We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same as it is for 22/8 or 220/0.08. You have to interpret the answer based on your sense of where the true answer lies. If you’ve ever had some kid at a fast food place enter the wrong numbers into a register and then hand you a ridiculous amount of change, you know what we mean.

Recent press reports highlighted a paper from Nvidia that claimed a data center consuming a gigawatt of power could require half a million tons of copper. If you aren’t an expert on datacenter power distribution and copper, you could take that number at face value. But as [Adam Button] reports, you should probably be suspicious of this number. It is almost certainly a typo. We wouldn’t be surprised if you click on the link and find it fixed, but it caused a big news splash before anyone noticed.

Thought Process

Best estimates of the total copper on the entire planet are about 6.3 billion metric tons. We’ve actually only found a fraction of that and mined even less. Of the 700 million metric tons of copper we actually have in circulation, there is a demand for about 28 million tons a year (some of which is met with recycling, so even less new copper is produced annually).

Simple math tells us that a single data center could, in a year, consume 1.7% of the global copper output. While that could be true, it seems suspicious on its face.

Digging further in, you’ll find the paper mentions 200kg per megawatt. So a gigawatt should be 200,000kg, which is, actually, only 200 metric tons. That’s a far cry from 500,000 tons. We suspect they were rounding up from the 440,000 pounds in 200 metric tons to “up to a half a million pounds,” and then flipped pounds to tons.

Glass Houses

We get it. We are infamous for making typos. It is inevitable with any sort of writing at scale and on a tight schedule. After all, the Lincoln Memorial has a typo set in stone, and Webster’s dictionary misprinted an editor’s note that “D or d” could stand for density, and coined a new word: dord.

So we aren’t here to shame Nvidia. People in glass houses, and all that. But it is amazing that so much of the press took the numbers without any critical thinking about whether they made sense.

Innumeracy

We’ve noticed many people glaze over numbers and take them at face value. The same goes for charts. We once saw a chart that was basically a straight line except for one point, which was way out of line. No one bothered to ask for a long time. Finally, someone spoke up and asked. Turns out it was a major issue, but no one wanted to be the one to ask “the dumb question.”

You don’t have to look far to find examples of innumeracy: a phrase coined by  [Douglas Hofstadter] and made famous by [John Allen Paulos]. One of our favorites is when a hamburger chain rolled out a “1/3 pound hamburger,” which flopped because customers thought that since three is less than four, they were getting more meat with a “1/4 pound hamburger” at the competitor’s restaurant.

This is all part of the same issue. If you are an electronics or computer person, you probably have a good command of math. You may just not realize how much better your math is than the average person’s.

Gimli Glider

Even so, people who should know better still make mistakes with units and scale. NASA has had at least one famous case of unit issues losing an unmanned probe. In another famous incident, an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel in 1983. Why?

The plane’s fuel sensors were inoperative, so the ground crew manually checked the fuel load with a dipstick. The dipstick read in centimeters. The navigation computer expected fuel to be in kg. Unfortunately, the fuel’s datasheet posted density in pounds/liter. This incorrect conversion happened twice.

Unsurprisingly, the plane was out of fuel and had to glide to an emergency landing on a racetrack that had once been a Royal Canadian Air Force training base. Luckily, Captain Pearson was an experienced glider pilot. With reduced control and few instruments, the Captain brought the 767 down as if it were a huge glider with 61 people onboard. Although the landing gear collapsed and caused some damage, no one on the plane or the ground were seriously hurt.

What’s the Answer?

Sadly, math answers are much easier to get than social answers. Kids routinely complain that they’ll never need math once they leave school. (OK, not kids like we were, but normal kids.) But we all know that is simply not true. Even if your job doesn’t directly involve math, understanding your own finances, making decisions about purchases, or even evaluating political positions often requires that you can see through math nonsense, both intentional and unintentional.

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry] was a French author, and his 1948 book Citadelle has an interesting passage that may hold part of the answer. If you translate the French directly, it is a bit wordy, but the quote is commonly paraphrased: “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

We learned math because we understood it was the key to building radios, or rockets, or computer games, or whatever it was that you longed to build. We need to teach kids math in a way that makes them anxious to learn the math that will enable their dreams.

How do we do that? We don’t know. Great teachers help. Inspiring technology like moon landings helps. What do you think? Tell us in the comments. Now with 285% more comment goodness. Honest.

We still think slide rules made you better at math. Just like not having GPS made you better at navigation.

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News.

The heavily-redacted documents, which surfaced earlier this week, are linked to a massive lawsuit filed by several school districts, families, and state attorneys general, accusing Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Snap of creating "addictive and dangerous" products that have harmed young users' mental health. (Snap settled earl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I’m not sure how long it will take you to read this article. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe you take a little longer and give it a close read. Either way, I’m confident however long you take to read this will not come close to the amount of time it took me to write it. And that’s a good thing. That is how communication should work.

Continue Reading

Category: AI and Humanoids, Technology

Tags: LLM (Large Language Model), Communicate, Thinking, Human, GPT

A few years ago a teacher in my school brought in a curriculum they’d bought online called “All Things Algebra,” created by Gina Wilson. It quickly spread from teacher to teacher. I considered it a niche product, just another thing being sold on Teachers Pay Teachers. Then I was talking to someone at a different school—their colleagues used it too.

It took me a while to realize just how popular these materials were—or how popular they must be, given how often I hear about them. And yet when people talk about the direction that American math teaching is going, Gina Wilson’s name never comes up. She must be the most influential person in math education that nobody knows anything about.

Because it comes from the bottom up, it’s hard to measure Wilson’s influence. Even now, I’m doubting myself—have I overstated the case? There are numbers, though: on Teachers Pay Teachers, she has over 167,000 happy customers.

We don’t talk about Teachers Pay Teachers much anymore, do we? In its heyday in the early-2010s it was the paywalled, cutesy outpost of a freewheeling ecosystem of teacher blogs. Natasha Singer covered it in 2015 for the NYTimes:

As some on the site develop sizable and devoted audiences, TeachersPayTeachers.com is fostering the growth of a hybrid profession: teacher-entrepreneur. The phenomenon has even spawned its own neologism: teacherpreneur.

“Teacherpreneur”—that’s quite a word.

While it’s tricky to figure out how widely Wilson’s curriculum has spread, we can get a bit of a hint from survey results. American Instructional Resources Surveys is a carefully designed survey performed by researchers at RAND that tries to shed light on what resources teachers are using to teach math, ELA, and science. They ask about textbooks and curricula, but also about supplementary materials.

In the most recent results, a full 43% of respondents said they use resources from Teachers Pay Teachers. Those aren’t all using Gina Wilson’s materials, but a lot, maybe most of them are.

Who is Gina Wilson? There is remarkably little public information about her. There is a blogpost from 2013 and a brief interview from 2014. She grew up outside of Buffalo, NY and is a huge Bills fan. In 2006 she graduated college, followed her boyfriend to Virginia Beach, and began teaching Grade 8 mathematics at Great Neck Middle School.

Like so many of us, Gina didn’t like the textbook she was assigned and began searching for materials. She was an avid Pinterester, collecting the free materials that others shared online. At some point, she began making her own sheets and posting them on Teachers Pay Teachers, where she found a following.

What happened next isn’t clear. But now, “All Things Algebra” is a full-fledged curriculum company. It offers full curricula from Grades 7 through Precalculus. How many people work for this company? I don’t know. Based on the pictures Wilson has posted on Instagram, she seems to write these materials entirely on her own, scanning textbooks to find and modify questions for her own sheets. Licenses for her course materials cost several hundred dollars.

Wilson is no longer listed as an employee of Great Neck Middle School. Doing a bit of quick math—hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of dollars per course—she must be f***ing rich. I assume she, uhh, is no longer hanging out with 8th Graders? If she is, respect.

What can we say about the quality of Wilson’s materials? Whatever—that’s actually the wrong question, because it doesn’t matter. What’s more interesting is why they’re so popular, and that’s clear to any teacher who’s seen them: they are ready to print and use, with answer keys and plenty of white space after each question.

PLENTY of white space. Oh my god. The hours I’ve lost to white space. There is currently a nationwide effort to get teachers to actually use vetted curricula—“high-quality instructional materials”—and I swear that if people were actually serious about this all they’d have to do would be to ADD WHITE SPACE to these things and make them READY TO PRINT. It doesn’t matter how good your textbook is if it’s annoying to use. The powers that be just don’t get this, but you know who does? Gina Wilson.

There are other things that Gina Wilson understands. Her curricular materials are simple and straightforward, with common structures and routines. The answer keys are important to many teachers. (Not me, but I’m a mess, figuring out answers in realtime.) When there are variations on a typical lesson—activities like “Madlibs” or “Relay Races”—they don’t ask kids to use different mathematics but vary the surface-level activity. I don’t love this personally, because I’m boring and scared of cuteness, but I get that most teachers like these twists on the daily grind.

Last summer, Sarah Schwartz wrote for Education Week about the RAND survey. “Regardless of state or district requirements,” she wrote, “teachers mix and match the lessons and resources they use in their classrooms.” But this reporting doesn’t dig into the actual nature of these supplemental resources, their qualities, or the people who make them. No reporting does, as far as I can tell.

The biggest mistake people make in following education is assuming that classrooms reflect the official requirements. People—even people who should know better—read position papers and state mandates and say things like, “New Jersey is moving in the wrong direction!” or “Finally we’re seeing some changes in Suffolk County.”

If there is anything to understand about education, it’s this: learning happens in classrooms with teachers and little oversight, except from overstretched administrators who, often despite their best efforts, cannot keep track of everything going on in their schools.

43%—that’s a very significant number. That’s a lot of space. It’s the space between curriculum and the classroom. It’s where ed school professors lose their influence, where consultants can’t reach, where state initiatives fizzle away into nothing.

American education will either live with this space, learn to engineer around it, or try to destroy it. I wouldn’t be shocked if, some years from now, the latest technology is used to automate oversight—maybe the next gen textbook will be watching the teacher. But until then, or maybe until that fails, this space will exist—right now it belongs to people like Gina Wilson, and without making much of a fuss, she’s dominating it.

As AI’s endless clichés continue to encroach on human art, the true uniqueness of our creativity is becoming ever clearer

- by Richard Beard

Read on Aeon

Skill-testing question: what’s wrong with this snippet?

user@host:~$ rm $FILENAME

You’re still reading. That means it doesn’t look scary. Many of you have already jumped to: this is a code snippet > this is a terminal command > this is probably Bash or POSIX shell > it’s deleting a file > $ doesn’t mean the file is expensive, it means $FILENAME is a variable > the variable is unquoted (!) > this snippet demonstrates one of the most basic and dangerous Bash footguns (see appendix)

You’re still reading. Maybe you understood the above paragraph, or maybe not, but even if you didn’t, you were interested enough to try to understand it, and the fact you’re here means you can fire up a modern computing device, put in a password, connect to the internet, browse to an obscure tech blog, scroll, and absorb strange words into your brain.

You are not normal.

Someone I know started teaching a podcasting course at a better-than-average high school in one of the richest parts of one of the richest countries. After his first day, he told me, with wide eyes, some of the students don’t know how to move or copy a file.

I was shocked. I thought we were the Luddites, and younger generations were running circles around us in the tech literacy department. Some of them are. And most of them are able to operate smartphones. But, copying a file? This is not something human beings are born knowing how to do, and, I now know, not everyone learns how in the natural course of their upbringing.

(Taking what we know for granted plagues all fields, and there’s a name for it: the curse of knowledge. And, of course, a relevant XKCD.)

My technical literacy filter bubble is Hacker News and Lobsters, where it seems like everyone is smarter and more hardcore than I am. I’ve dabbled in Python, Go, Rust, Bash, C, PHP, and JavaScript, but I don’t feel like a real programmer, because I mostly write scripts and websites. Real programmers are the ones that write compilers and desktop applications in Lisp and Zig, and run BSD or QubesOS. Real programmers are the people that are eternally one step ahead of where I am.

If your mother uses Linux, you’re probably in a computer literacy filter bubble.

If you have happy memories of booting from a treasured Live CD and playing Nibbles for Knoppix on a CRT monitor, and both parents programmed mainframes using punch-cards and FORTRAN, and you prefix anything than involves the terminal with “just”, you’re definitely in a computer literacy filter bubble.

Filter bubbles aren’t inherently bad*.* And there are countless filter bubbles that we aren’t in. I’m not in the mechanical competence filter bubble, and I bet most of us aren’t in the fashion filter bubble. Even if we wanted to, I’m not sure it’s possible to fully escape a tech literacy filter bubble while being tech literate and surrounding yourself with people who are more tech literate. But I think it’s healthy to deliberately poke our heads out of whatever bubbles we’re in once in a while, take in the view, and realize how different it is out there.

Those of us reading, and writing, blogs that routinely talk about writing shell scripts to save keystrokes, measuring brainwaves, preventing servers from crashing, and modifying the software running on embedded devices are so out of touch with the median level of technological literacy, we forget that just knowing how to double-click is a privilege.