And yet where I grew up in Florida, it was a tourist/family activity to go and pick your own strawberries. Of course you only pick a couple cartons worth at most at your own pace, but I always felt it must be amusing to have a strawberry field where the pickers pay you instead.

I've seen some that use single, possibly OCR'ed word for the captcha. It couldn't have been the system that uses one known word, and one unknown word, as there was only a single word. But sometimes it seemed to grab things that were not words, like a cut offed equation one time (it didn't like the LaTeX version of the equation...) or non-Roman character based text. I suppose the trick to avoiding such problems might be to build a functional system that can handle such non-word captchas like these guy's captcha.

That seems like a decent article on the topic. Although, last time some of the research on the topic came up in the news, I saw some confusion (possibly due to some of the headlines used), that some people were asking me if the it was possible the proton had physically shrunk or is smaller than it was a couple years ago. The old methods for measuring the charge radius of a proton still give the same value, so it is down to a discrepancy between two methods.

Even more interesting is that the new method actually produces two different radii related to the proton from the same set of measurements: the average radius of the charge, and an average radius of magnetic effects. The latter is in agreement with older methods, while the former is the one with the 4% difference. So the same set of results both agree and disagree with results from different methods.

I've seen a lot said about delayed clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord in medical research, but by which they mean by only a couple minutes. There is a minor thing or two that it seems to increase the risk for, but are incredibly minor in the big scheme of things. But typically the fluid transfer through the umbilical cord is done within a couple minutes, so I'm not sure what the benefit would be of going any longer than that. And the process of clamping and cutting the cord is quite quick if you aren't trying to make a circus out of it, so it isn't some massive barrier in mother-baby interaction. Additionally, a lot of place still seem to leave a fair bit of cord on and allow it to dry off, so cutting after a couple minutes will not offer any more infection chance than not cutting or damage, as in either case where the cord attaches is still allowed to dry out on its own.

The scientific model as spelled out in grade school text books shouldn't be taken to literal or specific, and should be considered a pedagogical analogy. It still covers a lot of stuff as is. And you can easily shoehorn every thing else to fit the textbook method depending on how you interpret each step, or vis-a-versa like here, and force the method to be more vague description of what is actually done. But either way is kind of missing the point. It is about the back and forth between model and reality, that the model must be a description of reality and that reality is the final discriminator. And his revision does seem to not illustrate that by using unidirectional arrows, and not separating testing from model building.

He does have a point though, as memorizing the steps probably doesn't really do much good. Maybe it works well for students that don't have an intuition about such things or limited exposure, that it is one of those things you need to learn the rules before you can understand when to break them. But that could probably be all wrapped up together, instead of just making you memorize the steps in grade school... and then letting you figure out the practical world is different if you ever end up in an undergraduate science program. I do think I would have a few words with teachers that spent too much time on the formality of my science fair projects in grade school instead of substance, although formality is a lot easier to teach ( and I would have plenty to say to those teaching too much formality of how to cite works...).

There are times that some of that formality shines through. Astronomers and particle physicists that have their data before they do tests or look for patterns know better than to just fish for patterns or results until they find something, as they will likely do the statistics incorrectly and by luck find something that is not actually significant. So they split the data up, play around with only part of it until they think they found something, then use the rest of the data for a more formal test. That method is rather important and distinct from just messing around, and fits the more formal idea of needing a question first, and research into how to test it, etc.

At some point though, talking in extensive detail about the method itself starts to diverge from introductory science, and go down the route of philosophy of science. Not to say that makes it useless, quite the opposite, but there are volumes written on that topic and a lot of well laid out thoughts that get more into the meat of things without dwelling on what may be merely superficial.

The issue with such number pattern based riddles and questions, is there are an infinite number of possible patterns that would make it work, and it comes down to figuring out which one they probably intended (which is a little bit obvious here after one has seen enough number riddles using the letters that spell out a number). But if the password were instead: given an x by the bouncer evaluate the function f(x)=[(4-K)x^2+(18K-68)x+288-72K]/8, you would get the same first two answers, and then the third answer would be K. So you could make up whatever password you want to match whatever third number you want to be the answer.

The funny thing I find about people making too big of a deal about the reduction of who & whom to a single word, is that it has happened in English before ... with those exact same words. Once upon a time, I came across an article that summed this up quite succinctly, but I wasn't able to find that article again. But as I understand it, whom replaced 4 or 5 words from Old English, condensing them into a single word. Whom replaced the accusative case hwone, the instrumental hwȳ & hwon (masculine and feminine), the dative case hwǣm, and possibly counting the genitive case hwæs (which also can become "whose"). I am by no means knowledgeable of Old English, and struggle enough with Modern English, so take that with a grain of sealt. But if someone complains why current generations are too lazy to learn the difference between the two words, maybe you could ask them why their generation was too lazy to learn the difference between 5 words.

Not to be confused with a Phasor or FASOR. I would always be hesitant to name something after a scifi device, because you never know if 10+ years later something cooler will come out that needs that name.

And I it seems like we've given up on the L in laser meaning light. First we had masers, then lasers, then it seemed like someone decided we should go with *adjective* laser instead of *aser. Maybe because I've seen stuff like xaser in writing but don't think I've ever seen anyone try to say it, and other combinations would be even harder to say. But the people who made the spaser didn't get the memo.