From: sanjoy
Subject: Re: merged abstracts
Date: November 29, 2004 4:38:44 AM MST
To: noah.finkelstein@colorado.edu

Thanks for telling me that. It's useful encouragement for my plan
next quarter: I'm taking sabbatical and going to New York from Dec 10
- April 25, there hopefully to finish my OOM textbook and give
Addison-Wesley a draft for them to bang on.

> the science - war article got some great discussions going
> (esp. about what you really mean ; )

That ambiguity reflects my own conflicted views about science. Should
we stop doing any research? I think so. Should we stop teaching
physics to graduate students? Probably. Should we stop teaching
physics to undergraduates? Not sure. Should we stop teaching physics
as a liberal arts subject? Probably not. Should we teach it in
schools? Depends how we teach it -- as a liberal art, maybe yes; as
an exam/filtering subject, maybe not. At least those are my current
thoughts on how to draw some lines, but it's a slippery slope and
there are so many arguments on every side.

> we spent well over a session going over order of magnitude physics...

Did you find the short papers on my website about OOM physics to
estimate gas mileage and the bending of starlight? They were written
for teachers, i.e. how can you teach this topic?