entitled “The Beauty of Numbers” and has a limit of 25 students with an expected enrollment of 25.

This course will be an introduction to number theory and mathematical thinking and logic, with emphasis throughout on mathematics as a way of thinking and approaching the world. Have you ever wondered what keeps your credit card information safe every time you buy something online? Number theory! Number Theory is one of the oldest branches of mathematics. In this course, we will discover the beauty and usefulness of numbers, from ancient Greece to modern cryptography. We will look for patterns, make conjectures, and learn how to prove these conjectures. Starting with nothing more than basic high school algebra, we will develop the logic and critical thinking skills required to realize and prove mathematical results. Topics to be covered include the meaning and content of proof, prime numbers, divisibility, rationality, modular arithmetic, Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Golden ratio, Fibonacci numbers, coding theory, and unique factorization. This course is meant to give you an appreciation for numbers and mathematics and to enhance your logical reasoning skills. Although most people will not use calculus or geometry in their jobs or everyday lives, mathematics enhances our abilities to think logically and reason effectively. This skill is useful in all aspects of life. Number theory, in particular, is a great area of mathematics that allows one to jump in right away without a lot of pre-requisite knowledge. We will look at examples, look for patterns, make conjectures, and we will spend a lot of time learning how to rigorously prove those conjectures.

Maybe I have to start being one of those old people who sits in courses in the back of the room. This

[stradivarius50t3]

@mch

Anyway, I’m familiar with how mathematicians look askance, or with wry humor, at the way scientists use math. I’ll stop here on this line of discussion except to note that Chemistry must “use” math in its own ways.

I was on an applied statistics faculty in a department that was not the mathematics department. There was another statistics group in the Department of Mathematics. In the 1990s, one of my colleagues in the Math Department was looking at one of the software manuals for SAS, covering the library functions and the DATA programming step. Even then there were several tens of functions to handle input and output of date and time data. (There are more functions now, thirty years later, in part because the ISO has released a whole collection of date/time standards.)

For someone working with actual data coming from a large number of diverse sources, having all of these ways to get the data into the system is a necessity. Without them the programmer is forced to read the data in as characters, convert to numbers, and finally do the conversion to time lapse from some base date. That’s a time-consuming and error-prone process.

Jerry was looking at this manual, and he looked at me and said, “No Statistician could possibly need all this stuff…SAS is moving into government work.” I thought about speaking up, and mentioning that I’d just been working on an econometric study using (in part) consumption data from a Japanese government survey and I’d needed those time/date functions. Then I thought better of it–when I did mathematical statistics, I didn’t need that stuff either. It was only when I tried to analyze real-world data that I needed it. Jerry wouldn’t get that at all–it was foreign to him: he was really a probabilist who had some interest in Statistics.

@mch

Thank you again!

You’re very welcome. I’m glad you found it useful.

[mch]

I got a little lost here, the way you might have if I’d tried to convey the complexities of the Greek verb in a few paragraphs. But that’s what’s fun. So many routes to insight. Hoping our students find what’s right for each of them along a path that’s true, and that we have helped them do so.

I’m hopeful that I persuaded the son of an Indian-American (India-born) merchant in town to take Greek, as he pursues a double major in Computer Science and Classics at a SLAC. This not in a classroom, but in local stores.

So frustrating that not just the Trumpsters but almost everybody has no idea what goes on in many a college classroom.

[thomaspaine]

I have no issue with 401K’s I have done quite well with mine, but the latest money grab is to reduce or eliminate tax-advantaged savings. It’s bullshit. This is just a continuation of the wealth transfer from the middle class (who, in fact, create all wealth), to the bastards in the 1%.

WRT Social Security and Medicare - the obvious way to protect it is to remove the caps on the FICA taxes and make it applicable to ALL income. While they are at it, they can close the deficit by treating capital gains the same as ordinary income for taxes. Finally, eliminate the Estate Tax, but DO NOT reset the basis for gain when some one dies and passes the asset on to heirs.

Bottom line, if these bastards do anything to threaten SSA, Medicare or the ACA subsidies, it’s torch and pitchfork time. Seriously - these people need to be turned out of office, tarred and feathered.

[thebishop]

This sounds delightful, or fluffy if you eat non-Abelian groups for breakfast. But it’s like art appreciation or descriptive anything, which was around even 0.5 M years ago. Before that, someone in need of a filler class took comparative religion, or underwater basket weaving. Before long, our nation’s college students will be taking descriptive underwater basket weaving I, the prereq for descriptive underwater basket weaving II.

I taught chemistry to first year nursing students during grad school. It was not General Chemistry, it was dimmed slightly. It was mostly young women with a few jocks who were using it more like the Chemistry for Life Sciences which the B.U. undergrad curriculum lacked. Back a few years before at the U. of Maine, I took General Chemistry with students from all disciplines. It was rough sledding, and there was no easier course. Anyhow, the dumbing down of America has been in the works for decades. I realized it was happening when Homer Simpson became something of a folk hero. Even though Homer’s character has redeeming and endearing qualities, that was a harbinger of the present day. Homer and T.Rump both might be Russian assets.

[thomaspaine]

I have spent 50 years in engineering and when I was an undergraduate I breezed through algebra, trigonometry, calculus and ordinary differential equations. The hill got steeper with partial differential equations and complex variables, and I hit the wall and realized my math comprehension limits in vector and tensor analyses.

Fortunately about that time the VAX 11/780 came about and I moved sidewise into numerical methods and became proficient in the big three areas of computational methods- computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational electrodynamics (CEM), and NASTRAN / ABAQUS analysis of structures. These tools all came into being and usage early in my career and my undergraduate classes in classical math allowed me to use these numerical tools within their respective ranges of validity. (I am hopeful that an understanding the limits of numerical methods will be respected for future users of AI / Neural Net tools - but the incredible hype about what, is in fact, a set of useful tools for auto-correlation of EXISTiNG data gives me the shivers. AI is not magic, and it certainly is not intelligence, folks.)

All that said, I am convinced that good mathematicians are essential and the really gifted thinkers. I wish I was more than an amateur at it, but engineering called me at a young age.

[thomaspaine]

My favorite was Leithold’s “The Calculus”. It’s a beautiful book - I still have it on my bookshelf and pull it out from time to time.

[mch]

@thomaspaine

I am convinced that good mathematicians are essential and the really gifted thinkers. I wish I was more than an amateur at it, but engineering called me at a young age.

NEVER regret engineering or an engineer’s command of math and science. Never!

[eggrollian]

Spartz can be completely incoherent at times. Extremely addled is a positive for most in her general vicinity.

[mch]

Do note that this course leads students nowhere on a math or science ladder of study – it’s not a prerequisite for anything. It’s designed for students whose main interests lie elsewhere, in equally valuable places, just not in math or science. It’s not a sign of dumbing down but of smarting up. At least, that’s how I see it. Today’s young at good colleges are mastering more than we ever had to. Education has improved over the last 60 and 70 years. Among nurses, too. Let’s celebrate that.

The students taking classes like this are smarter and more creative – though maybe not in math and science – than it is easy to credit. The young today are mastering more, at an earlier age, than we ever did. (Thank you, primary and secondary educators!) The prof teaching this course otherwise teaches courses in areas of number theory to advanced math students. A she, btw. Is it dumbing down math courses when females teach them?

[jonney_5]

@osprey

Absolutely agree. Also the point about middle class office workers - far too many get laid off in their 50’s or 60’s and find themselves collecting benefits early (with significant penalties) because they can’t find a decent job that pays the bills.

Yep, whether its you body or your industry giving up on you the result is the same.

Unless you are over a certain hump in the hierarchy.

[jonney_5]

@brian512

Age-based discrimination in tech is a big deal. And being laid off, even if it’s part of a massive broad-brush headline-generating wave of tech company madness, is still often seen as a black mark by the hiring droids

Depends on where in the cycle and what tech, but yes.

Software is worse than hardware with this.

In hardware, especially Electrical Engineering, its common to keep the old guy as long as possible.

Software programs and languages come and go but Ohms law, or how a tranformer works, of how RF is radiated if your design isn’t tight and clean shielded doesn’t.

Electrical engineering technology has evolved with thing like programmable firmware etc… but this means in a 4 year Engineering degree, you have more topics to learn than the guy who graduated college in 1985, so the older education had more depth in the fundamentals.

Even the highest tech has old school things that have hardly changed in decades within it, like a power supply…

[thebishop]

Well, my first reaction was that the course sounded delightful. But I also thought you were making the point that math has gone the way of science, softening the subjects (or dumbing down) for broader consumption. Not like the bad old days when nursing students were thrown into the deep end with science and engineering students. I read you wrong? I see it both ways. Broadening the appeal and the audience is good. At the same time, it is obvious that our populace and education system has suffered, unless you are a top student. There is a widening divide. We have not yet seen the fallout of the lost covid years. The disruption of schools by parents threatening teachers and gutting libraries is still working through the system. I am probably getting farther from your original point here, which I mistook perhaps. Now, why did you ask me about female teachers? Nothing I said suggested that, did it? I might fairly be paraphrased as saying that it would dumb down math if your average registered nurse taught the course. That would be women as nurses. Not women as women. I really hope you don’t think I think that women are “dumb”!? I am not the one who admits them in overwhelming majorities to nursing programs and then enrolls them in science classes that are easier than the ones the science majors are taking. That is a failing of our educational system which I am describing.

[jonney_5]

@thomaspaine

WRT Social Security and Medicare - the obvious way to protect it is to remove the caps on the FICA taxes and make it applicable to ALL income.

Actually, i disagree… i think the cap in which you pay 6.2% should be lowered. Then income over that number the rate is progressive

Say income over 100k, reverts to say 2% and gets higher at higher income levels.

Those in say NY that are doing well as a salary number but are still middle class becaise cost of living dont get to foot the bill like everything else

[mch]

I’m sorry I left you with the impression that I thought you were suggesting women were dumb, or at least less able in science and math than men are – though I can see why you read me that way! I should have made clear that I wasn’t directing my final sentence at you except in that I assumed you don’t think women are less able (as all too many people still do). Something to celebrate together. Sorry for my bungling!

[thebishop]

No worries. I always love to hear from you. I was just a little puzzled is all.

[fgs]

By simple arithmetic, I’d expect country club rightists to be better than average at guessing whether Rump was lying to them or for them. It’s pretty clear the people who could barely afford a round at the municipal golf course, are terrible at it.

[fgs]

I found a shocking thing somewhere; sorry it’s too hard to link it while screwing around at work.

Speaker Johnson has never faced a competitive election. His whole political career going back to the LA state legislature, he’s run either completely unopposed or won by ~ 70% ballpark because of gerrymandering. Even the Speaker’s chair he’s basically defaulted into for lack of anyone less unpopular.

Evidently, it’s somewhat rare for a politician to never face competition, although once they get in, running unopposed is fairly common almost everywhere.

[pwmesq]

Thank you both! @stradivarius50t3 Today I learned something new!
I escaped anything more rigorous because I took the AP Calc exam in HS (and scored terribly) and so ‘stats’ was my out for that requirement. Evidently my alma mater puts that in the same bucket as the rest of it.