for the parents: Bedtime math instead of bedtime stories [Interview]

Laura Overdeck is the founder of “Bedtime Math,” thinks that tucking kids in with equations every night helps kids keep up their math skills over summer vacation. Listen to (or read the transcript of) her interview with Ira Flatow of NPR.

What’s really great is when parents just weave math into the daily routine, into playtime. And I think that a lot of adults have math anxiety and shy away from doing that. Then kids go off to school, and their first introduction to math is school, which is homework and drilling. If kids can discover math before they have any preconceived notions, they’re just going to be on much better footing.

The cost of the tummy tuck, photographed [Article]

Found this website devoted to photography that documented the impact that cosmetic surgery is having in South Korea.

South Korean photographer Ji Yeo created a series called Beauty Recovery Room that graphically shows the fixation with cosmetic procedures. Post-operative surgery women are shown in their respective recovery rooms, black and blue, some of them obviously in some kind of pain, all more than willing to endure the agonizing process to achieve an unnatural look.

NSFW, discretion advised.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Ego and the Cosmic Perspective [Video]

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson echoes Ptolemy:

 ..if you were depressed after learning and being exposed to the (cosmic) perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego. You thought more highly of yourself than in fact the circumstances deserved.

Recycling: Can it be wrong, when it feels so right [Discussions]

Prof Michael Munger kicks off the debate with this statement:

Almost everything that’s said about recycling is wrong. At the very least, none of the conventional wisdom is completely true.  

Edward Humes, Melissa Walsh Innes, Steven E Landsburg contribute their thoughts to this discussion too.

Ignored in all this, I think, is the incredibly increase in the desire to consume, for most of the world.

The futility of comparing yourself to others [Article]

Leo Babauta illustrates why we aren’t content with our lives, & why it is a wasted exercise trying to compare yourself to others:

It’s not a comparison that makes sense. You can’t compare apples to apples when you compare yourself to anyone else. Which means it’s a dumb comparison — why would you compare how tangy an orange is compared to a beach? They’re not similar things.