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Thursday, April 23, 2015

Mini-review: Aferim!

My friend and occasional co-blogger Dan and I went to see this at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight: Aferim!


I can't say I recommend it. It's a story of man's inhumanity to man, presented brutally (especially at the end) but without sufficiently well-drawn characters to create much feeling of connection to them, and paced in a slow manner that sinks into the tedious. I do feel I know something now about Romania in the 1830s, and certainly the film shows some skill and originality. But its main effect, I found, is depressive. The title means "Bravo!" by the way, though this has only tenuous connection to the story.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Silber family history

Recommended reading: "Russian Jews should heed lessons of history," a Jerusalem Post op-ed by my friend Alexei Bayer. Some family history of my own is included in the opening paragraph.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Stop teaching math?

A dreadful article at Bloomberg View: "Want Kids to Learn Math? Stop Teaching It." Via Twitter, I called it to the attention of Edward Frenkel and Keith Devlin, whose reactions were as negative as mine. (The thread is here.) However bad things are in math education currently, one shouldn't underestimate how much worse they could become, and conveying to kids that math beyond some basic arithmetic is something that only a small segment of the population ought to concern itself with is surely a fast track to a dystopia populated primarily by mentally enfeebled Morlocks.

I speak as someone who, even though not exactly lacking intellectual self-confidence growing up, decided too early and too easily that developing mathematical abilities was not where my talents lay. My efforts to rectify that, which I wrote about recently, are ongoing and, oddly enough, fun.