Math Teachers at Play #7 is living this week at Homeschool Bytes, with lots of neat posts (like this one about Math and Language Reversals).
Incidentally, if you haven’t seen it yet, on April 30 The Daily Show had a great piece [not quite safe for work in places] about the Large Hadron Collider (currently due to start up again in the fall). Pay careful attention to the calculation that the world had a 50% chance of being destroyed; Walter probably checks this site regularly. (There’s a lot more discussion at Good Math, Bad Math.)
[Hmmm, the embedding isn’t working. Bummer. You’ll have to go here.]
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May 15, 2009 at 10:29 pm |
I showed that clip to my trig class today to cap off a week of Bernoulli experiments. They laughed in all the right places and looked appropriately incredulous at the guy’s “fifty fifty” argument. I stopped it before the really off-color stuff near the end. All they got exposed to were some bleeped out eff words.
May 16, 2009 at 9:32 am |
Good point — I could stop the clip early. [Although it’s a little bit of a shame because the line at the very end about having a 50-50 chance of being able to reproduce really amused me.]
May 16, 2009 at 9:39 am |
Well, you could make a note of what time to stop it and where to start it back up, and move the slider thingie. Or just show the whole thing. You teach college, right? They’re adults and they’ve seen much worse in mainstream movies.
May 16, 2009 at 10:01 am |
Certainly they’ve seen worse, but I struggle with how much it’s OK to show in the classroom without making them feel awkward that I’m in the room with them. 😉