exchemist

Like this? Aha, got it. Thanks.

How do you hide responses?

Yup, ditto. I recall these problems can be a bit counterintuitive, from trying to work the effect of the current in the Thames on a round trip in a sculling boat. One sculls by the bank against the stream, where it is less strong, and in the centre when going with the stream. (I think I came to the conclusion that the fastest time for a round trip is in still water, since you always lose more time going against the current than you gain when going with it.)

The uniquely bonkers feature of the paper, it seems to me, is the apparent equating of any form of hierarchy with “whiteness”.

Why don't you make a bit of an effort to inform yourself, then? There is masses of publicly available information on the evolution of flight.

Yes I was wondering about that, but decided it would be better not to lead the witness. 😉

What is a "progress metal"? Perhaps you are using a translator and it has not chosen a good term.

Yeah but I bet you are guilty of leading a discussion with a marker pen and whiteboard at some point in your life, you evil white supremacist. I know I have, on numerous occasions, mea culpa.

I was forgetting you were on an island. If you are - or soon will be - getting predominantly green electricity already, then there may be little environmental advantage. In fact there could be a net disadvantage, due to the manufacture and transport of the panels.

I should have the most obvious is lowering your carbon footprint so that you can look your children and grandchildren in the eye. The economics will obviously depend on the payback period, which no doubt you can work out. And if you a certain type of person it can be just interesting to see how well it works, how the output varies and so on. So a kind of engineering toy - but with the bonus of built-in virtue signalling.😁

I agree. The title is misleading, as so often in journalism. What occurred to me, as to you, about this case study was the tendency for men to dominate meetings, syndicate work etc. Towards the end of my time at Shell we were given training on this, to stop an "alpha male" character from seizing control of every discussion by picking up the marker pen, when there were probably more insightful and capable women present, who just were not as aggressive in putting themselves forward in a public forum. I suspect these researchers are so blinded by their ideological prejudice that they simplistically attempt to attribute everything to race, when there may be other, more obvious, factors at play. I am reminded of the excesses of the post-structuralist movement in literature - denial of the role of the author etc. Academia can occasionally be prey to fads whereby the latest theory, which may be well-founded in its original form, is pushed way beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, before gradually settling down to a more modest place in the battery of ideas.

Fair point. You have inspired me to look up the paper too. Here is a link: https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010119 I have to agree the argument about whiteboards is not that they are physically white in colour, but the way a whiteboard (or potentially a blackboard, or a flipchart, I imagine) is used in teaching, to focus discussion of a topic. But I did find the paper shocking. I think it is worth reproducing a part of it. The authors analyse a recorded discussion about heat capacity. I quote an extract from their analysis (an "EID" is an Energy Interaction Diagram): QUOTE In the episode we analyzed in this paper, we observe an interaction in which Drake and the representation he is constructing are centered, and Gail and Paris’ sense making and contributions are marginalized, both in their interactions within their (small) group and in the larger-group discourse. This social organization is co-constructed and co-maintained by at least five mechanisms of control: the EID representation, physics values, the use of whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling. Importantly, we would suggest that these mechanisms operate mostly invisibly; actors’ participation in them is sensible and normal. At the same time, actors are (consciously or unconsciously) renegotiating their relationship to the center or expressing aspirations to change whiteness as social organization [51,53,64]. For example, Iris expresses a wish for her class to reflect nonhierarchical social structure, and has made a number of pedagogical choices that make this more possible, even if not actualized in this episode. Paris describes herself as “making sure that me and Gail had a say” in interactions with Drake, and Gail challenged Drake’s assertions and made moves toward the center. Drake seeks Gail’s approval at the end of the episode and makes discursive moves to distribute the credit for the construction of the representation (using “we” pronouns). That these aspirations and microchallenges did not fundamentally change the nature of the interaction or the social organization of the classroom in this episode points to the power and the institutionalization of whiteness. Even our notions of what collaboration means are shaped, epistemically, by whiteness. Our goal in this paper has been to “make whiteness visible,” in the tradition of Critical Whiteness Studies. In particular, we have sought to make visible how everyday physics classroom interactions reproduce whiteness as social organization, and how physics representations, values, and pedagogical tools play a role in this reproduction. That whiteness is “ordinary” in physics classrooms is not surprising, given critical race theory’s assertion that whiteness is endemic to every aspect of U.S. society [7]. The ordinariness of whiteness’ reproduction is not surprising either, given critical scholarship’s emphasis on the invisibility and hegemony of whiteness. UNQUOTE This strikes me as verging on parody. The authors clearly have a preconceived ideological conviction that any form of steering of a discussion is - culturally - "white" and, ipso facto, A Bad Thing. Well, good luck with trying to keep any form of discussion on-topic, then! These people would obviously accuse the moderation on this forum of "whiteness", for a start. It's nuts. But actually, the point Krauss was objecting to was not so much the article, daft though it is, but the impossibility of responding to its claims, due to the Catch 22 attitude of the editors of the journal. There will always be contentious papers published, but refusing to accept a critique of them is more alarming, academically.

Yes we had dark green ones at both school and university, which were some kind of flexible rubber material, in a loop on rollers at top and bottom, so one could scroll them up or down. Handy for long mathematical derivations that took up more than could be written on one panel. But you still wrote on them with chalk.

There is no evidence of any connection, so far as I can see. Troublemakers were logged in a black book, sure (from the 2nd link below, Henry VIII is the first documented case of someone who did this) , but there's no evidence that it had anything to do with slavery or skin colour. Black and white have been contrasted for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, due to light being associated with goodness and reason and dark with danger and evil. It probably goes right back to when we lived in caves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

Being a mere chemist by training, I had the same difficulty for many years. I found this article by Matt Strassler very helpful: https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/ One key takeaway for me was that the term virtual particle is a bit unfortunate, as these disturbances in the relevant field are not particles, but just disturbances that can modelled using much of the same mathematics. However, as a chemist, I have never studied QFT. Some of the real physicists here may be able to comment with far more authority.

I think it's pretty obvious to most people that there's nothing remotely racist about the term "blacklist". Black sheep is obviously not racist in origin, though one can definitely sympathise with the idea that the concept of separating sheep by colour and denigrating black ones is not a comfortable metaphor in a multiracial society. So that's a metaphor that is probably past its sell-by date. Re master bedroom, I was actually brought up short yesterday in a Hi-Fi shop, where I was getting advice about stereo bluetooth speakers. These are sold as a pair, with one having the bluetooth receiver and power supply and the other running from it by a wire. So I said something like "Aha I see, so it's a master and slave setup. The shop assistant slightly uncomfortably replied "Well we call them primary and secondary". So there we are. The "master" and "slave" metaphor has been standard in engineering throughout my life (e.g. the cylinders in hydraulic brakes on a car), but no longer, it seems. I suppose that's fair enough: when I was growing up, Britain was nothing like as multiracial as it is now, so now there will be different sensitivities to step around. But, assuming the article is not a spoof, I am sort of intrigued as to what they would say about a blackboard.

How funny. I’m old enough to remember when all our teachers used a blackboard. Would that be seen now as “cultural appropriation”, perhaps? And what about the universal prevalence of white paper for writing and printing? Pretty shocking, eh? Something Must Be Done! 🤪

It's not a surprise that organisms adapt to make use of their environment, if that is what you mean. That's what evolution does, after all.

Is a Naiver Stroke a medical condition you suffer from?

You haven’t bunked it yet. 😁

A lie is an intentionally false statement. Are you really accusing @Mordred of that?

Can you give an example to show how this would work?

Probably.

The transposition, you mean?…..

Yes it seems Emma Kirkby's version can't be seen in the US, for some arcane copyright reason I presume. But the singer in your version has slightly screwed it up by failing to use the flattened note in the last line (when pitched in G, as Kirkby sings it, some of the F#s are flattened to natural) which gives it its sexy bittersweetness. Here's another, more authentic version (transposed down to E♭ - sung by someone who has chosen, in view of the subject matter, not to wear a bra, by the look of it.......