West of the Moon

academic

the ending is also the beginning.

I read a book recently where one of the characters kept having a very specific kind of premonition. Every once in a while, he would do something, and then suddenly know that he would never do that thing again. “This is the last time I will ever pet a dog,” that kind of [...]

Tags: berkeley, new york

authority and the classroom, part two.

I mentioned in the previous post that, before I started teaching for the first time, I asked some colleagues for advice about how to establish myself as an authority in the classroom.  At that point, before I’d ever walked into a classroom as an instructor, I phrased the problem in terms of “controlling” the room.  [...]

Tags: history, students, teaching

authority and the classroom, part one.

I’ve been trying for a few days to put together my thoughts on the extremely complicated issue of classroom authority; in the end, I’m breaking it into a couple of parts, to make it more manageable. Part One is a story, because telling stories is one of my favorite ways to make sense
At the [...]

Tags: authority, gender, teaching

math on the bias.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a series of articles for an upcoming encyclopedia of world history; I’m writing a set of short pieces for them about various aspects of science and technology in the ancient and early medieval periods. Two of my assigned articles deal with Indian mathematics [...]

Tags: bias, history of science, teaching

oh dear.

Things that do not inspire confidence, number one: All of the lights on my hallway are off. I don’t think it’s an electrical problem, since the lights in my office work. It does, however, create the vague impression that I’m working in some kind of horror movie set.
Things that do not inspire confidence, [...]

Tags: berkeley, technical difficulties

what we’re doing here.

This June, it will be ten years since I first started keeping an online journal.
I was going to say something like, “online journal, that’s what we called them before they were called weblogs,” but that’s not entirely true.  Online journals were always much more about personal narrative, telling stories about your life.  They’re by nature [...]

Tags: personal history, weblogs

africa reading challenge.

I’ve decided to join the Africa Reading Challenge, which I first learned about from Matt Cheney. It’s pretty straightforward: read six books this year that are either about Africa or by African authors. Ever since I first put together the unit on African science for my survey course on science in [...]

Tags: africa reading challenge, mixed media

friday housecleaning.

Closing tabs, as they say.

I’ve seen a lot of people linking to this article from National Defense Weekly, about SIGMA, a group of science fiction writers who are offering their services to the US government in an advisory capacity. News of this group has been around for a while–the idea being, presumably, that people [...]

Tags: academic trainwreck, hugo, sigma

Is history a science?

Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science. I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through [...]

Tags: boundaries, history, science, teaching

playing the numbers.

Within the community of people who make their living paying attention to science–science writers, historians of science, science ethics and policy experts, among others–there are a few recurring concerns. One is the lack of scientific literacy in the general public, which is usually seen as being related to a “soundbite culture”. Popular media [...]

Tags: health, science, science literacy, statistics