Honorable Mentions: August 2013

After writing this blog for about three months now, I have gotten into somewhat of a groove balancing family and work with trying to write blog posts and making the site both more visually appealing and easier to find via web searches.  Nonetheless, I am left with interesting topics that I wanted to write about, but either never got the time, or couldn't come up with something original enough to justify spending the time to write about it.   They are still interesting topics and/or articles, so I strongly suggest you read them.  I decided to do this a bit late this month, so this month's post is going to be short, but hopefully subsequent months will be a bit more full of topics.

Should Math Really be a Required Subject?

I found this article very interesting, because it is an apposing viewpoint to my own, that math should be taught to children more, not less.  The author supplies some compelling arguments for making math an elective, primarily that many kids don't learn anything in math class due to its regimented nature, and most professions don't require anything beyond basic arithmetic.  I absolutely agree with the former, and think schools need to change how they teach math, rather than whether they teach math.  As for the latter comment, this is a bit misguided, because while you may not have to do anything other than arithmetic at work formally, people are doing algebra all the time, they just don't know it.  Algebra is, at its core, arithmetic where what you are solving for is not at the end of the equation.

Western Union's Failed Plan To Drive the Digital Revolution Is A Cautionary Tale For Electric Utilities

I thought, as I think did most people, that the internet was developed by the Department of Defense in the 1970s and later spilled into the private sector.  Well this is still true, but it is interesting that Western Union, a company once known for its massive telecommunications empire including the first telecom to own a fleet of geosynchronous communications satellites, tried to invent the internet back in the 1960s, albeit unsuccessfully.  In 1965 Western Union developed a strategic plan to develop a national information network, and modeled it after the power grid.  While Western Union did have some successes, and even supplied some of the equipment the DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)used to develop the internet in the 70s and 80s, their vision of being the first national supplier of the internet did not materialize.  Now they are just known for that company you can use to send money and pay bills.

Fukushima radiation leak the same as 76 million bananas

With Fukushima in the news again recently because radioactive water has been leaking from storage tanks, I found this article very interesting.  It compares the total amount of radioactivity released from the Fukushima disaster since 2010 to the amount of radioactivity people actively ingest every day from eating bananas due to the naturally occurring radioactive potassium isotopes.  The author's numbers, which I have not independently verified, equate 76 million bananas consumed worldwide, per hour, to the amount of radiation released into the environment from Fukushima per hour.  It does seem like a lot, but 76 million bananas is only around half of the estimated number of bananas people consume per hour, based on worldwide production.  While the banana to Fukushima comparison isn't a perfect one to one comparision as there are many variables when you talk about radiation, radioactive particles, and biological processes, it does provide context to what is otherwise a very disorienting number, 40 trillion becquerels.