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For those, like me, who find the writing style somewhat annoying, this is the part of the article that relates directly to the title: > Imagine the situation Florence Nightingale confronted in the Crimea. Everyone knew that, in a war, soldiers get shot. Everyone knew that people who are shot tend to die. What they didn't know was that the vast majority of deaths in the Crimean War weren't caused by wounds at all -- t…
>LESSON TWO: Learning maths is hard. I wish this were more widely accepted, rather than the fallacy of "math people". Mastering even undergraduate level mathematics is the single hardest intellectual pursuit any human can undertake. There's no way around it. It's just an insanely hard thing to do. I've been taking remedial math courses in prep for a CS degree after 10 years in the industry, and it is absolutely madde…
My issue with many of the maths courses especially in early primary classes is that they lack rigour. It seems to be about solving practical problems (calculating grocery lists totals etc.) rather than really understanding what happens when you do arithmetic. There are some things that genuinely help when memorised (e.g. the times tables) when you're doing arithmetic but that's looked down upon.
I'm trying to remedy this with my own children but it's a bit of an uphill battle. This article is definitely something I can use in my attempts.
Interesting that despite this being an Australian speech reported on an Australian site, there is no mention of Nightingale's role in the development of nursing in Australia, at the request of the great Henry Parkes. Here's his granddaughter (herself a nursing educator) on the subject: http://www.nurseuncut.com.au/from-nightingale-nurses-to-mode... If only we had statesmen of the calibre of Parkes today, instead of t…
Totally off topic, but I was wondering if that Parkes somehow had the Parkes radiotelescope named after him. The timing seemed wrong, but it seemed worth checking. Turns out he visited the town once, so they renamed it after him. Chuck Norris, eat your heart out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes,_New_South_Wales