Science

A look at the role of science in society, and our beliefs.

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I still think children should learn hex and base 2 math rather than the idiotic base 10 math they teach children

I still think children should learn hex and base 2 math rather than the idiotic base 10 math they teach children.

It truly is child abuse to force young children to memorize useless things like 8 times 8 is 64, when it’s so much easier to teach children that you multiply by one and you carry the one to the next position which is always twice the size. Most things in nature grow by doubling, they don’t grow by powers of ten.

Yes, with base two you have to memorize powers of two to convert to the legacy base ten system and also the 16 hex numbers but it’s so much easier and logical. 

Ultracold Soup – The ‘Superfluid’ States Of Matter

Ultracold Soup – The ‘Superfluid’ States Of Matter

8/24/21 by NPR

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/127492810
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510351/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/dailyscience/2021/08/20210824_dailyscience_matter_encore.mp3?awCollectionId=510351&awEpisodeId=1030367793&orgId=1&topicId=1007&d=700&p=510351&story=1030367793&t=podcast&e=1030367793&size=11202605&ft=pod&f=510351

(Encore episode) Class is back in session. We’re going “back to school” to dig a little deeper on a concept you were taught in school: states of matter. Today, Emily and Maddie explore OTHER states of matter — beyond solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Martin Zwierlein, professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), discusses his work with ultracold quantum gases and observing superfluid states of matter.

Meet Wes McKinney, the man behind the most important tool in data science β€” Quartz

Pandas: Meet Wes McKinney, the man behind the most important tool in data science β€” Quartz

Perhaps more than any other person, McKinney has helped fix that problem. McKinney is the developer of “Pandas”, one of the main tools used by data analysts working in the popular programming language Python.

Millions of people around the world use Pandas. In October 2017 alone, Stack Overflow, a website for programmers, recorded 5 million visits to questions about Pandas from more than 1 million unique visitors. Data scientists at Google, Facebook, JP Morgan, and virtually every other major company that analyze data uses Pandas. Most people haven’t heard of it, but for many people who do heavy data analysis—a rapidly growing group these days—life wouldn’t be the same without it. (Pandas is open source, so it’s free to use.)

Wes McKinney. So what does Pandas do that is so valuable? I asked McKinney how he explains it to non-programmer friends. “I tell them that it enables people to analyze and work with data who are not expert computer scientists,” he says. “You still have to write code, but it’s making the code intuitive and accessible. It helps people move beyond just using Excel for data analysis.”

Basically, Pandas makes it so that data analysis tasks that would have taken?50 complex lines of code in the past now only take 5 simple lines, because McKinney already did the heavy lifting.

Often probability predictions are surprising

Often probability predictions are surprising. In the case of the coin-tossing experiment described in the puzzle, Dr. Theodore P. Hill of the Georgia Institute of Technology wrote in American Scientist, a “quite involved calculation” revealed a surprising probability. It showed, he said, that the overwhelming odds are that…
 
…in a series of 200 tosses, either heads or tails will come up six or more times in a row.

Most fakers don’t know this and avoid guessing long runs of heads or tails, which they mistakenly assume to be improbable. At just a glance, Dr. Hill can see whether or not a student’s 200 coin-toss results contain a run of six heads or tails.  If they don’t, the student is branded a fake.

Read more on http://niquette.com/puzzles/randoms.htm

Science doesn’t mandate βš—οΈ

Few thing annoy me more than when people use scientific evidence to say that a political policy is required. Science doesn’t give us values, it instead gives us probabilistic outcomes and evidence of what is likely to happen should any one course of action be persued. Science isn’t a moralistic cause, it’s not church but a way to gather facts to guide policy options.