I read a result described as statistically significant and I want to know what has been established. Every explanation I find says something like: the result is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Then when I ask what…
I teach an introductory course and this comes up every single year, always at the same moment. We compute a mean, it lands on something like 1.5 children per household, and a hand goes up: nobody has half a child, so…
My son has a homework question asking how you know an exponential expression will eventually be larger than any quadratic one. I can handle any specific case. Take 3 to the power x against 10 x squared, make a table,…
I am fourteen and doing a geometry course over the summer. We have reached right triangles and trigonometry, and everyone seems content to type an angle into a calculator and accept whatever appears. What I cannot find…
Someone explains a thing, I follow every step, it makes total sense and I feel the click. An hour later I could not reproduce a single line of it and I am back where I started. This happens with work concepts, with…
There are two ways to hang a roll: with the free end coming over the front, or down the back against the wall. Setting aside the aesthetic argument, there is a mechanical difference I cannot explain. Tearing a sheet off…
Working through isothermal processes and the definition I was given for the universal gas constant was that it is the work done by a gas, per mole, per kelvin. I wrote it down and it has not meant anything to me since.…
I opened a training session with it last month and afterwards someone asked me where it's from, which I could not answer. Half an hour of searching gets me a thousand posters and not one citation with a page number in…
Exam in six weeks and I've been writing plain language explanations of every topic in a notebook, which is supposed to expose the gaps. What it actually produces is confident nonsense that feels wonderful to write and…
Put 32 in the tank on Friday, and my banking app immediately showed 75 pending. The real amount appeared on Monday and the 75 disappeared, but for the weekend I was 75 down on a balance I was watching quite carefully.…
This happens to me in engineering meetings and it happened last week at a hospital appointment. I ask once, I get the same explanation again slightly louder and slightly faster, and then I nod and leave with nothing. I…
She is completely solid on a half and a quarter and can shade them in on a drawing. Where it falls apart is comparing two fractions that are not obviously related, specifically whether two thirds is bigger than three…
Same loaf, cut in half, half in a bag on the counter and half in a bag in the fridge, because I was trying to stop it going mouldy in a humid week. Counter half was fine on day three. Fridge half was dry and crumbly by…
Every big system update it sits there saying it is optimising, counts up through a few hundred apps, and takes fifteen or twenty minutes. Then the battery drains noticeably faster for a day. I have read that you should…