Hidden Figures: Yes, Go See It Right Now

Here’s how to deal with the fact that a great orange buffoon is getting sworn into our highest office: go see Hidden Figures. Just go. Go see black women fighting misogyny and racism and Jim Crow while doing badass math. You need to see that right now.

*This review is mostly spoiler-free*

Take your children to go see it. Yes, even the young ones. Yes, even the teens. Look: I was in a theater full of little kids and teenagers, and they were sitting there beside unrelated adults up to the age of probably-watched-John-Glenn-orbit-live-on-teevee-with-their-own-kids, and apparently they were all riveted. I have never been to a movie that full of young folk who were so extraordinarily quiet. I’ve never been in an auditorium packed with nearly 400 people of all ages and had such an uninterrupted experience. The kids will do fine, and they need to see this.

Hollywood put out a movie about black women doing math, and it was spellbinding. I never thought they’d try. And since they tried, I never thought they’d do it with so much math and so few explosions. They had exploding rockets, but seemed almost embarrassed to mention them. There was a love story, but only because one of the real women this movie is based on actually got married in the middle of our race to space. It wasn’t shoved in just to hook our emotions, and you get the feeling they’d rather be doing more math. The movie stayed remarkably true to actual, historical events.

You’ll get to meet three of the most extraordinary women in our country’s scientific history: Katherine Goble (later Johnson), Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. You will get to see them be math nerds. You will get to see them have interests other than marriage and children. Hell, you’ll even get to see one of them fix a car. In a dress. Did you know women could fix cars while wearing dresses? Well, now you do.

You’ll get to see three black women star in their own story, as heroes, not as sidekicks and inspirations to white people. This wasn’t a story about white people learning how not to be racist gits (although several white people learned this, the movie isn’t about them). This wasn’t a story about three career women trying to also balance their roles as wives and mothers (although they were). This wasn’t a story about men learning how to deal with career women, women smarter than them, and figuring out how not to be sexist gits (although this all happens).

No. Continue reading “Hidden Figures: Yes, Go See It Right Now”

Hidden Figures: Yes, Go See It Right Now
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Happy Rounded Pi Day!

It’s Pi Day in those countries that write the date as month and day! This year, Pi Day is extra-coolio because it’s 3/14/16. See?

Image shows a pie (possibly a cheesecake) with the Pi symbol in the center, and the numbers of Pi written around the edge in black. I've added an arrow showing the fifth and sixth digits of Pi (59) and showing the 5 would round up to 6.
See whatcha get if you round up? Pi pie public domain image by GJ, annotated by moi.

Yep, if you round up the first six digits to the ten-thousandths place, you end up with 3.1416. Rounded Pi Day! Yes, it’s entirely silly and yet too much fun.

Happy Rounded Pi Day!

Help Me Calculate Wooly Mammoth Populations

Ya’ll, I’m sorry, but I need you to put on your calculating hats and help a woman defeat creationists. I have numbers, but no higher math skills to work ’em out*. Any of you care to calculate?

Here’s what I need to know: how many wooly mammoths can we expect 900 years after the Food?

Let’s give creationists the benefit of the doubt, and pretend Noah kept two wooly mammoths aboard. Let’s further say they were of breeding age when they got off the boat, and there was lots of forage, and they got it on right away. Here are the relevant stats, pulled from their closest living relatives, the Asian elephant.

Breeding age: 10-15 years until around 50-55

Gestation: around 18-22 months

Weaning: around 3 years

Which gives us a birth interval of about 4-5 years.

Life expectancy: roughly 60-70 years.

So, if our wooly mammoths pump out bebbies on the regular, and all is ideal, and we even let ’em all live to ripe old ages, how many mammoths will we have after 900 years?

Herd of wooly mammoths. Painting by Charles R. Knight, image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Herd of wooly mammoths. Painting by Charles R. Knight, image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve got plenty of other ways to show that the creationist crap being spouted about wooly mammoths in this textbook is utter bunk, but it would be nice to hoist them by their own petard, while we’re at it. Thanks for your help, my more numerate darlings!

*Gawds, I can’t math. Up until pre-algebra, I was actually pretty good at the stuff, but I got jumped ahead before I had the proper foundation, then had a string of truly awful math teachers and never recovered. I shoulda kept up on the tutorials I was doing back in the early aughts, but I let my skillz atrophy because hey writers don’t need math right?

Let this be a cautionary tale to all aspiring authors: keep your math skills polished. Otherwise, you’ll end up on the intertoobz at three in the ay-em begging your readers to do the math for you and feeling a right nitwit.

Help Me Calculate Wooly Mammoth Populations

A Reward for Your Patience

Sorry, my darlings. It’s apparently a holiday week: I’m disorganized as hell and keep getting distracted by shiny things when I should be writing. I’ve nearly got everything together for our next Prelude to a Catastrophe installment. Unless a squirrel happens, I should be writing it tomorrow night.

We will not discuss the post WordPress decided to eat earlier tonight.

In the meantime, the SciAm blog network turned one yesterday, and we celebrated with a bit o’ cake and curiosity. For those who didn’t see or didn’t feel like fighting with its comments system, you can answer nosy questions here, if you like. I know a little about some of you, and a lot about a few of you, but I know there are folks here who haven’t got the chance to say something about themselves. And you’re important to me. If you want to delurk, I’d love to hear from you!

And I’m going to give you, my patient darlings, a little bit o’ beauty from Mount St. Helens. These are from September last year, and I haven’t yet published them. Exciting, amirite?

Mount St. Helens from Johnston Ridge, September 2011

Yeah, that’s me trying to get all artsy-fartsy with one of the blow-down stumps and the volcano in the background.

Mount Adams from Johnston Ridge.

One thing I appreciate about Mount St. Helens, among many, is the blast zone. It’s amazing how much geology you can see with all the trees gone. Not that I don’t like trees, mind, and I hate clear cuts, but if a volcano wants to do a little deforestation, who am I to argue?

I’m off to Oregon soon. I might swing by and see the old girl, just the two of us. I’ve never spent quality time with her alone. We’ll be spending a lot of time together this summer: I’ve got to run Suzanne over for a nice jaunt later in the year, and Amanda and I are going to explore Ape Cave sometime before fall. We’ll see if temptation gets the better of me as I pass by her exit on my way down to collect Lockwood for some adventuring.

If I do go, what do you most want me to grab you photos of?

A Reward for Your Patience

Mathematical Memories

There’s this post, you see, up at a new blog called Hyperbolic Guitars, that’s dredged up some old memories:
We should have, as a goal, to never hear the question “why are we learning this?” again.  No one asks why we learn to read.  The same should be true for basic mathematics.  Once students go beyond the basics, they should learn what their natural interests require of them.  The job of a mathematics teacher, once a student achieves basic mathematical fluency, should be to shine light on where mathematics lives in the world, and to point the curious student in the direction that they wish to go.  And then to stand aside.
The teachers, the engineers, the musicians, the artists, the scientists – all of us need to demonstrate – not EXPLAIN – how the quantitative complements the qualitative; the reasons that knowing why is as important as knowing how.  Or what.  Or when.  Or who.

I remember math.  I remember spending a good part of elementary school living in dread of it, because after I’d proudly learned my numbers and some basic addition and subtraction, it started getting nonsensical.  No one told me multiplication and division could be cool, just that they had to be done.  We had timed tests.  Those timed tests comprised a goodly portion of my academic dread (and I was a nervous child, mind).  I’d freeze.  I’d fail.  And freezing and failure led to more freezing and failure, until I became convinced that mathematics was an Evil Subject that Was Not For Me.


Something clicked early in middle school – don’t know what – but we got to the more complex stuff at the end of the basic math courses and all of a sudden, I was flying.  Math was fun.  I could own this shit.  It made sense.  Numbers spoke to me.  Oh, and the tests weren’t timed, so that pressure was off.  Just a nice, happy communing with numbers – until the school said, “Congratulations!  You’re doing so well we’ll just let you skip the rest of this and get right into pre-algebra.”


It was rather like someone deciding a hole in the ground was as good as a finished foundation and trying to slap a house up on top of it.  I collapsed.  Numbers, once more, made no damned sense.  And the book – oh, that book, with its horrible word problems.  My dad, incensed that his daughter, the daughter of a civil engineer, couldn’t do pre-algebra, sat down one night to explain to me just how easy it was.  He looked at the book.  He fell silent mid-rant.  He flipped a few pages.  And then he told me he didn’t understand it, either.  What, he asked, did any of this have to do with real life?  This wasn’t how math behaved in the real world.


He worked thirteen hour days, so he didn’t have time to teach me when the teachers couldn’t.  He tried, but by then, I needed too much time and attention, and his books were decades out of date, and what he did the teachers tried to undo the next day, because it wasn’t the way it would be on the test, and so he gave up.  We both did.  Math became one of those subjects that I scraped by in.  The numbers never talked to me, and I could see no possible way it would ever be relevant to my interests.  I didn’t need algebra to balance a checkbook.  I had calculators to deal with the calculations.  And all I ever wanted or needed to be was a writer, and what writer needs calculus?


SF authors, actually, but nobody ever told me that.


There was only one more time when math made sense.  It was in high school chemistry, and our chemistry teacher didn’t take for granted we’d have learned any of the algebra we’d need.  So he taught it to us.  It had context, it was directly applicable to what we were doing, it helped us do interesting stuff with chemicals, and I loved it.  I could do it.  I could solve the problems.  But he was the only one who ever did that.  It was back to story problems and divorced-from-my-reality-bullshit-complete-with-blond-jokes-in-geometry for the rest of my academic career.  


And no one ever told me, ever, in all that time, that music and math were related.  Never told me where algebra came from, or how powerful it was.  No one ever said that calculus had been only a comparatively recent invention, and what a universe it had unlocked.  Math was never put in context.  The closest my math teachers got was some vague hand-waving about algebra being useful if you forgot to record a check in your checkbook (like we couldn’t just call the bank) and some extraordinarily lame “What if you were trapped on a desert island without a calculator?” bullshit when they tried to get us to go without calculators.


I felt that, in that case, solving for x wouldn’t be high on my list of priorities.


So I missed out.  There’s a whole enormous universe of numbers out there, and I don’t speak the lingo.  I can’t understand what they’re trying to say.  I never knew about “happy primes” until I watched Doctor Who and thought no such thing existed.  But they do.  There’s whole realms of happy and sad numbers.  Why don’t they teach recreational mathematics? 

I can’t tell you how to fix education.  But I can tell you what I needed: I needed teachers who loved the subject.  I needed less teaching to the test and a lot more exploration.  I needed strong foundations built.  I needed the who and the what and the when and the where and the why.  I needed teachers who demonstrated what math was good for, and the astonishing things it could reveal, and how art and music and myth and fiction and science and engineering and politics and just about everything else used math, could be inspired by it, could be given power and potential by it.  I needed to be shown how math tied in to other subjects.  I didn’t need it walled off from everything else, as if it was a noble gas that refused to react with anything else.  I needed to see it as something every bit as dramatic and exciting as a great story (which it can tell), and as uplifting and inspiring as a song (which it can be).  I needed to make friends with numbers.  I needed to understand you don’t have to be born good at math in order to become good at it.  And I needed to know it was beautiful.

If my teachers had done even a fraction of that, I’d very possibly have gotten right up through calculus.  Equations would still hold mystery, but they wouldn’t be mysterious.  I’d be able to suss out their secrets.  We’d be able to converse, these numbers and I.  Instead, we’re doomed to stuttering, stilted conversations held only when translators are available, and I don’t understand a tenth of what they’re saying.  That hurts, sometimes physically hurts, and it’s held me back in life.  It’s kept me from delving as far into science as I’d like to go.

So yes, education in this country is failing miserably, and I’m damned glad there’s a good place to have a conversation about it.  Maybe someday, if enough of us get talking, we can change the academic world.

Mathematical Memories

I Was a Victim of New Math

Efrique has two posts up that I’m certain are a tour de force of mathematics. I deduce they are not because I understand the math, but because I know that Efrique is a genius and his logic in other areas has never failed me.

I don’t understand the math because of this:

Back when I was in school, I sailed through English and foundered on mathematics. My brain looks at numbers, screams, and flees. I blame the way math is taught.

I struggled with basic math for many years, until I hit a point in early middle school when things went “click.” My sails filled with a good wind. I skimmed the waves of numbers. Each new concept slotted perfectly into place: we were plotting a good course, and there seemed nothing ahead but open ocean and the shores of Calculus sometime after a pleasant journey.

As soon as I reached 5 knots, my teachers, in their infinite wisdom, decided I could skip the rest of the basics and move right on to pre-algebra. For some children, this might have been a good move. They’re the ones who “get it” intuitively. For me, it was a disaster. It was like telling a sailor that since he’s so good at navigating by sight, he’s ready to strike out across the open ocean.

And then, there was the Book.

I can’t really describe my pre-algebra book. I remember very little of it. I just remember the look on my father’s face when, disappointed by his daughter’s inability to understand the simplest algebraic concepts, he sat down one night and lectured. Couldn’t understand why I didn’t understand, why I was failing, math is the easiest thing in the world, it’s simple and obvious and –

-then he opened the book, looked at a problem, and stopped mid-rant.

And stared.

His forehead creased. A little thunderhead formed above his eyebrows. He turned red. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at a few more problems, and looked at me in utter disgust as I quailed.

“No wonder you don’t understand math,” he snapped. “What is this shit?”

We then spent a delightful hour wherein he ripped the book a new one, while I watched his wrath in awe. He hated that book with a passion.

I never did recover momentum. The wind had been sucked from my sails, the hull staved in, and not even my father could right the ship. Part of that was because he worked 16-hour days and just didn’t have the necessary time. Part of it was because we couldn’t find any sane math books. And the rest was because I’d already taken a berth on another ship, and was starting to chart a literary course.

I would have focused all of my energy and attention on comprehending math, however, if I’d known that as an SF author, I’d someday need the bloody stuff for incidental details like planetary mass and gravitational force, orbits, and a billion other things that go into making a story universe work. I can’t do even the simplest calculations.

One day, I keep telling myself, I’ll take the time to rebuild the ship. I’ll start with regular math and follow every iteration until I finally reach the promised land of calculus. Only, there’s never time. And that impoverishes me. There’s a whole world described in math that I’ll never see and only vaguely comprehend.

When it comes for the math underlying my books, I’ll just have to fake it.

Good thing I can cuss like a sailor, then, eh?

I Was a Victim of New Math