CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@Akshay Well, d'oh!

@mattblaze It reminds me of the changing room talk when I was eight years old after gym class where "you cheated" was always the talking point. Unfortunately when it comes to elections it's deadly serious.

I wondered whether this might happen one day:
The IgNobel Prize ceremonies will be held in Europe (ETH Zürich) rather than the US. A shocking realisation of how far things have changed in the US just over a year from the rise to power of the Orange Microchiron. I hope that we will also have offshoot shows in other cities across Europe and beyond. It must have been a pretty tough decision for @MarcAbrahams to take. https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

1/ @HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer You've hit on the head one of the things I puzzled with for a long time. How to devise a practical that had "epistemic doubt/uncertainty" (to be as pompous as possible ) built into it. For a long time the response from people was "how will you mark it?" because we assessment looms so large in our thinking these days (KPIs, innit!). It puts the focus on the numerical value of the answer in a perverse and binary way (right vs wrong).

@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Yes. I get that and that is because there is little joining of the dots at exam board level. Physics, chemistry and maths all seem to do things slightly different. Maths focuses on decimal places all the time while SF are never properly grounded in the sense of confidence - how much money/chocolate would you bet on the last, the penultimate, the penpenultimate, and so on, figures being correct!
I worry that it's a zombie problem that will keep recurring… 

@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer But jsut to continue with this thought, there is so much confusion over significant figures. Schools need to get a grip on this because different subjects/boards put the focus on sig figs or decimal places. Many teachers too are not confident about this, in my view, or rather the deeper meaning of the digits quoted.
These are crucial components of critical thinking that need to be built in very early and not left for university teachers to sort out.

@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Maybe they were thinking of Elon Musk's mole of satellites.

@martinvermeer @HGourlayUCL I do four workshops with life science students on estimation. Some love it. Some absolutely hate the fact that I don't really care what the "right answer" is and cannot get their head round the idea that it's an approach, a process, not a result.
Maybe they'll thank me 10 years from now.

@ianRobinson Facetiouslessness always contains a solid kernel of truth.

I got totally mired in stat mech because I just couldn't get the big ideas. It was all detail, symbols and fractions and somehow what it was for seemed to pass me by. It makes me sad… 

@oldoldcojote He's old, but he's still sharp as a tack.

@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.

@ianRobinson His textbook contains all the underpinnings, but his point was that teachers need to show students the wood before getting into the trees.

@egonw I stupidly forgot to bring my copy of his Quanta that my dad gave me at age 18 or 19 for him to sign.

Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.

@augieray Top choice. Love that film.