I frequently hear the argument that the US falling behind in primary science/math education is due to the absence of the national curricula (as compared to, say, France and Japan ( Read more... )

I do not understand people concerned with inequality of wealth distribution ( Read more... )

Fairness is a subject on which there is seldom any agreement. People like to talk about fairness: this is fair, this is unfair. It is almost impossible to pin down what exactly is meant in each particular case. The root problem might be that our intuition of fairness is informed by the brain that is capable of but a few arithmetic operations ( Read more... )

I wrote this post a year ago, as a complement to the gooseberry story, but decided that one complaint at a time is quite enough. But it is another spring, and the old wound is bleeding again. So I repost it here.

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Мы не можем ждать милостей от природы. Взять их у нее - наша задача. (Michurin)

Николай Иваныч засмеялся и минуту глядел ( Read more... )

I confess that I am not among those who want to make the world a better place. They are so concerned about bettering it, constantly talking about it: so much work ahead, so many improvements to make... A better world to whom? To themselves? Do they actually know what is going to happen to them in a very short while, what kind of a better world ( Read more... )

I've read Tanenhaus' "The Death of Conservatism" in a bookstore today. It is his expanded (and largely misunderstood) essay in "The New Republic." His thesis is that classical conservatism of Burke and Disraeli (and Chambers and Buckley) is dead, being eclipsed by ideology-based movements that are conservative in their name only. The idea of civil ( Read more... )

I find the modern approach to translation utterly ridiculous. We are so used to this imbecility that few of us ever question the approach, as it is something self-obvious rather than almost unheard-of just 200-300 years ago. A word-for-word rendition aiming to preserve as much of the text as possible - what is that for? Who says that translating ( Read more... )

I am sick and tired of hearing that "doubling of CO2" will cause global warming because the "heat has to go somewhere." My frustration equally applies to the enthusiasts of the GW and its dectractors, as both of these groups are clueless how it works. This includes most of the physicists, too. The effect is subtle and counter-intuitive, as the ( Read more... )

I confess that I have no innate feeling for countable and mass nouns. I've been told that even toddlers can tell the difference between objects and substances, that it's hardwired in our minds. Yet this hardwiring is powerless to explain the difference between fruit and vegetables. The Chinese treat all of their nouns as mass nouns and just look at ( Read more... )

A decade ago, my wife asked me to give M. a subject for the science fair at school. I suggested proving that the Moon is not made of green cheese (his favorite animation back then being A Grand day Out).

( The fruits of enlightment )