Virtual Laboratories

An article in the New York Times discusses a review by the College Board of the role of virtual laboratories in advanced placement.
“Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they’d be concerned about giving credit to students who have never had [...]

Teaching Again

My youngest daughter is taking algebra based physics in high school. The middle one is taking AP calculus in high school, and the oldest is taking honors calculus-based physics. They are keeping me busy.
My youngest was asking me about conservation of momentum problems last night. The book did something that I liked. It did not [...]

Wasting Time with Outlook

I use Microsoft Outlook at work because that is what is supplied. We are given a quota of 450 MB of storage on the Exchange Server. Much of my work centers around email, so I do find that I hit that limit quite easily if I do not aggressively archive my email. This of course [...]

A Functional Relationship in a Health Article

 I have long complained about the simplistic analyses given in health articles. Saturated fats are bad. Trans fats are bad. Hormone replacement therapy prevents heart attacks. Hormone replacement therapy causes heart attacks. In reality things are much more complex because of the difficulties in experimenting with living being and particularly people, it can take a [...]

Frankenbunny

Scientists in England are planning to introduce human DNA into rabbit egg cells in order to learn about how to produce stem cells. They hope that this will mitigate some of the moral objections to using human eggs.