Why boredom is anything but boring

Why Mathematics is Boring

Storytellers have many strategies for luring in their audience and keeping them interested. These include standardized narrative structures, vivid characters, breaking down long stories into episodes, and subtle methods of reminding the readers of facts they may have forgotten. The typical style of writing mathematics systematically avoids these strategies, since the explicit goal is “proving a...

Transmembrane signaling is anything but rigid.

"School is So Boring": High-Stakes Testing and Boredom at an Urban Middle School

Existing evidence suggests that high stakes exams result in little increased learning among students (Amrein & Berliner, 2002; Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stetcher, 2000; Koretz, Mitchell, & Stetcher, 1996). Yet, given the federal mandates for greater accountability, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and Race to the Top policies, and the “pervasive testing culture” (Moses & Nann...

Stux in a Rut: Why Stuxnet Is Boring

This data gives an opportunity to confi rm to some extent the degree to which these strategies are used. More importantly, perhaps, while articles on the best and worst strategies for choosing passcodes are not in short supply, the data gives us a better starting point for evaluating the entropic effi cacy of these strategies as the basis for better recommendations to end-users. And that’s a to...

Stop Asking Why There’s Anything

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it s...