{"id":214,"date":"2007-03-15T09:36:11","date_gmt":"2007-03-15T14:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=214"},"modified":"2007-12-13T13:41:15","modified_gmt":"2007-12-13T17:41:15","slug":"funny-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=214","title":{"rendered":"Funny, But&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lore Sj\u00f6berg&#8217;s <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/news\/columns\/0,72961-0.html?tw=wn_index_8\">Alt Text<\/A> column this week is a reductio ad absurdum about easy-to-use technology.  Even though he&#8217;s being humorous, this line kind of struck me:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Did you know that it&#8217;s possible to calculate a cosine even if you think &#8220;cosine&#8221; is a brand of nasal decongestant? We don&#8217;t allow people to walk around with live grenades in their pants, and we shouldn&#8217;t allow people who don&#8217;t understand math questions to get the answers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Since Shadow only recently had to physically restrain me from showing up in Shadaughter&#8217;s math classroom with a baseball bat,* I&#8217;m not laughing at this so much as wondering if I could fit it on a T-shirt.<\/p>\n<p>Given the preeminent position of technology and information in the modern world, I think it&#8217;s vastly important that people understand <EM>how<\/EM> things work instead of simply taking them for granted.<\/p>\n<p>:::whew:::  Now I feel better.<br \/>\n<BR><br \/>\n*Long story short: As with all other public schools in Virginia, Shadaughter&#8217;s school is in the thrall of <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Standards_of_learning\">SOL<\/A> testing (which, frankly, is an uncannily accurate acronym).  Her math teacher required all students to have a graphing calculator, because he wasn&#8217;t teaching them how to do the problems <EM>without<\/EM> a calculator.  So she wasn&#8217;t learning the theory of the problem, she was learning how to punch buttons like a trained monkey.  To say that I was annoyed is like saying that the Pacific Ocean is damp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lore Sj\u00f6berg&#8217;s Alt Text column this week is a reductio ad absurdum about easy-to-use technology. Even though he&#8217;s being humorous, this line kind of struck me: Did you know that it&#8217;s possible to calculate a cosine even if you think &#8220;cosine&#8221; is a brand of nasal decongestant? We don&#8217;t allow people to walk around with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}