It’s that time of the week again, when I bore you with my bizzare taste in music. Quite an eclectic mix this week.

1. Spock’s Beard, “Thoughts”. A track from an oldish Spock’s Beard album. SB is an American neoprog band, which sounds something like a blend of old Genesis, Kansas, and Rush. Very good band. This isn’t my favorite of their albums (that would be “V”).
2. Gentle Giant, “Way of Life”. A classic song off of a classic album.
3. Whirligig, “Mister Fox”. An interesting little ballad by a wonderful NYC based Irish band.
4. Peter Gabriel, “San Jacinto”. Peter Gabriel at his absolute best. He’s never done anything to match the “Security” album, and this is one of my favorite tracks off of there. Starts off mellow and kind of mysterious sounding, and gradually builds, and then fades.
5. The Clogs, “Lady Go”. A track with vocals from one of those “post-rock ensembles” that I love so much. Very strange sounding; partly a capella falsetto; lots of dark rythmic stiff in other parts.
6. Broadside Electric, “Tam Lin”. The old traditional ballad performed by a really cool local electric folk band. (And one of the members of the band is actually a math professor at Suny Stonybrook! But she hadn’t joined yet on this album.)
7. Mel Brooks & broadway cast of “The Producers”, “Springtime for Hitler”. The original producers is one of my all-time favorite comedy movies. I still haven’t managed to get in to see the show. But the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant.
8. Psychograss, “Looks like a Duck”. Psychograss is a thoroughly amazing band: Tony Trischka, David Grier, Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, and Todd Phillips. They’re mostly bluegrass, but with various strange influences mixed in. This track has some of the most subtly amazing banjo playing you’ll ever hear, not to mention a knockout fiddle bit at the end.
9. John Corigliano (performed by Stanley Drucker), “Clarinet Concerto, movement ii: Antiphonal Toccata”. I’m actually a classically trained clarinetist. I used to think that I didn’t like Stan Drucker’s playing. Then I heard this. I’ve since learned that while his performances of some of the old classical standards for Clarinet (Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the Weber concertos, etc.) are rather uninspired, he is utterly magnificent when it comes to modern music. He clearly loves playing the newer stuff, and it shows. This is also the most technically challenging piece for Clarinet that I’ve ever heard.
10. Vasen, “Sluken”. Vasen is a Swedish folk band. The lead player plays a peculiar instrument called the Nyckelharpa – it’s a violin with a keyboard. They’re a great band, especially if you get to see them live.

This is the last time I’m going to bug folks to remind them to donate to the SB challenges.
The DonorsChoose fundraiser here at ScienceBlogs is just about over. Three more days for you to help some kids get a good education in math and science. The GoodMath/BadMath challenge is here; and Janet has a rundown on the challenges that are close to their goals. (If the challenge is met, DonorsChoose will add in an extra 5% bonus.)
As an extra incentive, for the next 10 people who donate to the GM/BM challenge, if you send me a copy of your DonorsChoose receipt, I’ll let you pick one topic for me to write a post about. The only restriction is that the topic be related to some kind of math – good or bad – and that it’s legit. (So don’t send me some good math and ask me to write a bad math post about it.)
Please, do go over to DC, and donate whatever you can afford, As I said at the very beginning of our drive, I’ve taught kids from the kinds of schools that we’re trying to help. There’s something deeply wrong with a school where you have kids who want to learn, but they don’t really get the chance, because they don’t have the things they need – like textbooks.

Just a reminder: the ScienceBloggers DonorsChoose challenge is not over yet. 10 GM/BM readers have already contributed over $1100. I can’t even begin to say how terrific I think that is. 9 of the proposals that I picked for the challenge have been fully funded!
Just to try to motivate other folks – here’s some of the things that I’d like to see get funded:

• Pre-Calculus Text Books for some awesome students!. This is the biggest proposal that I included in the GM/BM challenge, and I don’t believe that we’ll manage to fund it just from SB readers. But this is a school with a class of kids who want to learn pre-calc, but have no textbooks. The proposal is to get enough textbooks for the all of the three classrooms full of kids who want to take the course. There’s nothing more disgraceful than a classroom full of hard-working students who’s school can’t even get them books. I put a couple of hundred of my own dollars (which I’m not counting in the SB challenge) towards this; let’s see how much we can do to help these kids.
• Future Mathematicians in Need of Tools. This is a proposal to get math games and flashcards to help fourth graders learn basic math skills. The whole proposal is only $219, and 20% of that is already funded. There are a bunch more similar proposals for this kind of supply. Go look at the challenge and see if any of them catch your interest.

To contribute to these, just click on over to DonorsChoose.. And if you do contribute, don’t forget that SB is running a drawing to give away goodies to the people who’ve contributed. Just send a copy of the confirmation message that you get from DonorsChoose to “sb.donorschoose.bonanza@gmail.com”. You can see the stuff that we’re giving away over on Janet’s blog.
There’s also lots of other great science proposals that could use money. Janet’s got the rundown.

It’s that time of the week again, and a new “Ask an SBer” question is out. The question is: “What makes a good science teacher?”
As usual, since I’m the only math blogger around here, I’m going to shift the subject of the question a bit, to “What makes a good math teacher?”. The answer is similar, but not quite the same.
In my experience, what makes for a good math teacher is a few things:

1. The ability to teach. This should go without saying, but alas, it doesn’t. There are an appalling number of folks out there who are brilliant mathematicians and genuinely nice people who have all of the other skills I’m going to mention, but have absolutely no concept of just how to get in front of a group of people and teach in a reasonable coherent way.
2. Enthusiasm. Most people have an unfortunate sense that math is miserable drudgery. Teaching something mathematical, one of the most important things you can do is to just be genuinely enthusiastic – to make it clear that you love what you’re talking about, and that it’s something fun and exciting.
3. Balance. The power of math comes from the way that it breaks things that you’re studying into simpler abstractions. Abstraction is the key to the value of mathematics. But it’s very easy to get caught up in the abstraction, and forget why you’re doing it. Good math teaching is a subtle act of balance: you’re studying abstractions, but you need to keep the applications of those abstractions in sight in a way that lets your students understand why they should care.

   There are two teachers that come to mind when I’m talking about this, both in mathematical specialties of computer science.
   One is Eric Allender, a professor at Rutgers University, who taught my first course on the theory of computation. ToC is a field that can get incredibly difficult, and can often push abstractions so far away from reality that it’s hard to see what the point of it is. Eric had everything that I said above nailed down perfectly: he had the ability to stand in front of a classroom full of people and explain difficult concepts in a way that made them comprehensible; and he caught us up in his enthusiasm for the subject, so that we caught on to why these difficult abstract things were interesting; and he always kept things grounded in a way where it was clear to us why we should care about it.
   The other is Errol Lloyd, a professor at the University of Delaware, why I did my PhD, and a member of my dissertation committee. Errol is a professor who studies algorithms – not quite as abstractly mathematical as ToC, but a subject that many computer science students dread. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it coming into the class: my undergrad experience in the topic was awful. (The main thing I remember about it was the professor who seemed to only own one shirt, which he never washed. It was a running joke among the students, because every time we saw him, the shirt was dirtier. Same stupid blue turtleneck, which was almost more grey than blue by the end of the semester.) In contrast to the dreadful undergrad experience, Errol’s class was one of my favorite classes ever. Errol has the most astonishing teaching method I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t directly tell you anything: he gets up in front of the class, and starts asking questions. But the questions guide you through the process of discovering the subject that he’s teaching. And as he does it, he’s excited and happy and very, very kinetic, bouncing around the classroom, peppering different students with his questions. So as a student, you’re involved, and you’re caught up in his enthusiasm. (For those who understand what I’m saying: imagine a professor who can lead you through the process of inventing LR parsing from scratch, without ever telling you how to do it – just asking the right questions to force you to work through the problems that led to the invention of the LR parsing algorithms.)

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Off topic, but can’t resist commenting, for reasons that will become clear.
Over at Sadly No, Brad discusses a review of Glenn Reynold’s latest book, which includes some babble about “Transhumanism”.
The very first comment?

I was watching a show on the History Channel on Star Trek’s influence on scientific research- there’s a guy in Britain, as I recall, who is trying to connect everyone to the Internet, and engage in cyborging, etc.
This is, actually, rather more widespread an ideal than one would think, particularly among both neo-libs and communistic types; theoretically, a non-intrusive connection would “benefit everyone” and allow complete connection without the need of a government to work together… theoretically.
I think it’s a pile of horseshit, naturally- and will happily proclaim my reactionaryness about keeping my bits and pieces together as God intended them (flesh, unless they fail first).

Now, who do you suppose the British scientist he’s talking about might be?
I’ll give you a hint. Look at this.
Yes indeed, it’s that great visionary of modern Britain, John Lumic, CEO of Cybus Industries.
A fictional character.
A fictional character from a goofy, but terrific TV show, which has put together some really silly tie-in websites.
Lumic is the villain in a Dr. Who storyline that was recently broadcast in the UK. He’s the inventor of that old Dr. Who staple enemy, the Cybermen. The upgrades to connect people to the internet and give them cybernetic limbs are the first steps, in the storyline, to turn people into Cybermen.
From the “Thoughts from our CEO” of the Cybus Industries website:

People often ask me: “John Lumic, you’re the richest man on the planet, you control the media, the arms trade, computing, medical research, the Cybusnet™, the telecommunications industry and the space programme. Some even say you control governments. What is there left to do?” To which I reply: “The hardest job of all.”
Every one of us, great or small, rich or poor, important or unimportant, me or you, will wither and die whether we like it or not. Mortality is the universal enemy, and until mortality itself is beaten and subjugated, until I discover the cure for death, then my work on this world is incomplete.
I am developing, as we speak, a series of cybernetic Upgrades™ for the human body. A skin of flesh and a heart of metal that does not age and does not die. These will be offered to the Great British public for free, whether you like it or not. They are both beautiful and compulsory. To those who ask me if I regret not having children, I say: “These Upgrades™ are my children.”

Yeah, there are actually people who take that website seriously.
Personally, I just can’t wait to actually see the damned storyline that it ties into. It’s been a long time since we got to see a new cyberman episode of Dr. Who. The very first Dr. Who episode that I ever saw was a Cybermen story, and it hooked me but good.

Off topic, but as a proud New Yorker, I can’t resist. Over on Feministe, zuzu posted a link to an article about New Yorkers, and how when it comes to genuine helpfulness, NY is the best city in the world..
Basically, Readers Digest did a series of experiments, where they actually observed people in different cities in the world. NYers were rude, but far and away the most helpful city-dwellers.
I particularly love one thing zuzu included, because it perfectly captures the spirit of NY to me. A friend of her described New Yorkers like so:

f you fall down on the sidewalk, they’ll help you up. They’ll laugh at you, and tell you you’re a fool, but they’ll help you up.

That’s my city all right.

I don’t want to get too NPR-ish, but: Just a quick reminder about our SB charity thing. GM/BM readers have donated almost $1000 dollars to help get desparately needed supplies for math teachers. And our benevolent Seed overlords are matching up to the first $10,000 worth of contributions through ScienceBlog challenges.
Help some great kids get the chance to learn math and science.

As usual for this time of the week, the seed folks have tossed out a new “Ask a Science-Blogger” question for us to answer. This weeks is particularly easy. The question:

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?

The answer: Insanity.
(Full disclosure: I’m not a PI; that is, I’m not an academic researcher who needs to do grant proposals to get funding for my projects. However, I am a professional researcher for an industrial research lab, and while I don’t write grant proposals, I do write project proposals to get projects funded, and I have to show results to the people who give me money for my projects. In the end, it’s not all that different.)