Historical

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Things have been happening here on Earth for around four billion years. Most of the things that have happened during that time were unobserved. And for most of the things that have happened that have been observed, no one has bothered to note them down.

Getting caught up

Between work and the play (The Lion in Winter) I've barely kept up with getting articles done. Let alone putting them here on the blog. So the next few entries are me getting caught up on those. I should be able to do better, and perhaps post more often now.

Billions and Billions

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

Back when I was teaching one of may favorite things was to answer questions. Sometimes you can just get by with the facts. But a lot of the time, when you're working on getting someone to understand some mathematical concept (or any other concept, I'm sure), you need to nudge them in a way that works for them. And people think differently. So to help them understand, you have to answer the same question different ways for different people.

To Thine Own Self

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  

Here in the new year, some of the events I've attended encouraged us to come up with a slogan for the new year. Something more general than a resolution, but a thought to guide oneself through the year. So I have selected the slogan of: “To thine own self be true”.

Resolution

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  

 

It's that time of year again. Time for New Year's Resolutions. Popular resolutions include: losing weight, saving money and managing stress. But I'm making slow progress on the first two and the last one doesn't apply to me too often. Only when one of Tehachapi Community Theatre's shows takes over my life. And that's generally short term and voluntary.

Familiarity

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.

Sometimes I don't quite know what comes over me. After all these years, and it has been plenty, I got it into my head to read the book The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi. The first part of the story was printed in 1881 in an Italian magazine.

Citizen Science

  This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

A while back I wrote a little about the Nobel Prize. Where some of the big discoveries, that change our understanding of the universe, are recognized. Though it does have some blind spots. Only three sciences are included (Physics, Chemistry and Medicine. I'm still refusing to include economics as a science.) So there are many fields that don't have any hope of getting a Nobel Prize. 

But science isn't always about the big ideas. There are lots of smaller problems. So many that scientists ask for help from the rest of us.