Category Archives: education

Chris Dawson, the education blogger over at ZDNet, has a post up today about not dumbing things down. It seems he was asked to read a book, The Bee Tree, and prepare a presentation on it for his son’s third-grade class. So he dug into his graduate-school calculus: Bees, as it turns out, create a completely optimal space for their honey, raising their young, and storing food. The hexagonal shape of honeycomb cells actually maximizes interior volume while minimizing surface area. Since bees must eat about 8 times the volume of honey for a given volume of wax that they need to create their hives, wax is a precious commodity, so optimization is key. Obviously I wouldn’t expect the third-graders to be able to handle calculus-based optimization problems (in fact, the so-called Read more