When my kids were in elementary school, I loved to volunteer as a chaperone on their field trips, and I remember with great fondness one of my daughter’s favorite teachers, Englishman Martin Cook, whom she had for 5th Grade.
Mr. Cook took the class out for a nature hike in a nearby forest, and began by explaining when we arrived, “This experience is best had with our ears and eyes, and not with our mouths. Please try to stay as quiet as you can.”
A reader asks: When you say “He’s not as happy as ______” do you say “me” or “I?”
Because the verb “to be” never takes an object, the correct answer is “I”; this is called a “predicate nominative.”
The problem with it is that it sounds stilted, and should be avoided if possible. As an alternative you can say, “He’s not as happy as I am,” which is both correct and doesn’t make you sound like an English teacher from the 1950s.
If you think this guy should have been tapped to be attorney general, our nation’s highest law enforcement official, you have the moral sensibilities required to be a member of the MAGA crowd.
I had a physics professor in college who told our class, “When most people go to Germany they tend to take river cruises and drink white wine. Physicists visit Boltzmann’s grave.”
I hadn’t thought about this statement in a very long time, until just now when I happened to run across this photo of . . . you guessed it.
Boltzmann was best known for his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics, which he expressed in the elegant equation that you see at the top of the monument.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy (randomness, chaos) never decreases in a closed system. Boltzmann explained this in an entirely new, and more precise way, in his equation that says that entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the number of different states that a closed system can find itself in.
OK, plenty of that. If I may be allowed a bit of gallows humor, a textbook chapter on this subject begins,
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying Statistical Mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study Statistical Mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”
Is someone trying to tell me that parents are prevented from knowing what their children are being taught in school?
Ridiculous.
Both my kids went through the local public high school, and I became thoroughly familiar with the curriculum by helping them with their homework, and speaking with their teachers. On top of that, I’ve tutored dozens of kids in that same institution, using textbooks that are available for anyone to examine.
This is simply an alarmist right-wing lie.
What this gentleman needs to understand is that:
1) The MAGA crowd / Trump base is overtly racist; they openly applaud garbage like this.
and
2) The rest of us are overwhelmed by the torrent of outrageous behavior from Trump and Musk. The latter’s statement about Alternative for Germany is indefensible, but not any more so than any of the other crap that comes out of his mouth.
It would be great if we could pull off what Harrison Ford is suggesting i.e., that our leaders believe in science and create policy that is informed accordingly. The problem is that our elections here in the United States are bought with extreme sums of money that are directed towards convincing massive numbers of poorly informed Americans that a certain candidate offers them solutions to their main concerns in life.
In 2024, hordes of people believed that runaway inflation was ruining the economy, that immigrants were taking their jobs, and that the crime rate was skyrocketing. Of course, none of these assertions was true, but that was hardly relevant.
Trump promised to bring down the cost of groceries and deport many millions of immigrants. He won every state and territory but nine.
Is climate change a hoax? No. Are vaccinations safe and effective? Yes.
Is any of this important? Not on your life.
The drawing here reminds me of a kid I tutored who introduced himself as follows, “Hi, Mr. Shields. I’m Andy. I hate math and it hates me.”
Of course, I chuckled amiably and tried to reassure him that we were about to change all that.
What makes this story worth telling is that things got worse before they got better. What really sent him through the roof was when he learned that some problems have more than one solution. He thought this is positively demonic.
I could be wrong, but I believe that Trump has made at least some of his picks simply to create outrage.
Attorney General? How about an alleged statutory rapist and sex trafficker? Couldn’t get any more insane than that, right?
Secretary of Health and Human Services? Let’s see. Got it! Long-time heroin user with brain worms. Perfecto.
A reader asks: We seem to overuse the word “very.” Can you comment on that?
Sure. Excellent point. It’s because most people’s vocabularies are limited and they’re too lazy to look for the proper word. For most adjectives, say “large,” there is another, perhaps “gargantuan,” that intensifies it without the need for “very.”
I try to use what I believe to be the right word, while not coming off as pompous.
