The State of Mathematics Education in the USA

I have the National Geographic channel on for the nifty astronomy and am thinking deep thoughts about humans' ability to consider powers of ten.

You see, the show is one of those terror-producing explorations of the impending doom of the Earth when the sun goes into its red-giant phase. It'll happen, and "sooner than we thought!" There is much emphasis on how one solution, pulling the Earth into a wider orbit, would take six thousand years to take effect and had to be accurate to within a billionth of a degree of arc. We could colonize Mars. We could travel to other suns.

Of course, when they do admit to a timeline, the events in question will occur in five billion years. That's billion, with a B. To astronomers, this is perhaps imminent. To geologists, that's the age of the Earth's crust. To biologists, this is 2 1/2 times as long as there's been identifiable life on earth of any kind whatsoever. The dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago -- approximately 1/100 the scale of time we're talking about here.

I may not be able to say a lot about what life, if any, will be on the Earth when the sun expands, but I can say one thing for sure: the pronoun "us" is probably not going to have a lot to do with it. DNA just isn't that stable a molecule.

Likewise, I have to grin a little at the Congressional attempts to balance the budget of the USA. Trillion-dollar deficit, addressed with a proposed $61 billion in budget cuts. Most of these are on the order of scrapping the money for the Museum of Cowboy Poetry, a few thousands, which is almost certainly all wages for the employees. This is akin to breaking your kids' piggy banks to pay off your mortgage, and will be about as appreciated by the owners of the piggy banks. Seriously -- that's $61 billion in money that's employing people. By my math, at $50K per person, that's another 1.2 million unemployed people. Isn't that just exactly what our economy needs right now? Lately, we're happy if the economy gains that many new jobs in six months. There's gotta be another way.