According to the U.S. state department the coastlines of Washington, Oregon and California together measure 2,131 km. This would seem to settle things. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.) says that number should be 3,288 km. Has at least one of these agencies measured ... poorly?
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Public Domain 2020
Gutsy piano students everywhere can now legally photocopy Chopin’s Préludes as they sweat over its tangled passages.
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Drawing or Color, Part III: The Neoclassicists vs. The Romantics
Ingres considered bright colors “anti-historic” and warned his students against them. “Better to fall into gray,” he said, “than into bright colors.” Color, as Delacroix saw it, was essential to painting. “Remember,” he urged in his journal, “the enemy of all painting is gray.”
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Drawing or Color, Part II: The Florentines versus the Venetians
They called Michelangelo "the divine one." Titian was "the prince of painters." But these two contemporaries were on the opposite side of one of art's great debates.
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QFT: The World is Stranger Than You Thought
Beginning with studies of electromagnetism, scientists have come to understand reality in such a way that there really is no such thing as tiny bits of matter that exist independently and that cannot be divided. Atomism (in any traditional sense) is dead. Reality is not what we thought it was.
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On the Importance of Forgetting
Most attention in our culture is given to the importance of remembering. But it turns out that forgetting can be just as important. The inability to forget can be as destructive as the inability to remember.
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The History of the Multiple-Choice Question
The same forces that gave us the Model-T also gave us “Which of the following best completes the sentence?” And the multiple-choice question became an essential tool for the new educational theories of the industrial age.
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Origami, Neusis and Angle Trisection
The history of mathematics tells us that oftentimes approved technique is as much a matter of philosophical commitments and aesthetic sensibilities as it is a matter of pure utility.
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Drawing or Color, Part I: The Poussinistes versus the Rubénistes
Every age has had arguments about art and beauty that are deeply entangled in questions of philosophy, society and even morality. One of the most heated took place in France at in the late 17th century.
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Karl Marx’s Letter to Abraham Lincoln
Wait ... what??? One of the challenges of teaching world history is that events unfold in both time and space. Focus on what was happening all around the world at a given time, and you lose the ability to tell a clear story. But focus on a story as it unfolded in a particular place (say America, France, China or Russia), and you risk putting history into silos.
