Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
That is really hardly even trying. "CO2 is not a pollutant" is pathetic, who ever said it was? Should we disband the RNLI and abandon all construction regs for reservoir dams because H2O is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Hydration is a blessing? Or encourage everyone in the country to double their calorie intake because food is such a good thing? Truly embarrassing stuff.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
You're not going to trick me with a deliberate mistake like that!
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
It's illogical I agree, largely because it's inconsistent with how we account for imports with embedded carbon emissions where we ignore those and consider the carbon emissions post-importation.
It would be more logical to continue to treat Biomass as neutral (or near-neutral, there are still transportation related emissions to account for) but also take into account embedded emissions in other products. That will start to happen on an industrial level with the introduction of CBAM of course - whilst that is an EU initiative I expect the UK will need to copy it or facing losing the rest of its heavy industry. Or treat biomass as carbon positive if we continue to do likewise with other products.
But I suppose there is a degree of pragmatism about all this. Biomass is suitable for old coal plants so a useful transition fuel, a bit like the role gas has played more generally.
Thanks @TimS and @LostPassword for the responses. I think we're probably all agreed that this is a glitch, regardless of how important or otherwise we think it is. As seems the trend with such glitches, whoever is winning, it ain't the UK.
Since burning imported pellets is considered carbon neutral, no carbon sequestration technology is used (I assume), whereas if new coal power stations were to be built, they would have to include carbon capture as standard. So potentially burning coal would add less carbon to the atmosphere than imported biomass, at least from a UK perspective.
The main problem with taxing carbon on imports is that it would start an immediate, massive trade war.
I don't think that's a good idea either, but I do think that we should take into account the beneficial impact on global carbon emissions of proposed projects within the UK, just as we're taking into account the beneficial impact on global carbon emissions on growing pellets overseas.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
Signed by that arse and nutter Monckton which tells us what we need to know
I have just learned I am incapable of reasoning, but I can judge scientific models after the fact by their predictive power. 25 years ago the warmists were saying catastrophic change and the Moncktons were saying pooh pooh and nonsense. Last year I made money betting the UK would top 40 C. This winter the alps are green. Who was right?
You're a very intelligent poster - far too intelligent I would say than to dismiss a proposition on the basis that a fellow traveller is someone you don't respect. That's loopy.
Monckton is special, and whatever you think of him what we know for sure is that he got a bad classics degree from Cambridge and has studied no modern science since O level.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
For sanity checks I (paradoxically) go with that American state legislature that tried to define π as 3
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
That is really hardly even trying. "CO2 is not a pollutant" is pathetic, who ever said it was? Should we disband the RNLI and abandon all construction regs for reservoir dams because H2O is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Hydration is a blessing? Or encourage everyone in the country to double their calorie intake because food is such a good thing? Truly embarrassing stuff.
________________
I don't think it's particularly embarrassing, because I think most public policy in the West treats CO2 solely as a pollutant, whether or not that is the official classification.
The comparison with food is an interesting one - 'calories = bad' is a view which similarly lacks nuance.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Heaven definitely exists, I walked past it a couple of weeks ago…
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
That’s very good, especially as you say when it required reading a physical encyclopaedia or two, rather than an iPad with an internet connection as it would now.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
For sanity checks I (paradoxically) go with that American state legislature that tried to define π as 3
The first sanity check is whether your units are right. cm x number -> cm. Hmmm. That doesn't appear to be an area...
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Heaven definitely exists, I walked past it a couple of weeks ago…
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
Very good. There is a cost side of the equation, however. Or are you one of those people who think the intergenerational cost of capital/discount rate should be zero.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
That’s very good, especially as you say when it required reading a physical encyclopaedia or two, rather than an iPad with an internet connection as it would now.
The guy was quite incredibly bright. He showed absolutely no interest in girls, and in our crass naivety we assumed he was gay. I'm still vaguely in contact with him, and he's been immensely successful in his trade, and says he is asexual - he just had no interest in sex, and is not attracted to anyone. He has a wide circle of friends.
I reckon that whilst I was spending countless hours, days and weeks chasing girls, he was just doing stuff he enjoyed and concentrating on studying.
Incidentally, girls used to really, really like him.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
That’s very good, especially as you say when it required reading a physical encyclopaedia or two, rather than an iPad with an internet connection as it would now.
The guy was quite incredibly bright. He showed absolutely no interest in girls, and in our crass naivety we assumed he was gay. I'm still vaguely in contact with him, and he's been immensely successful in his trade, and says he is asexual - he just had no interest in sex, and is not attracted to anyone. He has a wide circle of friends.
I reckon that whilst I was spending countless hours, days and weeks chasing girls, he was just doing stuff he enjoyed and concentrating on studying.
Incidentally, girls used to really, really like him.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Christmas day 800 and new years day 1600 are the only real dates you need to know
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
Mr. Password, I do not share your confidence, although the element of doubt we do both have is only a disagreement in degree. And, as I said, some things we should be doing anyway. My distrust of zealots remains, however.
Mr... erm... Dearg, if we understood the climate so well over a century ago why (around a decade ago) have more recent individuals made claims that rapidly proved to be utterly wrong (specifically, snow in the UK becoming a thing of the past a few years prior to two of the worst winters in a century)?
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
The other thing is that if you take the media's desire to whip a religious war out of it, 99.99% of climate science is solid, incrementally improving modelling over 50 years of high quality work. Remove the media-fed denialist loonies and the extremist green fringe, and we have an ever-clearer warning and risk-based path forward.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Christmas day 800 and new years day 1600 are the only real dates you need to know
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
Untrue. I think it's reasonable to assume with a level of some certainty that life carried on.
"And in the meanwhile, mathematics in British schools will continue to be a bit shit."
British ?
Is not education devolved? What the Prime Minister says on this matter has no bearing outside England? Similarly, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings, Nick Gibb, Amanda Spielman, Conservative MPs and the DES. Their sayings and doings only affect England.
We can learn something from the devolved nature of mathematics and science teaching and the PISA results.
(I understand it is 2015, I can't find the more recent report on the OECD website).
Student performance in science: "Within the United Kingdom, students in England score 512 points, on average, and students in Northern Ireland score 500 points, on average – both above the OECD average. Students in Scotland score 497 points, around the OECD average, while students in Wales score 485 points, which is below the OECD average."
Student performance in mathematics: "Students in England and Northern Ireland score 493 points in mathematics, on average, and students in Scotland score 491 points – all comparable to the OECD average. Students in Wales score 478 points, below the OECD average."
Two things are interesting: (i) There are quite significant differences between education in Scotland and England, yet the overall performance in science and maths in the two nations is very similar, (ii) Labour have nothing to be proud of in Wales.
Mr. Password, I do not share your confidence, although the element of doubt we do both have is only a disagreement in degree. And, as I said, some things we should be doing anyway. My distrust of zealots remains, however.
Mr... erm... Dearg, if we understood the climate so well over a century ago why (around a decade ago) have more recent individuals made claims that rapidly proved to be utterly wrong (specifically, snow in the UK becoming a thing of the past a few years prior to two of the worst winters in a century)?
Some people (often prompted by their (desire for) media interactions) make ludicrously specific claims about weather that climate models don't support.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
I think you've forgotten to square the radius, according to my own sanity check...
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Christmas day 800 and new years day 1600 are the only real dates you need to know
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
Untrue. I think it's reasonable to assume with a level of some certainty that life carried on.
The simulation was paused while one of our Alien Puppetmasters went for an Alien Wee. They fast-forwarded when they got back (against the wishes of their Alien Lifepartner who preferred to see all of it; but the first Alien hated watching the Live Simulation on catchup in case there is an event that is spoiled by hearing the cheering/groans of their Alien Neighbours through the too-thin Alien Walls of their Alien Apartment.)
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
The other thing is that if you take the media's desire to whip a religious war out of it, 99.99% of climate science is solid, incrementally improving modelling over 50 years of high quality work. Remove the media-fed denialist loonies and the extremist green fringe, and we have an ever-clearer warning and risk-based path forward.
Is your 99.99% a mathematically provable figure, or a rhetorical flourish? Better not tell Rishi Sunak if it's the latter.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
The other thing is that if you take the media's desire to whip a religious war out of it, 99.99% of climate science is solid, incrementally improving modelling over 50 years of high quality work. Remove the media-fed denialist loonies and the extremist green fringe, and we have an ever-clearer warning and risk-based path forward.
Is your 99.99% a mathematically provable figure, or a rhetorical flourish? Better not tell Rishi Sunak if it's the latter.
It is a figure that is precise but not accurate. #cough
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
I think you've forgotten to square the radius, according to my own sanity check...
Yes, yes, very clever. Have a gold star. Now we don't find out how long it would take for Josias to work out his own mistake. Spoilsport.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Christmas day 800 and new years day 1600 are the only real dates you need to know
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
He did say that for some of the early years were a little vague, and he'd say things like "That was around the time King Foobar of Esher died..."
Without t'Internet it was hard to check what he was saying, but the things we did know about matched. On one occasion we sat in the student union bar and threw years at him.
He had quite an amazing mind; not just in his ability to remember things, but also in terms of intelligence. I've met, and worked, with many brilliant minds since (and married one), but no-one quite matched him.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
I think you've forgotten to square the radius, according to my own sanity check...
Ahem. Yes...
I'll banish myself to ConHome, where such brilliant mathematics will convince them that Brexit has been a resounding success...
(This actually shows how easy it is to make stoopid mistakes when discussing things.)
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
I think you've forgotten to square the radius, according to my own sanity check...
Yes, yes, very clever. Have a gold star. Now we don't find out how long it would take for Josias to work out his own mistake. Spoilsport.
This is PB, where people can hold eronious opinions for years. There are still some people on here who haven't worked out that Brexit is a mistake yet. I think you might have been waiting for a while.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
The other thing is that if you take the media's desire to whip a religious war out of it, 99.99% of climate science is solid, incrementally improving modelling over 50 years of high quality work. Remove the media-fed denialist loonies and the extremist green fringe, and we have an ever-clearer warning and risk-based path forward.
There is a lot of contention and scientific disagreements at the frontiers of climate science. Some rather heated disagreements. The vitriol that lay behind one sentence in an IPCC report. So a lot of new climate science will turn out to be at least partly wrong. That's the nature of all science.
It's just that the stuff that the so-called sceptics harp on about was all settled ages ago and is now boring to anyone in the field. All the new stuff people are working on necessarily has to take it as a given, in a similar way that chemists don't continue to debate whether the combustion of coal involves the oxidation of carbon.
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
You're seemingly obsessed with constraint payments. Let's put it into context.
Last year wind generated around a quarter of all UK electricity: that's about 75TWh. Or 75,000 million kWh.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
Christmas day 800 and new years day 1600 are the only real dates you need to know
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
Untrue. I think it's reasonable to assume with a level of some certainty that life carried on.
The simulation was paused while one of our Alien Puppetmasters went for an Alien Wee. They fast-forwarded when they got back (against the wishes of their Alien Lifepartner who preferred to see all of it; but the first Alien hated watching the Live Simulation on catchup in case there is an event that is spoiled by hearing the cheering/groans of their Alien Neighbours through the too-thin Alien Walls of their Alien Apartment.)
Alternatively, it's just a calendar mixup, and the year didn't actually exist.
I'm disappointed nobody liked my math joke earlier.
As for climate science, I've been following it since I was a little lad as it's one of my main "hobbies". Best to strip away some of the political hype and culture war and just look at the basic numbers. The world is warming, at a fairly monotonic straight line rate, and has been doing so for decades now. There's no evidence it's about to stop warming anytime soon, but there's also little evidence it's accelerating out of control. The basic trend is bad enough.
What I find most interesting, and is still very much up for debate, is precisely how things will change in North West Europe and the UK.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
That is really hardly even trying. "CO2 is not a pollutant" is pathetic, who ever said it was? Should we disband the RNLI and abandon all construction regs for reservoir dams because H2O is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Hydration is a blessing? Or encourage everyone in the country to double their calorie intake because food is such a good thing? Truly embarrassing stuff.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Without getting drawn too far into the debate, your first paragraph is simply wrong. Whilst we understand the large scale, broad brush effects on the climate we have no idea about the details of what causes the move from one climate state to another. After a century or more of studying these things we still don't know why events like the Allerød interstadial or the subsequent Younger Dryas Cooling occurred when they did and to the extent they did. Nor can we account for the Bronze Age and Roman warm periods nor even the Little Ice Age. There are lots of different hypothesis but none of them close to an actual scientific explanation.
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
To be a bit picky, I'd suggest drugs are as rife in private schools as state schools. Possibly more so, given the relative affluence of many of the students.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
You're seemingly obsessed with constraint payments. Let's put it into context.
Last year wind generated around a quarter of all UK electricity: that's about 75TWh. Or 75,000 million kWh.
So £237 million represents around 0.3p per kWh.
That's not "wholly uneconomical".
The £237 million on constraint is not why the system is wholly uneconomical, it is merely the most grotesque and egregious expense of the whole shitty shebang. I only learned the other day that wind farms are compensated automatically for their power generation losses (outside of the constraint payments system) when the National Grid asks them to switch off, and that constraint payments are actually there purely to make up for losses in subsidy, which goes some way to demonstrating how heavily wind farms are subsidised when the ARE actually providing power.
Mr. Password, I do not share your confidence, although the element of doubt we do both have is only a disagreement in degree. And, as I said, some things we should be doing anyway. My distrust of zealots remains, however.
Mr... erm... Dearg, if we understood the climate so well over a century ago why (around a decade ago) have more recent individuals made claims that rapidly proved to be utterly wrong (specifically, snow in the UK becoming a thing of the past a few years prior to two of the worst winters in a century)?
Note the overlap and the fact of the later series ending in 2010. which was the last - I think - of your worst winters. Don't know where you live, but look what alpine skiing looks like these days. One third of French ski resorts have permanently closed https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ski/inside-story-frances-abandoned-ski-resorts/ Of the survivors, 50% were temporarily closed 3 days ago because of no snow in the high Alps in January (they have had a good fall now).
The 1912 prediction was a bit more substantial
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Again. LOL at "a few centuries," but if something is called that far out and then happens I am impressed.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
To be a bit picky, I'd suggest drugs are as rife in private schools as state schools. Possibly more so, given the relative affluence of many of the students.
At uni the posh kids did loads more drugs than us comp kids, I suppose because they had more money, but also they seemed to have a more cynical and nihilistic mindset.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
I do think you need to provide some evidence for the assertion in bold. You may be right, but I'm not persuaded. It depends to some extent on what you mean by "academic standards".
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
I think your points are well made. What I might say more reasonably is that 'comparative' academic standards have been falling for decades. We are falling behind other countries. Additionally have started to see - since the 1990s* - Universities claiming that the students they are being presented with post A-levels lack some or many of the basic skills they need and expect for them to be able to complete degree courses.
*I use this date because this was the first time I noted such complaints from universities. It may of course predate that time.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
These days it is also pastoral care - huge differences between good private and state on this.
The extra teaching resources are what give the bright-but-issues-or-unmotivated cohort a chance, I think, in private schools.
I saw with my eldest daughter, that even at a very good state primary, if you get above a certain level, the teachers tended to put you in the top group, and let you cruise.
My youngest went to the Free School primary, which was started by a Head who had the ambition of an education as good as the private school she’d got a full bursary to. There they said “excellent - now try this…”
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Without getting drawn too far into the debate, your first paragraph is simply wrong. Whilst we understand the large scale, broad brush effects on the climate we have no idea about the details of what causes the move from one climate state to another. After a century or more of studying these things we still don't know why events like the Allerød interstadial or the subsequent Younger Dryas Cooling occurred when they did and to the extent they did. Nor can we account for the Bronze Age and Roman warm periods nor even the Little Ice Age. There are lots of different hypothesis but none of them close to an actual scientific explanation.
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I can do 0 AD, that's easy. Nothing happened: year did not exist. 🙂
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Without getting drawn too far into the debate, your first paragraph is simply wrong. Whilst we understand the large scale, broad brush effects on the climate we have no idea about the details of what causes the move from one climate state to another. After a century or more of studying these things we still don't know why events like the Allerød interstadial or the subsequent Younger Dryas Cooling occurred when they did and to the extent they did. Nor can we account for the Bronze Age and Roman warm periods nor even the Little Ice Age. There are lots of different hypothesis but none of them close to an actual scientific explanation.
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
I'd just like to expand on your last paragraph a little, as I utterly agree with it. IMV the various clean air acts are one of the best groups of legislation every introduced in this country. In ?1951? my dad visited the Festival of Britain and described air so thick he could almost taste it - and that was not even the famous 'smog' year. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a coal power station, and my mum would have to bring in the washing whenever the wind blew from the 'wrong' direction, as it would soon get tiny particles of soot on it.
Getting cleaner (not yet 'clean' air) has been a challenge and expensive, but we're making massive progress.
Likewise, the banning of diesels, and ICE engines in cities will potentially improve the health of millions. In 100 years we may well look back on the way we treated our atmosphere in the same way I look back at the 1952 smog, or Queen Victoria's alleged reaction to the Black Country: "The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black."
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
To be a bit picky, I'd suggest drugs are as rife in private schools as state schools. Possibly more so, given the relative affluence of many of the students.
At uni the posh kids did loads more drugs than us comp kids, I suppose because they had more money, but also they seemed to have a more cynical and nihilistic mindset.
If they'd been public school, they were likely emotionally traumatised, too.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Without getting drawn too far into the debate, your first paragraph is simply wrong. Whilst we understand the large scale, broad brush effects on the climate we have no idea about the details of what causes the move from one climate state to another. After a century or more of studying these things we still don't know why events like the Allerød interstadial or the subsequent Younger Dryas Cooling occurred when they did and to the extent they did. Nor can we account for the Bronze Age and Roman warm periods nor even the Little Ice Age. There are lots of different hypothesis but none of them close to an actual scientific explanation.
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
"can be" != "are entirely and in precise detail"
Neither the implication of, nor the subsequent expansion of, your original comment.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
To be a bit picky, I'd suggest drugs are as rife in private schools as state schools. Possibly more so, given the relative affluence of many of the students.
At uni the posh kids did loads more drugs than us comp kids, I suppose because they had more money, but also they seemed to have a more cynical and nihilistic mindset.
Anecdotally when I was at Uni from 73 - 76 students generally didn't take drugs, those that did used pot. However on a Saturday night in the union you could always spot the pretend students by the way they dressed. They dressed like students were supposed to dress rather than the boring jeans and pullover the rest of us wore and for them LSD seemed to be common. They didn't seem to be aware that they stuck out like a sore thumb.
BREAKING: Head of health at UNISON Sara Gorton has confirmed that NHS strikes will proceed following a meeting with the health secretary, saying they didn't get the "tangible outcome" they were hoping for.
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
You're seemingly obsessed with constraint payments. Let's put it into context.
Last year wind generated around a quarter of all UK electricity: that's about 75TWh. Or 75,000 million kWh.
So £237 million represents around 0.3p per kWh.
That's not "wholly uneconomical".
The £237 million on constraint is not why the system is wholly uneconomical, it is merely the most grotesque and egregious expense of the whole shitty shebang. I only learned the other day that wind farms are compensated automatically for their power generation losses (outside of the constraint payments system) when the National Grid asks them to switch off, and that constraint payments are actually there purely to make up for losses in subsidy, which goes some way to demonstrating how heavily wind farms are subsidised when the ARE actually providing power.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
So is Rishi Sunak a fan of Robert Heinlein? I think we should be told.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
So is Rishi Sunak a fan of Robert Heinlein? I think we should be told.
Are you saying he is a stranger in a strange land?
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
I do think you need to provide some evidence for the assertion in bold. You may be right, but I'm not persuaded. It depends to some extent on what you mean by "academic standards".
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
I think your points are well made. What I might say more reasonably is that 'comparative' academic standards have been falling for decades. We are falling behind other countries. Additionally have started to see - since the 1990s* - Universities claiming that the students they are being presented with post A-levels lack some or many of the basic skills they need and expect for them to be able to complete degree courses.
*I use this date because this was the first time I noted such complaints from universities. It may of course predate that time.
The Maths prof I did part time research with had instituted (about 10 years back) remedial classes - quite a few students for undergrad couldn’t differentiate or integrate with ease, or deal with more than simple examples.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
BREAKING: Head of health at UNISON Sara Gorton has confirmed that NHS strikes will proceed following a meeting with the health secretary, saying they didn't get the "tangible outcome" they were hoping for...
You can somewhat see his point. Productivity discussion ought, surely, to be in relation to terms of employment including salaries - rather than a "one off" payment.
...Following discussions at the Department of Health, Unite negotiator Mr Kasab said the government had suggested that any one-off payments would have to be based on "productivity savings". He said that some of his members were working 18 hour shifts and that it was "an insult to every single one of our members" to discuss productivity. "We are extremely angry," he added...
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
The causes of past climate changes can be studied and understood. We are therefore confident* that, without combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the Earth's climate would otherwise have cooled slightly. The evidence we have is that greenhouse gases released by human activity explain the difference between what we would expect (due to observed solar, volcanic and other effects) and what we have observed (rapid warming).
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Without getting drawn too far into the debate, your first paragraph is simply wrong. Whilst we understand the large scale, broad brush effects on the climate we have no idea about the details of what causes the move from one climate state to another. After a century or more of studying these things we still don't know why events like the Allerød interstadial or the subsequent Younger Dryas Cooling occurred when they did and to the extent they did. Nor can we account for the Bronze Age and Roman warm periods nor even the Little Ice Age. There are lots of different hypothesis but none of them close to an actual scientific explanation.
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
I'd just like to expand on your last paragraph a little, as I utterly agree with it. IMV the various clean air acts are one of the best groups of legislation every introduced in this country. In ?1951? my dad visited the Festival of Britain and described air so thick he could almost taste it - and that was not even the famous 'smog' year. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a coal power station, and my mum would have to bring in the washing whenever the wind blew from the 'wrong' direction, as it would soon get tiny particles of soot on it.
Getting cleaner (not yet 'clean' air) has been a challenge and expensive, but we're making massive progress.
Likewise, the banning of diesels, and ICE engines in cities will potentially improve the health of millions. In 100 years we may well look back on the way we treated our atmosphere in the same way I look back at the 1952 smog, or Queen Victoria's alleged reaction to the Black Country: "The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black."
Agree with every word of this. I would go further as well in slightly different direction. Hydrocarbons are a highly valuable finite resource (unless you subscribe to some fairly fringe Russian ideas about spontaneous geological hydrocarbon formation). They are simply too valuable to burn in the way we have. This was an argument for nuclear 40 or50 years ago and is a so much stronger argument for renewables today.
🚨🚨New Voting Intention🚨🚨 Labour lead is fourteen points in latest results from Deltapoll. Con 31% (-1) Lab 45% (-) Lib Dem 9% (+1) Other 14% (-1) Fieldwork: 5th - 7th January 2023 Sample: 1,593 GB adults (Changes from 9th - 12th December 2022) https://twitter.com/DeltapollUK/status/1612437144093573122/photo/1
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
I do think you need to provide some evidence for the assertion in bold. You may be right, but I'm not persuaded. It depends to some extent on what you mean by "academic standards".
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
I think your points are well made. What I might say more reasonably is that 'comparative' academic standards have been falling for decades. We are falling behind other countries. Additionally have started to see - since the 1990s* - Universities claiming that the students they are being presented with post A-levels lack some or many of the basic skills they need and expect for them to be able to complete degree courses.
*I use this date because this was the first time I noted such complaints from universities. It may of course predate that time.
The Maths prof I did part time research with had instituted (about 10 years back) remedial classes - quite a few students for undergrad couldn’t differentiate or integrate with ease, or deal with more than simple examples.
Maths and science degrees, that follow on from A-levels rather than starting anew, used to take three years and now usually take four.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I can do 0 AD, that's easy. Nothing happened: year did not exist. 🙂
That battle was lost when we celebrated the new millennium in 2000.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I can do 0 AD, that's easy. Nothing happened: year did not exist. 🙂
I'm not on good form with maths and precise knowledge today, am I? I obviously meant from the year 1 to whatever year it was I knew him best (1992 or 1993, I think).
Blame Dry January. Yes, that's it. Any inaccuracies or mistakes I make are due to too much blood in my alcohol stream.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I can do 0 AD, that's easy. Nothing happened: year did not exist. 🙂
That battle was lost when we celebrated the new millennium in 2000.
Pedantry. Every year starts a new millennium, we have just started the one ending 2122, and we were all at liberty to celebrate the millennium of years beginning with 2. Plus, Futurama showed us the way.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Whereas in the west, Latin remained the language of the educated elite after the fall of empire.
(I am not very knowledgeable about ancient history.)
🚨🚨New Voting Intention🚨🚨 Labour lead is fourteen points in latest results from Deltapoll. Con 31% (-1) Lab 45% (-) Lib Dem 9% (+1) Other 14% (-1) Fieldwork: 5th - 7th January 2023 Sample: 1,593 GB adults (Changes from 9th - 12th December 2022) https://twitter.com/DeltapollUK/status/1612437144093573122/photo/1
Lib Dem surge.
Annoying that Deltapoll don’t quote Green or Refuk numbers on their tweets so I can’t easily do LLG:refcon (details not on their site yet).
They were 6 and 4 last time so if unchanged that’s 60:35
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Whereas in the west, Latin remained the language of the educated elite after the fall of empire.
(I am not very knowledgeable about ancient history.)
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
I saw a program that touched on the Italian-speaking Greeks recently - I think it was 'Abandoned Engineering' or somesuch (which my son loves). An Italian village was abandoned, and with it went one of the last pockets of Greek-speaking Italians. I'd never heard of it before.
That's no good. How will we know whether to condemn the troughers or applaud these MPs for their interest in high speed broadband if the report does not tell us which party they belong to?
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Probably exactly that. But the extent of the wipeout is odd, compared to the survival of English post 1066 and of Andalusian Spanish during moorish rule.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
I saw a program that touched on the Italian-speaking Greeks recently - I think it was 'Abandoned Engineering' or somesuch (which my son loves). An Italian village was abandoned, and with it went one of the last pockets of Greek-speaking Italians. I'd never heard of it before.
They have their dark side. "The Ndrangheta which is the name of the Calabrian Mafia is a word of Calabrian Greek origin: andragathía (ἀνδραγαθία), composed by "agathia" ("value") and "andròs" (genitive of "anér" with the meaning of "noble man")." A misnamed bunch.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Probably exactly that. But the extent of the wipeout is odd, compared to the survival of English post 1066 and of Andalusian Spanish during moorish rule.
It must be something to do with cultural imbalances between the west and east of the Roman empire ? In the east, there were a number of fairly advanced civilisations which long predated the Romans, with their own religions and literatures; far less so in the west.
I don't know much detail of the ancient world, but there are distinctions between languages of the educated elite (courts; law; religion) and the spoken languages of the uneducated. A conquering culture which didn't have a literary tradition would be far more likely to adopt that of those it had conquered, as a matter of both prestige and administrative convenience ?
In the later examples of England and Spain, the cultural disparity was nowhere near as great.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
That's no good. How will we know whether to condemn the troughers or applaud these MPs for their interest in high speed broadband if the report does not tell us which party they belong to?
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Probably exactly that. But the extent of the wipeout is odd, compared to the survival of English post 1066 and of Andalusian Spanish during moorish rule.
It must be something to do with cultural imbalances between the west and east of the Roman empire ? In the east, there were a number of fairly advanced civilisations which long predated the Romans, with their own religions and literatures; far less so in the west.
I don't know much detail of the ancient world, but there are distinctions between languages of the educated elite (courts; law; religion) and the spoken languages of the uneducated. A conquering culture which didn't have a literary tradition would be far more likely to adopt that of those it had conquered, as a matter of both prestige and administrative convenience ?
In the later examples of England and Spain, the cultural disparity was nowhere near as great.
Isn't it more simply that there's a lot of continuous land East of the Eastern Empire and there wasn't any continuous land West of the Western Empire?
Alan Binder in WSJ: “..Inflation in the 2nd half of the year has run vastly lower than in the first half. In fact—and this is astonishing—it’s almost back down to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Even more astonishing, hardly anyone seems to have noticed.” https://twitter.com/talmonsmith/status/1612247025684201475
Naturally, since the year on year figure still looks high (and everyone still sees prices being a lot higher than this time last year), even if annualised inflation for the current month is very low.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
So my biggest disaster was in metalwork. The lad behind me turned around with the pointed end of a handle he had just taken out of the forge and which was literally red hot and which he was just about to hammer into a point to fit into a wooden handle. The 'red hot poker' caught me in the backside and melted my nylon trousers. Obviously I had to tell the teacher, who, although trying to be serious, could not restrain himself from collapsing into giggles. The needlework class put a patch on my trousers.
PS There are some cracking videos on the internet of sodium being thrown into toilets and such like.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
I think @kinabalu may be assuming of all private schools something which is only true of a minority of them. I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp. Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
To be a bit picky, I'd suggest drugs are as rife in private schools as state schools. Possibly more so, given the relative affluence of many of the students.
I think that's fair. Perhaps to parents it doesn't look quite as frightening - there isn't the obvious air of criminality about it; the dealers around the gates. But drugs will be at private schools, along with various other social problems (albeit, largely, more expensive ones). You can't insulate totally your kids from grubby reality.
Comments
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
I hope. That's from memory
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I don't think it's particularly embarrassing, because I think most public policy in the West treats CO2 solely as a pollutant, whether or not that is the official classification.
The comparison with food is an interesting one - 'calories = bad' is a view which similarly lacks nuance.
I reckon that whilst I was spending countless hours, days and weeks chasing girls, he was just doing stuff he enjoyed and concentrating on studying.
Incidentally, girls used to really, really like him.
It cannot be entirely ruled out that there is an unknown factor, or factors, which simultaneously produces a warming effect on the Earth's climate that matches the time pattern of greenhouse gases, while reducing the effect of those greenhouse gases to near-zero. There are always unknown unknowns. But if we accept that we have to act on the basis of the best available evidence and our confidence in it, then the best available evidence is that this is very unlikely.
* There's a more contentious hypothesis that extends this idea to state that, were it not for deforestation due to agriculture, we would be entering an ice age. But the numbers are too uncertain to draw that conclusion.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
I thought there was a year, 931 or thereabouts, in which absolutely nothing is known to have happened
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
Mr... erm... Dearg, if we understood the climate so well over a century ago why (around a decade ago) have more recent individuals made claims that rapidly proved to be utterly wrong (specifically, snow in the UK becoming a thing of the past a few years prior to two of the worst winters in a century)?
I think it's reasonable to assume with a level of some certainty that life carried on.
Please refrain from commenting overmuch on Putin.
British ?
Is not education devolved? What the Prime Minister says on this matter has no bearing outside England? Similarly, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings, Nick Gibb, Amanda Spielman, Conservative MPs and the DES. Their sayings and doings only affect England.
We can learn something from the devolved nature of mathematics and science teaching and the PISA results.
https://www.oecd.org/unitedkingdom/PISA-2015-United-Kingdom.pdf
(I understand it is 2015, I can't find the more recent report on the OECD website).
Student performance in science: "Within the United Kingdom, students in England score 512 points, on average, and students in Northern Ireland score 500 points, on average – both above the OECD average. Students in Scotland score 497 points, around the OECD average, while students in Wales score 485 points, which is below the OECD average."
Student performance in mathematics: "Students in England and Northern Ireland score 493 points in mathematics, on average, and students in Scotland score 491 points – all comparable to the OECD average. Students in Wales score 478 points, below the OECD average."
Two things are interesting: (i) There are quite significant differences between education in Scotland and England, yet the overall performance in science and maths in the two nations is very similar, (ii) Labour have nothing to be proud of in Wales.
He did say that for some of the early years were a little vague, and he'd say things like "That was around the time King Foobar of Esher died..."
Without t'Internet it was hard to check what he was saying, but the things we did know about matched. On one occasion we sat in the student union bar and threw years at him.
He had quite an amazing mind; not just in his ability to remember things, but also in terms of intelligence. I've met, and worked, with many brilliant minds since (and married one), but no-one quite matched him.
I'll banish myself to ConHome, where such brilliant mathematics will convince them that Brexit has been a resounding success...
(This actually shows how easy it is to make stoopid mistakes when discussing things.)
I went to a private school - I don't think I have access to any influential networks. None of my peers went on to be the establishment. Many went on to be quite successful in their fields, but no more than you would expect of any Russell Group graduate.
The biggest motivator to parents using private schools is not to get their children into the establishment, it's to avoid them falling through the trapdoor of a really shit comp.
Now you might very well say that plenty of people come through shitty comps where violence is a daily threat, teaching is intermittent and drugs fairly rife and go on to do well. I'm sure some here fall into that category. But if you're a parent of an 11 year old and you can afford it, you'd really rather not take the chance.
It's just that the stuff that the so-called sceptics harp on about was all settled ages ago and is now boring to anyone in the field. All the new stuff people are working on necessarily has to take it as a given, in a similar way that chemists don't continue to debate whether the combustion of coal involves the oxidation of carbon.
Let's put it into context.
Last year wind generated around a quarter of all UK electricity: that's about 75TWh.
Or 75,000 million kWh.
So £237 million represents around 0.3p per kWh.
That's not "wholly uneconomical".
As for climate science, I've been following it since I was a little lad as it's one of my main "hobbies". Best to strip away some of the political hype and culture war and just look at the basic numbers. The world is warming, at a fairly monotonic straight line rate, and has been doing so for decades now. There's no evidence it's about to stop warming anytime soon, but there's also little evidence it's accelerating out of control. The basic trend is bad enough.
What I find most interesting, and is still very much up for debate, is precisely how things will change in North West Europe and the UK.
Ban DiHydrogenMonoxide. It kills!
Unlike Luckyguy I don't use this as an argument against any of the measures we are taking. Decarbonisation is a good thing for myriad reasons. This is just a point about what we do and do not 'know'.
- from Beethoven's autopsy
https://twitter.com/tonyprinciotti/status/1612121958363152387
That 60% increase in constraint payments is mostly just from 2 new wind farms, which, since grid limitations vs. wind farm location is a completely known factor, should never have been allowed to be built. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/payments-for-windfarms-to-switch-off-soar-to-quarter-billion-pounds/
Note the overlap and the fact of the later series ending in 2010. which was the last - I think - of your worst winters. Don't know where you live, but look what alpine skiing looks like these days. One third of French ski resorts have permanently closed https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ski/inside-story-frances-abandoned-ski-resorts/ Of the survivors, 50% were temporarily closed 3 days ago because of no snow in the high Alps in January (they have had a good fall now).
The 1912 prediction was a bit more substantial
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Again. LOL at "a few centuries," but if something is called that far out and then happens I am impressed.
https://www.bigissue.com/culture/music/sex-pistols-singer-john-lydon-is-making-a-bid-for-eurovision/
*I use this date because this was the first time I noted such complaints from universities. It may of course predate that time.
The extra teaching resources are what give the bright-but-issues-or-unmotivated cohort a chance, I think, in private schools.
I saw with my eldest daughter, that even at a very good state primary, if you get above a certain level, the teachers tended to put you in the top group, and let you cruise.
My youngest went to the Free School primary, which was started by a Head who had the ambition of an education as good as the private school she’d got a full bursary to. There they said “excellent - now try this…”
Getting cleaner (not yet 'clean' air) has been a challenge and expensive, but we're making massive progress.
Likewise, the banning of diesels, and ICE engines in cities will potentially improve the health of millions. In 100 years we may well look back on the way we treated our atmosphere in the same way I look back at the 1952 smog, or Queen Victoria's alleged reaction to the Black Country: "The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black."
Read more on the latest polling here: https://www.scotlandinunion.co.uk/post/new-poll-scots-condemn-snp-s-record-running-public-services-1 https://twitter.com/scotlandinunion/status/1612425001206005761/photo/1
https://trib.al/6IHSwJT
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1612435186725097473/video/1
Please itemise the "grotesque", "egregious" total subsidy to UK wind.
And net it off against such items as these.
High Power Prices Mean Wind Farms Are Paying the U.K. Government
Offshore wind farms are set to fund a payment to suppliers
High wholesale power prices have caused subsidies to vanish
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-13/high-power-prices-mean-wind-farms-are-paying-the-u-k-government?leadSource=uverify wall
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
Productivity discussion ought, surely, to be in relation to terms of employment including salaries - rather than a "one off" payment.
...Following discussions at the Department of Health, Unite negotiator Mr Kasab said the government had suggested that any one-off payments would have to be based on "productivity savings".
He said that some of his members were working 18 hour shifts and that it was "an insult to every single one of our members" to discuss productivity.
"We are extremely angry," he added...
Labour lead is fourteen points in latest results from Deltapoll.
Con 31% (-1)
Lab 45% (-)
Lib Dem 9% (+1)
Other 14% (-1)
Fieldwork: 5th - 7th January 2023
Sample: 1,593 GB adults
(Changes from 9th - 12th December 2022) https://twitter.com/DeltapollUK/status/1612437144093573122/photo/1
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_languages
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
Blame Dry January. Yes, that's it. Any inaccuracies or mistakes I make are due to too much blood in my alcohol stream.
@SamCoatesSky went to the company's address after they said it was policy not to hand the media their press office details https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1612439894160441344/video/1
Whereas in the west, Latin remained the language of the educated elite after the fall of empire.
(I am not very knowledgeable about ancient history.)
Annoying that Deltapoll don’t quote Green or Refuk numbers on their tweets so I can’t easily do LLG:refcon (details not on their site yet).
They were 6 and 4 last time so if unchanged that’s 60:35
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griko_people
In the east, there were a number of fairly advanced civilisations which long predated the Romans, with their own religions and literatures; far less so in the west.
I don't know much detail of the ancient world, but there are distinctions between languages of the educated elite (courts; law; religion) and the spoken languages of the uneducated.
A conquering culture which didn't have a literary tradition would be far more likely to adopt that of those it had conquered, as a matter of both prestige and administrative convenience ?
In the later examples of England and Spain, the cultural disparity was nowhere near as great.
Seems that Tory central office were given a pile of money by IX Wireless and determined where it went after MPs made applications for the money.
And it seems to have created no discord; at least no major dispute.
https://twitter.com/talmonsmith/status/1612247025684201475
Naturally, since the year on year figure still looks high (and everyone still sees prices being a lot higher than this time last year), even if annualised inflation for the current month is very low.
PS There are some cracking videos on the internet of sodium being thrown into toilets and such like.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-considering-supplying-ukraine-with-challenger-2-tanks-to-fight-russian-forces-12783107
Perhaps to parents it doesn't look quite as frightening - there isn't the obvious air of criminality about it; the dealers around the gates. But drugs will be at private schools, along with various other social problems (albeit, largely, more expensive ones). You can't insulate totally your kids from grubby reality.
https://youtu.be/636ifPirrEY