AwesomeScience

Science! Where the rubber meets the road—at the intersection of literacy and numeracy. 💪🏆

@Math_files significant figures

Carl Friedrich Gauss once noticed that when he counted his steps to school, the number was never exactly the same. Just a little off each time. That small difference made him wonder: maybe nothing we measure is ever perfectly exact. No matter how careful we are, there’s always a tiny bit of error. From that simple thought came a powerful idea—the normal (Gaussian) distribution, showing how most results gather around an average.

@JayKloppenberg I, as the teacher, am the Chief Mistake Maker in my classroom. I lead by example and, by example, model resilience. 💪

At ASE, we consider laughing at a student for a wrong answer or a "dumb question" to be among the most serious offenses there is, whether it is for mispronouncing words (which, I agree, is often a sign of reader) or for anything else. This happens with every new group of students within a few days: someone tries something, gets it wrong, and the class laughs at them. When this happens, we ask our teachers to put aside our general principle of "address misbehavior in the least disruptive effective way" and instead stop the entire class and speak calmly but harshly to the students. Students must understand that laughing at each other is absolutely poisonous for learning. If students feel it is even a remote possibility that they might be laughed at, they will refuse to speak, or will only speak when they are completely sure they know what they are saying is the "right" thing. This fear cuts their learning by at least half, probably much more. Educative discussion becomes impossible. Valuable questions go unasked. Misconceptions go unaddressed. Connections between ideas go unmade. I think too many schools accept this kind of thing as "how kids/teenagers are." Sure, they will behave this way if it is accepted or encouraged. But you can put a stop to it, at least in class. And learning that value does eventually impact how kids behave outside of class, as well. We have a credo of "We Help Each Other Learn." We go back to it basically every day. Laughing at others is the opposite of that principle.

you can just do things

Some of you still seem to think oil is only used for gasoline for light duty vehicles, because that’s the only time you’ve physically encountered it. Expensive and scarce oil is an omnicrisis for the global economy. It cannot be replaced by electrons from solar panels.

Ever wish there was a weather map that just showed you where it's gonna be BEAUTIFUL? We made one. The Nice Weather Outlook is a 7 day forecast scoring every part of the US from Fair to Pristine based on temp, humidity, wind, sun and rain. Updated 4x daily. Also available in the Weatherwise app, with full text discussions for Plus subscribers. You're welcome.

💯 Senior high school students entry level jobs: fast food restaurants, grocery & clothing stores. Pre-2020, if one wanted to work, jobs were available. Post-2020, they *WANT* to work, they *cannot* get a job. oh, and please don’t moan kids are “entitled” and don’t know the value of work blah blah blah…if you are not also actively advocating & enabling their ability to realize the value of work.

As a middle class Canadian citizen I’m simply shocked that other Canadians can’t see what’s happening here. How do you not see the adult immigrants working the jobs our youth used to hold? How do you not look around when out in public and see the massive amounts of foreigners wearing foreign garb and speaking foreign languages? How do you not see the prices of groceries and realize that your dollar no longer has any purchasing power? How do you not fuel up and see the cost of fuel increasing due to taxes that if removed would make fuel affordable again? How do you not see the secondary CPP on your paycheque that generations before us weren’t forced to pay? How do you not see the excessive control the government is trying to take via the bills they’re currently discussing and passing? How do you not see the corruption, ethics violations and laws being broken by politicians, their family and friends with ZERO accountability and justice never being handed out? How do you not see the corrupt justice system who panders to foreigners allowing them to commit crimes on Canadian soil with almost zero punishment to protect their immigration status? How do you not see a justice system we were promised was blind hand lenient sentences based solely on race? How do you not see the billions sent to foreign countries, on illegal migrants and people who hate Canada? How do you not see the increase in homeless people on our streets, the increase in drug addictions and the degradation of society? How do you not see that our education and healthcare systems have been decimated due to mass immigration? HOW CAN YOU LIVE HERE AND NOT SEE THE TRUTH ALL AROUND YOU?

@HelpfulTeacher_ There is truth to this.

The classroom default should be pin-drop silence 🔕 There is time for collaboration, think-pair-shares, discussion and debate When the teacher decides so But the default is silence. That's the only way education can work, and it's how students should enter the room 🚪 #Edchat

@elonmusk shaken and stirred, their needle remains magnetized

So many phonies, so few who are the real deal

Stepped into a faraday cage and my internal monologue disappeared

@OgAn0n661 100% accurate.

Facts

@flowidealism The reward system of traditional schools was never open and flexible enough to motivate those whose intrinsic motivation is rewarded by something else. Historically, it was probably impossible to make it so. Going forward, it’s cooked.

There's an entire literature on how many of history's great creators and entrepreneurs hated school and dropped out as soon as they possibly could. The pattern repeats constantly. Creative genius plus traditional schooling equals misery and early exit. The system is completely misaligned with creative and entrepreneurial personalities. The qualities that make someone innovative, the restlessness and curiosity and refusal to accept arbitrary authority, those exact qualities make school unbearable. We're filtering out the people we need most.

@DavidJPba ability to overcome obstacles is a sign of intelligence 😂

I think what everyone complaining about the algorithm fails to understand, is that everyone is trying to hack it constantly, we are standing on the front lines of the war between human enjoyment and AI optimization.

@trump_repost wind is the middleman all still solar powered

From Douglas MacKinnon: "This is a photo from yesterday on the drive from LA to Palm Springs. Hundreds and Hundreds of these pieces of junk windmills. No surprise to The President, but ONLY ten percent of them working as we drove past!!! Eagle and bird killers which suck the taxpayers dry!! My best to The President!"

If you don’t wake up every morning saying “I need more time,” then what are you even doing?

The bird claim is a myth that’s been circulating online since 2012. The real biology is better. Blaschko’s lines trace cell migration paths from embryonic development. A German dermatologist named Alfred Blaschko mapped them in 1901 by studying over 150 patients with skin conditions and tracing their patterns onto Greek statues in his Berlin office. The lines formed V-shapes on the back, S-curves on the chest, and whorls on the scalp. They didn’t match nerves, blood vessels, muscles, or any known body system. Nobody could explain what they were for 75 years. The “birds can see them” claim has no scientific support. IFLScience investigated it directly and found zero evidence that cats, birds, or any other animal can perceive these lines on normal human skin. The lines aren’t a UV-reflective pattern sitting on the surface. They’re a developmental map encoded in how your cells organized before you were born. The actual explanation is stranger than the myth. Every woman is a genetic mosaic. During early embryonic development, each female cell randomly shuts down one of its two X chromosomes: mom’s copy or dad’s copy. That choice is permanent for every future daughter cell. The result is two genetically distinct populations of skin cells living side by side across your entire body, each running different X-linked genetic instructions. There are 1,100 genes on the X chromosome alone. The borders between those two populations follow Blaschko’s lines. This is why calico cats are almost always female. Orange fur patch: mom’s X chromosome active. Black fur patch: dad’s X chromosome active. Two genetic programs painting the same animal. Same mechanism, visible result. In humans, the two cell populations usually produce near-identical outcomes, so the seams stay invisible. When a mutation hits one population, the boundary lights up along those exact developmental paths. Conditions like incontinentia pigmenti, segmental vitiligo, and linear psoriasis all trace Blaschko’s lines when they appear. You’re a quilt of genetically distinct territories. The seams were stitched during week two. No bird required.

@KelemenCari All of the above.

I find it hilarious that we don't know if he's talking about Cuba, Greenland, Canada or somewhere else. Trolling: A+

Matter, Energy & Intelligence

@BrandonLuuMD I'm sure there's even more of a difference if the subject area demands text + visuals (diagrams, vectors, etc.) like science. Oh, and use pen. 😀

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

haha, awesome! The left column sounds like it was transcribed from a typical day in class. It usually ends with “grumble, grumble... mean teacher, doesn’t teach.” I wonder how AI will unfold. There will probably need to be a “press zero to speak to a customer service representative” option.

Interesting paper showing that Bjork’s desirable difficulty works. Tight integration of AI chatbot with ‘intelligent task sequencing’ delivers 'right material at exactly the right level matching the individual’s needs. In other words, AI tutors work better when they do more than just provide full and correct answers but encourage 'effort'. They sequenced tasks, choosing the next practice problem based on how student is doing, using data from chatbot conversations and their actual attempts to answer and do things. Improved performance on the final in-person written exam by the equivalent to 6–9 months of additional schooling, without increasing instruction time or teacher workload. Interestingly, the benefits were especially strong for beginners and students in lower-tier schools. And this was with ChatGPT 4o, which is now regarded as a very old model. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…