[Religion] is about that human intervention that science cannot explain or comment on. humanity is an interesting creature: it creates it's own reality. something that is not real in the natural world is made real nonetheless simply by enough of humanity believing it into existence. and i am not talking about physical objects like pyramids or airplanes, i am talking about mental concepts like fairness and justice Which is to say, you've relegated religion to the field of philosophy (it used to overlap science -- it used to explain how natural phenomena occurred, but that fell out of favour). So sure, if you like, you can say science and religion have no conflict, but all you've done is stand religion squarely up against philosophy. So how does religion fare there? Not well. Religion is just poor philosophy. It is philosophy that come pre-hobbled with incontrovertible dogma and blanket assertions -- and a "get out of jail free" card to be played whenever the argument gets too hard. To paraphrase Dan Dennett, religion (the way you describe it) and theology are intellectual tennis without the net. Philosophy can provide very interesting analyses on ethics, morality, consciousness, and what it means to be human. Religion covers the same material, but in the same unquestioning dogmatic way that religion used to explain natural phenomena. Give me good philosophy over religion any day.
For instance, how would you explain some concept in number theory (as an example) in a "straightforward" way when it requires postgraduate math to even describe it? Very slowly with a lot of lead up work explaining all the basic mathematics you'll need. So far I've been going for about a year, and expect to take another 2 years before I get to where I can actually explain anything interesting int he way of research mathematics. Still, it can be done, it just takes an awful lot of effort. It is, however, effort that I firmly believe should be spent by someone: there's a disconnect between the general public and the world of research, and that needs to be healed -- particularly in the case of mathematics, where the general public's perception of what mathematics is, and what most research mathematicians think mathematics is are wildly different.
My suggestion: Make everything explicit. Unfortunately this just isn't feasible in a lot of cases. A while ago it occurred to me that it might be interesting to try and actually explain my Ph.D. thesis to a general audience -- I decided to make a project out of it, in which I would lay out the necessary background and build up enough information and terminology that I could actually explain the rather rarefied topics of my thesis without resorting to glib descriptions and vague analogies that gloss over pretty much all the details. I got started a while ago, and things are progressing well. You can read my efforts so far at The Narrow Road. However, while I'm managing to cover the required background topics in a way that I think a general audience can understand, two problems remain:
I am still glossing over fine technicalities -- at this stage it would confuse rather than inform, and much of it is pendantry that won't be necessary till later... maybe I'll come back and fill the technical holes, but...
I am nowhere close to being finished. I'm barely even started. I've been writing pieces as a hobby project for a year, and have only covered a little ground. I expect that I'll be able to explain the basic ideas of my thesis in another 2 or 3 years, by which time the total material will comfortably fill a large book.
In other words, there's just too much ground to cover. It isn't possible to be fully explicit, not without writing a book instead of an article. The reality is that science (and my field, mathematics) is extremely specialised these days, and this has resulted in a disconnect between those doing research work and the general public (personally I feel this disconnect it worst in mathematics). Now I do certainly feel that trying to heal that disconnect, at least a little, is important (it is another of the motivations for my project to explain advanced mathematics to a general audience), but that is a life's work in and of itself, not something you can do on the side while writing an article.
I wrote about this prospect back in 2004 -- it all seemed on the cards then, and I was surprised that no-one was really talking about it. Of course not too much happened -- the Fed raising interest rates steadily since around that time managed to keep things in check and everything puttered along happily. Eventually, though, the higher rates cut in, and the housing market went down, and so finally the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
What is remarkable, to me, is that this was all clearly an issue 3 years ago (more than that really), and not only was little or nothing done, little or nothing was ever really said about it as a problem. Since I wrote that pretty much all the numbers in that piece have gotten significantly worse as the US continued blithely on its economic course. This really should have been an election issue in 2004, and it definitely should have been an election issue in 2006. Why exactly do so few Americans seem to know or care about the very serious issues here?
the only reason that most products are forign products is because they are priced lower. If they become pricier because of weakening dollars (or other currency's becoming stronger) then American products will bounce back.
It's not like we no longer know how to manufacture in this country... it's just that it's cheaper to import. Sure, but manufacturing industries don't spring up overnight, and there are a number of imports which the US relies upon which just aren't that negotiable -- oil being at the top of that list. So yes, American products will bounce back, but there may be a somewhat unpleasant adjustment period as the increasing cost of imported oil (from a weakening dollar) forces up the costs (via increased transport costs) of all the increasingly expensive manufactured imports, prior to US industry kicking into high enough gear to actually satisfy the demands of US consumers.
In order to see anything useful, you should also plot the Euro and the Yen. And that would look something like this. Which mostly shows exactly what you say, save for the fact that the Yen has not been quite as strong against the USD as the Euro and the Loonie. We can lump a bunch of currencies in like so and the fact that it is the USD that is moving is more clear. The general trend is clear, and with the Fed dropping interest rates right now that's going to put considerable downward pressure on the USD, so expect to see things get worse over the next month or so.
Ada has the strong typing capabilities of Pascal, with multitasking and object support as well. It seems to be the main Pascal-like language for serious, high-reliability applications. Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada? You might as well ask what advantages it offers over Eiffel, another language that offers strong typing, object support, and clean clear syntax. Better yet Eiffel not only has a GPL compiler with LGPL libraries, you can also opt for a GPL compiler suite, libraries and complete development environment.
The advantage, in the end, is that it is Pascal, and if that's the language that someone wants then other languages like Ada and Eiffel, despite similarities just aren't Pascal.
FPC has been my sidekick ever since Delphi did it's magic trick of fading into obscurity and uselessness. If you're looking for a Delphi replacement, you might want to consider Chrome, which is Object Pascal with a variety of nice extra features, including lambda expressions, generics, nullable types, and design by contract. The downsides are that it is a.NET langauge (though it works with Mono apparently), and that only the command line tools are free -- the whole suite is pricey (though comparable in cost to Delphi I guess). It is, at the least, worth looking into if you're a Pascal fan.
I am guessing the reason for more libertarians amongst the geek is due to a higher then average IQ. Really? I'm guessing it has far more to do with a combination of the relative social isolation geeks and nerds experience along with the appeal of highly ordered/structured/logical systems. The former tends to make individualist philosophies far more appealing to geeks -- they have less of a sense of social ties and social fabric, and indeed, as society as a co-operative entity in and of itself -- while the latter makes the clean blak and white logical distinctions of libertarian/objectivist philosophy more appealing. Libertarianism (in the US sense/usage) is ostensibly a reductionist philosophy: by assuming that the individual is all there is you can reduce everything into simple black and white rules regarding individuals. The reality, however, is that we are all tied together in a social network, and rely on society and social interaction to survive: humans are fundamentally social animals, and it would appear that out intelligence developed, as much as anything, as part of that social system. Sure, there are individuals and we need to have some respect for individuals, but any philosophy that ignores society altogether has hobbled itself and doesn't seem capable of providing practical real world results. It's just that geeks tend to undervalue society themselves, so this gaping flaw in pure libertarianism is less evident to them.
There are so many barriers to new entrants. Is it any wonder linux took of in the server market where MS didn't dominate. It's worth noting that Linux only gets by in the desktop market, where application base is one of the largest barriers to entry, because of its open source nature and the surrounding philosophically motivated developer community. MacOS X gets by via legacy support -- that is, they were once big enough and had a large enough application base, and remained strong enough in niches (such as graphics and design) that they've managed to keep an application base. Newcomers that didn't have either of those advantages (including BeOS and NeXT) got crushed regardless of superior quality. The only way NeXTStep got anywhere was by rebranding as MacOS and dragging the Mac developer community along kicking and screaming.
Breaking into the desktop market is very hard indeed, and the barriers are ridiculously steep. We're just very lucky that a couple of special cases happened to squeak through -- and note that even having gotten past the barrier to entry and getting onto the field, application base remains an exceptionally powerful obstruction to actually managing to compete. Linux and MacOS may be on the field, but it is still far from level.
Or at least that's the perception which the overwhelming majority of the population have. If you take away the practicality, then people who might just benefit from it simply don't realise that what they saw in maths class is applicable to something they're doing... Like crop yields. Sure, but what I'm trying to explain is that doing an example showing how math can be used to find crop yields doesn't help the people who aren't calculating crop yields. Applications explained via specific examples is missing the whole point of mathematics. If all you've seen is how to apply differential equations to the few examples that the teacher chose to trot out, and never covered the principles of abstraction and universality of mathematics then you won't see how it might apply to some new problem you encounter later. Rather, if you have an idea of how the math actually works, and how the abstraction provides broad application, then you can understand how to bend the math to the new application required.
I'm not saying don't ever show how math can be applied, I'm trying to say that showing examples of applying mathematics actually fails to address the problem; it's a band-aid solution that only tackles the symptoms rather than the cause. What is a relevant application for one person is a completely pointless and irrelevant one for someone else. Trying to introduce "applications" to solve the problem is simply shortsighted. We need to teach people how to actually do math, see the forest for the trees, and understand how abstraction allows for application. I have a sneaking suspicion you might not be getting quite what I'm getting at here, so I encourage you to read some entries from my website on abstraction, fractions and algebra, and applying group theory to get some idea of what I really mean. It's not a matter of eliminating concrete example applications, but rather demoting them to a garnish so we can properly takle the meat of the problem.
WTF use is a quadratic equation in a book? Not much. But to calculate the potential yield of a field of produce it is useful. Well it is useful to the maybe one or two kids in the class who think they might be going into agricultural work, to the rest it will be just as useless as before. Contrived special case "applications" are really of limited use in explaining why mathematics is useful. Demonstrating that mathematical abstractions are applicable to real world problems is important, but it is far from the be all and end all of explaining why mathematics is useful. Indeed it is this misperception, that "applications" (no matter how contrived) make the math "relevant" or "useful" that lead to a concentration on special cases and problem solving via recipe that actually helps hide why mathematics is actually useful.
So why is mathematics useful? Because it is layered abstraction; it is the art of forgetting all the details that don't matter, and in so doing making a problem both easier to solve, and the solution universal in its application. Numbers abstract over collections; we no longer have to care what exactly is in the collection (whether it is apples, oranges, fenceposts, or the number of millimetres in a given distance) and can simply use the same arithmetic operations regardless. In not having to worry about the specifics the problems becomes easier. In generalising over all the myriad of possible cases any solutions we find become universally applicable. Algebra abstracts over numbers; we no longer care which particular number a letter is standing in place for, as long as we use the particular algebraic manipulations that work independent of particular numbers. An algebraic transformation is valid for all possible numbers; solving an algebraic equation is a matter of letting the variable solve for be anything, and determining what the restrictions on it must be. But all of this is universal -- it allows us to reason about numbers in general, rather than individually, just as numbers allow us to reason about collections in general, rather than with regard to their specific contents. By building this two layer abstraction we can speak with unparalleled universality.
So, with that in mind, why is the quadratic formula important? It is the result of completing the square (an algebraic manipulation) to solve a general quadratic equation. In many ways it is a demonstration the fact that algebraic manipulations work in remarkable generality; it is a demonstration of the universality and power of algebra. It speaks to an inredibly broad class of situations. It is the first step into making sense of non-linear relationships. The details of the quadratic formula are probably less important than the principles that it demonstrates. If you want to skim through some real world examples to show how non-linear relationships can crop up that might be a worthwhile activity.
You want to make math and sciences easier, train your teachers to do a better job. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that an often overlooked point with regard to getting better teachers is that there is a desperate shortage of decently mathematically literate teachers in the early (elementary/primary/whatever you call it) levels of schooling. The problem is, with mathematics being as layered a subject as it is, each year building upon the work of the last, once a student is a little behind catching up can be well nigh impossible: they find themselves chasing a rainbow that is forever moving just out of reach. More importantly, once a student starts to struggle with mathematics, upper level physics and chemistry start to become far harder since they completely rely on basic mathematics and algebra, and ideally use some calculus. One bad teacher early on is often all it takes to set a student behind mathematically sufficiently badly that they never quite catch up. Yet more often than not teachers in the primary/elementary system are those who hated, and have little understanding of, mathematics. Both the distaste, and the lack of real understanding of mathematics (the forst for the trees, the understanding amidst all the basic facts) rub off on students in their formative years.
Interestingly some countries have noted this and done something about it. A good example is Finland which, in the the late 90s instituted a policy of encouraging teaching students to attend math classes, and join math groups. They saw a significant increase in people going into teaching who had taken some university level courses (often the only place where the deeper and broader understanding of the subject is taught these days), particularly in elementary/primary school teachers. The result is that Finland now finishes first in the world for math and science in most comparisons of student ability.
There's no way to work through it from first principles - there is no understanding and a vague promise it would come some day. This lack of understanding, and the reduction of subjects to memorisation of a long list of facts, is a deep problem that is permeating all the sciences. Personally I feel that it is worst in mathematics, where the confusion between doing mathematics and facts about mathematics extends well beyond school curricula and out into the mainstream perception of the subject.
Learning a lot of facts will help a student pass exams, and it can aid them in appearing to know something about a subject, but it leaves them hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with any problems outside the recipes they're textbooks gave them, and it does nothing to give them an appreciation of the subject. A common cry from students is "why do I have to learn this?" and "why does this matter?"; you'll never cure that, of course, but presenting a subject as a connected whole rather than a vast array of unconnected and apparently meaningless facts is the fast route to disillusioning students. No amount of "applications" and "making the subjet relevant to students", via lame and contrived attempts to connect the latest facts to "real world" experiences you think will interest students, will help; students will still just see a vast array of unconnected facts, most of which have apparently little to do with their lives.
Ultimately what matters about math and science is that they lay the foundations, through the philosophy and methods of the subjects, for the majority of human knowledge. Thus it is, at heart, the philosophy and methods that matter, not the facts; the facts are simply there to provide examples of the philosophy and methods in action, they are just the concrete application of the abstract core of the subjects. Ignoring the core material of a subject is no way to make progress.
GHCN + UHCN corrections is the data that GISS starts with, so it's as raw as they ever see. If you want more than that you'll have to go upstream of them -- they publish the data that they get and use.
Why filter your result set to only one *source* of data? (I mean, incoming data, not source of data to report on, as if I was contradicting my first statement.) How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting? You didn't actually look at the NCDC material on the NOAA website did you? It is a collection of a wide variety of climate related data, not simply NOAA data or work. Let's have a little tour. In the ice core section we have Vostok, and Dome C ice core data from Antarctica, GRIP data from Greenland, ice cores from Kilmanjaro, and a glacier in Kenya, and even Peru among many others. How about tree ring data? Why yes, we have tree ring data from innumerable studies from all over the world. Coral data? Got it! Pollen data? Got it! All from many different studies by a wide variety of different people, all providing their data for the archive. There's also cave data, borehole data, and lake data. And that's just the paleo-data. Lord forbid that you should actually have to spend a little while looking for things.
I don't want a category on del.icio.us that lists 50 to 100 links of where to get the data... I would like a "community" (ie: scientific types) built repository for it. Think of arxiv.org, for instance. You mean kind of like this or perhaps this. These things do exist. Your inability to actually go and look for them would seem to be the problem.
Hmm, the evidence is pretty strong that more CO2 leads to higher tempuratures. If C02 was a symptom, please explain what you think would release more C02 as the tempurature rises. The usual cause is ocean arming leading to outgassing of CO2 (warmer water can hold less CO2). Historically this has worked with Milankovitch cycles to provide a feeback to the small orbital variations with the released CO2 causing yet more warming, and providing the strong glacial/interglacial cycle we see over the lst million years or so. Of course the GPP is wrog in claiming that CO2 is a symptom of warmer temperatures. It is both a symptom and a cause, at least in theory. In practice, in this particular case we can do isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2 and determine the source of the current increase in CO2 (burned fossil fuels have different isotope ratios). The result is that the current dramatic rise in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic -- it's us doing it. In the past CO2 increased and provided a powerful amplifier for changes that were initially spurred by orbital variation. Now we have CO2 increasing for other reasons, but continuing to provide the same warming effects it has historically.
I think it is their duty to fully disclose the raw data and the methods used to arrive at the final result. The raw data, and the papers giving detailed descriptions of methods used to arrive at the final result. Have fun.
The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Well for startes the data is available. Full gridded data can be found here, along with appropriate fortran code to extract individual months of years. Gridded data for individual years can be found here. Original source data for individual stations can be accessed from here. Detailed accounts of the adjustments for urban heat island effects and compilation procedures used can be found in the papers listed in the references here. Most of those papers (i.e. those by GISS staff) are freely available in the GISS publications database. You did actually look to see if the data and detailed accounts of the methods were available, right?
I think the complaint, and it is a fair one, is that there was considerable human coaching and potentially even intervention during the tournament and potentially even during the games. That makes it not "computer beats human" but "computer assisted humans beat human" which doesn't have quite the same ring. This doesn't take away from the fact that deep blue was a rather remarkable machine, it just means the summary headline of the event is potentially somewhat misleading.
I thought part of the reason future games didn't have such moments was that Kasparov had adjusted his play. Well yes, he could no longer play the cmputer as if it were a computer, but instead had to play it as a completely unknown opponent with no prior game history. That's a steep challenge considering his opponent had been trained extensively on his complete game history.
But in my humble opinion, given a computer of such power able to look so deep into the decision trees, I'm not personally surprised that it found a move you wouldn't expect of any other computer. I think the part that threw him was that it was a move you wouldn't expect from this computer either, based on its previous play so far anyway. Even with deep decision trees computers have horizons of how far they can look ahead and very limited understanding (intuition really) of board position. This is generally how the great players beat even very good computers -- by using that horizon against them. Given the deep blue had shown all the signs of playing exactly like a computer with a limited horizon right up until that fateful move, it did seem a little incongruous.
Are you proposing that Kasparov doesn't "tweak" his game play? That he doesn't learn and adapt? No, but if I recall correctly Kasparov was not given the equivalent game history of big blue to learn how it plays. There was a crucial move one of the early games where Kasparov essentially set a trap -- a situation where computers always opt for one move, but a more subtle human player opts for a different strategy. Given the computers play so far, which had conformed exactly to how computers play, Kasparov was fairly confident. But then deep blue went the other way, against anything any other computer would have done, and completely against all expectation. That really threw Kasparov; he thought IBM was cheating since the move deep blue made was so uncharacteristic for a computer (and even for deep blue's play so far). Things quickly went downhill from there because Kasparov really had no idea what he was playing against anymore, while the computer had been trained extensively on his style of play.
As far as I know no explanation for the strange uncharacteristic move was given by IBM, and deep blue didn't make any other startlingly non computer like moves for the rest of the tournament. It's a rather interesting puzzle.
The White House's most important Central Asian ally, Pakistan, looks more and more to be sliding towards some sort of pro-Islamist regime. That, right there, is one of the big dangers for the future. Currently Musharraf, and army general who came to power as the result of coup, is holding the more extreme islamist factions in check. Then again, the more he is supported by the US, the greater the chance of him becoming viewed as puppet dictator and getting violently overthrown as the Shah was in Iran. That would not be a pleasant end result. As painful as it may be for some to admit, the better course is probably to weaken the grip, and accept that Pakistan may democratically become an islamist state (it is, fater all, a majority islamic country). The chances of a more moderate islamist power rising in the short term are, ultimately, probably better than the potential for a far more extreme and violent islamist nuclear power somewhere down the road.
Claims that anthropogenic CO2 are going to cause a life ending apocalypse are the fare of random prounouncements. If you actuall turn to climate scientists, and things like the IPCC reports, you'll see no such thing. What we could face, however, is a rather painful and difficult period of readjustment. It is certainly true that CO2 levels have been vastly higher in the distant past, but they have not been as high as they are now in the history of the human species. Ultimately we, and the current flora and fauna, are adapted to certain temperature ranges, and if left unchecked, we could end up moving outside those (and equally importantly, the transition may be relatively rapid on evolutionary timescales). That, at the very least is going to cause some disruption to ecosystems as they adapt. More importantly humanity has the issue of a vast population and a great deal of fixed infrastructure. Moving vast tracts of agricultural infrastructure to cope with shifting climate bands, for instance, is no small feat, and certainly not inexpensive; it also certainly can't happen overnight, and the transition period would be a hard one. Equally sea level changes, given the large populations and infrastructure that is vulnerable to even small rises, is of concern. Significant sea level rise is still a matter of centuries out, but preventing those effects would have to start now, and the mitigation cost -- literally moving entire cities and infrastructure -- is hardly any more palatable than the actions required to reduce emissions. So yes, a planetary disaster and the end of all life is not imminent, but then that doesn't mean there isn't cause for concern.
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In other words, there's just too much ground to cover. It isn't possible to be fully explicit, not without writing a book instead of an article. The reality is that science (and my field, mathematics) is extremely specialised these days, and this has resulted in a disconnect between those doing research work and the general public (personally I feel this disconnect it worst in mathematics). Now I do certainly feel that trying to heal that disconnect, at least a little, is important (it is another of the motivations for my project to explain advanced mathematics to a general audience), but that is a life's work in and of itself, not something you can do on the side while writing an article.
I wrote about this prospect back in 2004 -- it all seemed on the cards then, and I was surprised that no-one was really talking about it. Of course not too much happened -- the Fed raising interest rates steadily since around that time managed to keep things in check and everything puttered along happily. Eventually, though, the higher rates cut in, and the housing market went down, and so finally the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
What is remarkable, to me, is that this was all clearly an issue 3 years ago (more than that really), and not only was little or nothing done, little or nothing was ever really said about it as a problem. Since I wrote that pretty much all the numbers in that piece have gotten significantly worse as the US continued blithely on its economic course. This really should have been an election issue in 2004, and it definitely should have been an election issue in 2006. Why exactly do so few Americans seem to know or care about the very serious issues here?
It's not like we no longer know how to manufacture in this country... it's just that it's cheaper to import. Sure, but manufacturing industries don't spring up overnight, and there are a number of imports which the US relies upon which just aren't that negotiable -- oil being at the top of that list. So yes, American products will bounce back, but there may be a somewhat unpleasant adjustment period as the increasing cost of imported oil (from a weakening dollar) forces up the costs (via increased transport costs) of all the increasingly expensive manufactured imports, prior to US industry kicking into high enough gear to actually satisfy the demands of US consumers.
The advantage, in the end, is that it is Pascal, and if that's the language that someone wants then other languages like Ada and Eiffel, despite similarities just aren't Pascal.
Breaking into the desktop market is very hard indeed, and the barriers are ridiculously steep. We're just very lucky that a couple of special cases happened to squeak through -- and note that even having gotten past the barrier to entry and getting onto the field, application base remains an exceptionally powerful obstruction to actually managing to compete. Linux and MacOS may be on the field, but it is still far from level.
I'm not saying don't ever show how math can be applied, I'm trying to say that showing examples of applying mathematics actually fails to address the problem; it's a band-aid solution that only tackles the symptoms rather than the cause. What is a relevant application for one person is a completely pointless and irrelevant one for someone else. Trying to introduce "applications" to solve the problem is simply shortsighted. We need to teach people how to actually do math, see the forest for the trees, and understand how abstraction allows for application. I have a sneaking suspicion you might not be getting quite what I'm getting at here, so I encourage you to read some entries from my website on abstraction, fractions and algebra, and applying group theory to get some idea of what I really mean. It's not a matter of eliminating concrete example applications, but rather demoting them to a garnish so we can properly takle the meat of the problem.
So why is mathematics useful? Because it is layered abstraction; it is the art of forgetting all the details that don't matter, and in so doing making a problem both easier to solve, and the solution universal in its application. Numbers abstract over collections; we no longer have to care what exactly is in the collection (whether it is apples, oranges, fenceposts, or the number of millimetres in a given distance) and can simply use the same arithmetic operations regardless. In not having to worry about the specifics the problems becomes easier. In generalising over all the myriad of possible cases any solutions we find become universally applicable. Algebra abstracts over numbers; we no longer care which particular number a letter is standing in place for, as long as we use the particular algebraic manipulations that work independent of particular numbers. An algebraic transformation is valid for all possible numbers; solving an algebraic equation is a matter of letting the variable solve for be anything, and determining what the restrictions on it must be. But all of this is universal -- it allows us to reason about numbers in general, rather than individually, just as numbers allow us to reason about collections in general, rather than with regard to their specific contents. By building this two layer abstraction we can speak with unparalleled universality.
So, with that in mind, why is the quadratic formula important? It is the result of completing the square (an algebraic manipulation) to solve a general quadratic equation. In many ways it is a demonstration the fact that algebraic manipulations work in remarkable generality; it is a demonstration of the universality and power of algebra. It speaks to an inredibly broad class of situations. It is the first step into making sense of non-linear relationships. The details of the quadratic formula are probably less important than the principles that it demonstrates. If you want to skim through some real world examples to show how non-linear relationships can crop up that might be a worthwhile activity.
Interestingly some countries have noted this and done something about it. A good example is Finland which, in the the late 90s instituted a policy of encouraging teaching students to attend math classes, and join math groups. They saw a significant increase in people going into teaching who had taken some university level courses (often the only place where the deeper and broader understanding of the subject is taught these days), particularly in elementary/primary school teachers. The result is that Finland now finishes first in the world for math and science in most comparisons of student ability.
Learning a lot of facts will help a student pass exams, and it can aid them in appearing to know something about a subject, but it leaves them hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with any problems outside the recipes they're textbooks gave them, and it does nothing to give them an appreciation of the subject. A common cry from students is "why do I have to learn this?" and "why does this matter?"; you'll never cure that, of course, but presenting a subject as a connected whole rather than a vast array of unconnected and apparently meaningless facts is the fast route to disillusioning students. No amount of "applications" and "making the subjet relevant to students", via lame and contrived attempts to connect the latest facts to "real world" experiences you think will interest students, will help; students will still just see a vast array of unconnected facts, most of which have apparently little to do with their lives.
Ultimately what matters about math and science is that they lay the foundations, through the philosophy and methods of the subjects, for the majority of human knowledge. Thus it is, at heart, the philosophy and methods that matter, not the facts; the facts are simply there to provide examples of the philosophy and methods in action, they are just the concrete application of the abstract core of the subjects. Ignoring the core material of a subject is no way to make progress.
GHCN + UHCN corrections is the data that GISS starts with, so it's as raw as they ever see. If you want more than that you'll have to go upstream of them -- they publish the data that they get and use.
How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting? You didn't actually look at the NCDC material on the NOAA website did you? It is a collection of a wide variety of climate related data, not simply NOAA data or work. Let's have a little tour. In the ice core section we have Vostok, and Dome C ice core data from Antarctica, GRIP data from Greenland, ice cores from Kilmanjaro, and a glacier in Kenya, and even Peru among many others. How about tree ring data? Why yes, we have tree ring data from innumerable studies from all over the world. Coral data? Got it! Pollen data? Got it! All from many different studies by a wide variety of different people, all providing their data for the archive. There's also cave data, borehole data, and lake data. And that's just the paleo-data. Lord forbid that you should actually have to spend a little while looking for things.
I think the complaint, and it is a fair one, is that there was considerable human coaching and potentially even intervention during the tournament and potentially even during the games. That makes it not "computer beats human" but "computer assisted humans beat human" which doesn't have quite the same ring. This doesn't take away from the fact that deep blue was a rather remarkable machine, it just means the summary headline of the event is potentially somewhat misleading.
As far as I know no explanation for the strange uncharacteristic move was given by IBM, and deep blue didn't make any other startlingly non computer like moves for the rest of the tournament. It's a rather interesting puzzle.
Claims that anthropogenic CO2 are going to cause a life ending apocalypse are the fare of random prounouncements. If you actuall turn to climate scientists, and things like the IPCC reports, you'll see no such thing. What we could face, however, is a rather painful and difficult period of readjustment. It is certainly true that CO2 levels have been vastly higher in the distant past, but they have not been as high as they are now in the history of the human species. Ultimately we, and the current flora and fauna, are adapted to certain temperature ranges, and if left unchecked, we could end up moving outside those (and equally importantly, the transition may be relatively rapid on evolutionary timescales). That, at the very least is going to cause some disruption to ecosystems as they adapt. More importantly humanity has the issue of a vast population and a great deal of fixed infrastructure. Moving vast tracts of agricultural infrastructure to cope with shifting climate bands, for instance, is no small feat, and certainly not inexpensive; it also certainly can't happen overnight, and the transition period would be a hard one. Equally sea level changes, given the large populations and infrastructure that is vulnerable to even small rises, is of concern. Significant sea level rise is still a matter of centuries out, but preventing those effects would have to start now, and the mitigation cost -- literally moving entire cities and infrastructure -- is hardly any more palatable than the actions required to reduce emissions. So yes, a planetary disaster and the end of all life is not imminent, but then that doesn't mean there isn't cause for concern.