Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Recently I had a round of correspondence with a county official in Washington state re pile drivability studies and their place in the contract process. (If you're looking for some explanation of this, you can find it here). His question was as follows: During the bidding process, is the contractor's sole basis for anticipating the …
Continue reading "My Perspective on Driven Pile Drivability Studies"
And HHS Secretary Sibelius is on the hot seat: Embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will testify before Congress next week about the botched rollout of ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges after rejecting GOP demands to appear this week. The House Energy and Commerce Committee confirmed Monday night that Sebelius would meet with the committee …
Continue reading "Obamacare's Ecommerce Chickens Come Home to Roost"
It would make sense that a Reformed person such as Steven Wedgeworth would pan an article on the revival of "high church". After all, who else to trash "high church" but the people who pitched the liturgy to start with? It would move the debate forward if a definition of "high church" would be agreed …
Continue reading "High Church is One Thing, but Trashing the Nautilus is a Mistake"
We've had another bridge collapse, this time on the I-5 in Washington State. So we can, for the moment, get away from debating natural disasters and discuss something we just might be able to do something about: fix our deteriorating transportation infrastructure. I'll repeat what I said about this six years ago, after the I-35 …
Continue reading "Dealing With What We Can: What the I-5 Collapse Reminds Us Of"
I was pleasantly surprised to read in phys.org that some researchers are coming to the conclusion that Victorian era people were more intelligent than those of us who have come after. With all the self-congratulating blather about the Flynn curve and just reflexive over-confidence, a corrective is in order. (It's probably too much to ask …
Continue reading "The Victorians Were Really Smarter After All"
One of the diciest spectacles we have in education these days is the rush to apply technology to the process. Our school systems are spending enormous amounts of money to equip students with the latest gadget (these days, it's a tablet) and make sure they know how to run these things. Textbook publishers are rushing …
Continue reading "Advice to Graduates: Every Wing has a Leading Edge and a Trailing Edge"
Most proofs of the characteristic polynomial of the companion matrix--an important specific case--proceed by induction, and start with a $latex 2\times2$ matrix. It strikes me that an inductive proof has more force (or at least makes more sense) if a larger matrix is used. In this case we will use a "large" (numerical analysts will …
It's that time of the year again, when some students turn into wage-earners, others just move on to another curriculum, and still others just tank. Once the mediaeval outfits return to the closet while some who just came out of the closet try to push others they don't like into the closet, college faculty are …
Continue reading "Advice to Graduates: The Importance of an Objective"
As a slight departure from the usual subjects of this blog, we offer this paper for discussion and consideration: This article is an overview of the current state of both forward and inverse analysis of wave propagation in piling. It begins with a summary of the typical acceptance procedure for the wave equation as applied …
My last post on STEM education in Florida has gotten an extensive response from Charles Richardson. This is a topic very much in vogue and deserves further treatment, although some of what I have to say in response to him--and others who don't find my strong position on the subject to their taste--I've covered in …
Continue reading "Some More Thoughts, and a Response, on STEM Education"
Positive Infinity 