All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it. Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false. If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc.

The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Alas, Apple, in moving to iOS, initially discarded this essential element of system design, perhaps because undo would require an object on the screen in order to invoke it.

I know there are philosophers of science who think that falsificationism can be salvaged and that a more sophisticated version of that view is correct, so they will predictably not be moved by this post, but I’m fine with that since it’s the crude version that most people, especially scientists, have in mind when they talk about falsificationism. Popper’s philosophy of science is a product of his view on the problem of induction, so let’s talk briefly about that. So the way science works, according to Popper, is by conjuring up hypotheses such as the law of universal gravitation that can explain a whole array of phenomena and subjecting them to tests, whose aim is not to confirm them but to falsify them.

Tina Kirschner and Barbara Kahlke, two 17-year-olds from West Germany, are sitting on a creaking red bus headed for the socialist part of their divided country. My brother went to the same school as Tina and Barbara. Tina and the others stayed on the bus, feigning sickness, so they could inform Bernd of the change in plan.

This is a set of notes for learning calculus. Computer algebra systems can be magical. The derivative finds use outside of the traditional way of specifying a function or relationship.

The two coins, one minted in Madrid in 1660 and the other made around the 1200s, were found lying on the floor at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah. It’s a mystery how such old coins have turned up in an area that wasn’t visited by Spanish explorers until 1776. They may have been left by early Spanish settlers or explorers, traded with native American tribes possibly in Mexico and then lost in the canyon, or someone brought a really old coin to the continent.

In the middle of Boeing 737 cockpits, sitting between the pilot seats, are two toggle switches that can immediately shut off power to the systems that control the angle of the plane’s horizontal tail. He said if the company had maintained the switch design from the 737 NG, Boeing could have instructed pilots after the Lion Air crash last year to simply flip the “AUTO PILOT” switch to deactivate MCAS and continue flying with the normal trim buttons on the control wheel. Boeing said in a statement that the company had historically called for pilots to flip both switches to shut of a problematic or “runaway” stabilizer, so the change on the MAX ensured that the function of the switches matched that procedure.

Hudson Yards bills itself as New York’s newest neighborhood, however it reflects many of the shortcomings of the city’s prior superblock development projects. Hudson Yards’ website calls the Public Square and Gardens area of the complex “the smartest park ever built” and an “engineering marvel,” but the Public Square is lined with broken pavers and questionable construction. While Mr. Kimmelman in the New York Times calls Hudson Yards “a spectacle” where “the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism,” saying it’s a place designed for a smooth experience is a stretch.

From a mental health perspective, too many conversations about the interaction between social media and self-harm are deeply frustrating. When it comes to self-harm and how it is materialised on social media, the conversation perhaps touches on what we might see as the secret life revealed. If we ban pictures of self-harm on social media, what we risk is silencing and isolating those in most pain and those in most need of connection.

All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it. Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false. If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc.