Viewing profile — pdm55

Not my "cup of tea", but certainly a record holder is Agatha Christie whose 66 detective novels and 15 short-story collections have sold over two billion copies, an amount surpasse…

I used PhET Circuit Simulations in a classroom of 14-year-olds. Luckily, I had: (1) the freedom to space the tasks over a number of hour-long lessons; (2) plenty of equipment to al…

The development of the lithium-ion battery is an example of how scientific discovery does not have a straight-line trajectory. How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery "One notable thing…

I don't think LLMs are suitable for chess. Witness the result of a chess game this year between ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Gemini (Google AI). The LLMs had a very poor record at picking …

Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story. The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so s…

Wow, this guy has been writing the code for card games for 10+ years. And the number of games has certainly grown. I remember when he had only coded about 3 games. No bridge, of co…

There is always more to the story: https://www.scribd.com/document/661270387/My-Work-with-Milli... Fletcher & Millikan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-uWaEvXqbA

When I used NMR scientific instruments that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1990s, the Japanese (Jeol) machines had a far more straightforward interface than the Germa…

Of course, the study of how living cells function is "hard". But that doesn't mean it has to be learnt without joy. We tend to explore things we enjoy. A lot of the writer's essays…

Links re Bill Watterson: http://timhulsizer.com/calvin/index.php/words/

A suggestion: I enjoyed one short online computer course I studied, because we were given other students' submissions to assess. I recall using both my own code and the code of ano…

Reading the transcript of Bill Gates's (Nov 16) interview with Yejin Choi (University of Washington / Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), one gets the impression that AI …

I recall reading an interview of a higher-up in the Saudi government. He was asked why he doesn't have multiple wives. He replied that he doesn't have enough free time for that lif…

Team sports require coordination between players. I never really appreciated how important it was to develop this. The sport I want to mention briefly is Rugby. This is a catch, ru…

I think the card games here have multi-player options: https://cardgames.io/

I also quickly went through the basic tasks in 17 levels of Hedy in about 20 mins. (I just know a little programming.) Hedy is text-based and introduces ideas such as: print, enter…

https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain He teaches with infectious enthusiasm https://studio.code.org/s/express-2022 For middle-school kids https://developers.google.com/blockly/ B…

Can it be argued that the cause of the Industrial Revolution was man's insatiable appetite for using our planet's resources? A recurring theme in our history! Great Britain was an …

Teaching Chemistry: https://www.chemedx.org/ A number of chemistry investigations, as distinct from experiments, for high school students: http://seniorchem.com/

My wife and I missed out on having kids. We wanted kids but it "didn't happen". Yes, I used to also lie awake at night. My wife went through the demanding IVF schedule a couple of …

Walter Mosley made an interesting observation about the writing process. When he rereads his first draft of a novel, he notes the places where the words go awry: where something is…

Can we tell what collaborations (with Maric, with Grossmann, etc.) were occurring by examining Einstein's notebooks? https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Zurich_Notebook/ What …

My day was made when I discovered "Chance in a Million" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC7zJP02Pak It's comedy of the absolutely improbable. The female lead is a young…