Viva la Revolution!

The sun came out today, after five straight days of rain. And the government was overthrown yesterday. For these reasons, we shall but laugh and gawk today.

Laugh: Take Grandma skydiving.



Gawk: No, you can't have a notecard for the exam, but...
I have actually told my students to do this (must be permanent, no wash-off-able henna, etc.) and not one has taken me up on it yet. When have they ever heard that they can't bring a tattoo to an exam? More found here


Laugh: the politically incorrect alphabet primer




Gawk: What to do with all those pennies you're saving:

Knowing the punchline is half the fun

OK, so there I am the other day, tooling along in class, talking about one of the coolest numbers on the planet when I seemed to forget I was not in the classroom alone. I had warned the students previous to this event that this might happen occasionally. Once in a while, my inner geek rises to the surface and—BLAMMO!—unwary onlookers are left in the dust.

The number responsible for this is e. It is just as cool as π but gets almost no press. You never hear of people memorizing e. As far as pop culture goes, e is getting short shrifted. Just what is a shrift anyway? And does size matter?

One more common way of describing where the value e occurs is in the following expression:

Ready for what seems like a mathematical paradox? The value for n can increase without bound. Pass Go, get your $200 and don't even slow down. Yet the overall value of the expression has a limit. It will never get bigger than e ≈ 2.71828 18284 59045 23536 ... Isn't that cool?

Can you tell my geek personality has taken control of my body right now? A similar thing happened in class. I was sharing the next occurrence of e with the students: pick a random number between 0 and 1. Go ahead, you've got an infinite amount to choose from. Now pick another number and add it to the first one. Keep picking and adding until the sum is 1 or greater. When it is stop and count how many numbers you had to pick. Then repeat the process; keep summing random values between 0 and 1 until the sum is greater than 1. When you've repeated the process a goodly number of times, find the average number of numbers you had to pick to exceed 1. That average will be—you guessed it—e.

It was right at this moment, this exciting climax when a student calmly asked: if we know the value of e why do we have to keep determining it?

(sigh) I felt I was in the room alone. Oh, well. I had a good time and hopefully my enthusiasm will prove contagious someday. Today was just not the day.

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Ode to e (and other math jokes/rhymes)
If (1+x) (real close to 1)
Is raised to the power of 1
Over x, you will find
Here's the value defined:
2.718281...

It takes a peasant to multiply.

Just can't let go of Halloween yet

Just wanted to share these pics because I'm so excited about being able to upload pictures to my blog again! Here are the results from our Squash Scarring party. The T is responsible for the top one, it's our hero Strong Bad (note the creepy eyes looking through the door in the background). I'm responsible for ... well, I'll let you figure out which ones I'm responsible for.

Entertainment over Thinking

With all due respect to Larry Bird, today's blog is brought to you by the game of H-O-R-S-E. Through the window, off the scoreboard, off the floor, nothing but links.

H for ha-ha: Post No Bills
O for oh-my: I'm going for a look that says "more death" and "non-regular hexagon"
R for g-R-R-R-R
S for: Somebody want to help me turn this page?
E for Everybody come get your tea!

Halloween Decompression

The refuse from our Halloween jack-o-lantern festival is now slowly recycling in the compost bin and the ghoulie-themed Tweety and Sylvester vest is once again tucked safely in the back of the closet. What's left from another holiday crossed off the calendar? A bowl full of homemade roasted sunflower seeds and 135 individually-wrapped Fruit Leathers.
I think it is safe to assume you didn't see that word combination coming, eh?

No, Fruit Leathers are not chaps for melons. Rather, they are direct relations of fruit roll-ups, sans the sugar, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial additives. And they are the only thing I could find that was suitable for the little whipper-snappers begging for treats. In my efforts to be a friendly neighbor in this here 'hood, I wanted to have something that would simultaneously be a hand out deemed worthy and prevent an egging or decorating of the house with TP while also being reasonably healthy or at the least not a mainline of sugar. Thanks to the creep that stuck a razor in an apple way back when, you can't hand out fruit or anything without a wrapper.

So think about this dilemma. What else is wrapped and snack-like without sugar? Should I have gone for meat jerky? That's an interesting idea. While we're wandering down Carnivore Lane, why not consider Slim Jims? You really have to appreciate a food item on which the first ingredient listed is "mechanically separated chicken." If we move to chips and/or pretzels, we merely make the carbs more complex. And therein lies the rub.

I refuse to contribute to the poor dietary habits of obese children. Yet I loved trick-or-treating as a kid and I didn't want to not participate. But eating the loot I'd collected was truly a treat for me. Candy was not a food group when I was growing up. More than once, my pleas for sustenance lest I pass out from starvation an hour before dinner was "go find something in the garden." The big treats for snacks were popcorn and pizza, both of which were labor intensive since they were made by hand—my hands. I'm not saying I had to shuck the corn but I did have to do the labor and clean up the mess to enjoy the snack. And the labor was more than rip off the plastic wrap and throw the bag in the nuker for two minutes on high.

So there I was in the big-box store looking for something reasonably priced with no sugar that I could hand out and feel no guilt when I watched the 3-foot tall superhero/heroine/sponge-bob/goblin waddle away down my walk. And I could find only one thing. I bought three boxes (48 per box) and handed out less than two-dozen of the brightly wrapped flat fruit. I was so ready if last year repeated itself and cars of non-city kids starting cruising the neighborhood. Alas, the temperature dropped and the scores of beggars I was anticipating stayed indoors. I now find myself gnawing my way through the fruit chews I have not yet been able to give away. Anyone interested in a Mango Madness?


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Play with Pi — each digit is a different color and the end result is a field of brightly colored pixels

Tampon Crafts — anything that involves a tampon, a hot glue gun and googly eyes is worth a click

5-Sided Regular Polygon

Sharing time. If you're a frequent visitor to this blog—and we can define 'frequent' as more than one visit—then you may have noticed how busy this page has gotten. I don't mean busy as in traffic. I mean busy as in bells-and-whistles. In the past few weeks, the page has gained:
• a countdown timer to ... uh ... count. To count down, specifically.
• a terror level alert scale, 'cuz who can pass up Bert & Ernie
• a Clustrmap to see where visitors are from (and let me tell you how humbling that little addition has been; can you guys tell a friend to surf over here once in a while so enough data compiles to earn a dot on the map?), and
• spelling with Flickr (scroll all the way down)

One item that has been a constant since day 1, maybe day 2 at the latest, is the StatCounter. This little gadget counts page loads as well as the IP address of the people viewing the page. If you have your own blog, probably none of this info is new to you. If you don't have a blog, are you surprised in the least that the blogosphere has spawned vast and numerous thriving cottage industries, such as services that do nothing but count?

Mere moments ago, I was mining the data regarding this blog's traffic and saw the following:

IP Address: 134.205.62.17
Host: dhcp062017.hq.af.mil
ISP: The Pentagon
Entry Page Time: 23rd October 2006 11:47:33
Visit Length: 0 seconds
Browser: Firefox 1.5.0
OS: Windows XP
Resolution: 1024x768
Location: Virginia, Arlington, United States
Returning Visits: 0

I've taken the liberty of highlighting the interesting part of the above data pile.

Are we to infer that the world is safe for at least a little while since someone in HQ has time to surf?!?
Should I feel snubbed that said visit was not of substantial length, or any length for that matter?
Is it a matter of concern that the military uses machines that are responsible for the second most popular download of all time, Windows Service Pack 2? (btw: first place is held by iTunes)

I'm going to go peek at the data a bit more and see if there's a hit from whitehouse.gov.

Tell me again why we're here

We just hit the midterm yesterday. And I mean we ran right into it like we didn't see it coming. We were just toolin' along, singing in our atonal kind of way with the tune in our head when—BAM!—we smacked full-on into week six. Or is it week five? See? We hit midterm so hard I've lost my ability to count.

I have a classroom gem I would like to share with you. For matters of clarity, please recall that I teach mathematics. Everyone on board? Let's go...

Me: What questions are there on the homework assignment (inside my head voice: that you have had for a week and probably haven't looked at yet) that is due tomorrow?

One of Them (OoT): I'm not sure how to start number three.

FYI: #3. Find all the points on the graph of y=x^2 that are a distance of 1 unit away from the point (1,2).

Me: Hmmm...(thinking about how to nudge OoT along without sharing the answer outright) ...

Another One of Them (AOoT): There's only one.

Me: There is at least one. There are definitely more.

AOoT: Well, sure. If you want to get into the numbers.

Yes, why would we want to do that in this—of all places—a math class?

FrenchieF, this one's for you

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(I wish I could hang this on your office door myself.)

Care to rephrase that?

I was able to hear Dr. Georgia Dunston, Director of the Molecular Genetics core research unit at the National Human Genome Center, speak the other day. She is passionate, brilliant, and driven. As I listened to her talk, I thought how little I would want to be someone who had to say to her, "Sorry, but I'm not done with that task yet."

Her work deals with using information gleaned from the human genome to address health issues. As she tells it, she is still looking for answers to the question she had as a little girl: What makes us different? A fair question, to be sure. What I found interesting, however, was a particular way she had of asking this question during her presentation. Couched in the framework of describing how she started on her career path and life's work, she asked instead "Who do you say I am?"

This stuck with me. Clearly this woman has worked hard to get to where she is today. She has earned degrees and titles and respect and recognition. Her work revolves around the innermost make-up of humans, the DNA and chromosomes and genes (98%+ of which is no different than that of an earthworm). Yet, even with her focus at that level of one's individuality, she phrased her question in terms of how others see her. She didn't simply ask Who am I? Nor did she ask What does this say about who I am? She asked Who do you say I am?

That is more power than I want.

And yet at other times I take the power on and use it so easily I do not recognize that I am wielding it. A different conversation happened the same day, about an hour after the presentation. Our school year has just started. We're not even 10 days into the quarter when I run into the women's assistant basketball coach and academic counselor. I have three of these young women in class. We talked for about 5-10 minutes about these players as students and how they are doing in class. I have to admit that I had little positive to say regarding their classroom performance thus far. While not incapable, I didn't think they were working very hard. I saw no evidence of interest or concern about their assignments. During class, if there is a hum or a murmur of a decidedly non-mathematic bent, it is probably coming from their corner of the room.

And it was oh-so-easy for me to categorize them as immature, and lazy or disengaged instead of simply young and possibly overwhelmed (there was also a dash a miscommunication thrown in). I lumped them in with other students who I believe/-ed were in school because they did not know what else to do and were stuck in a class they could not care less about. I have honest empathy and concern for students show an iota of responsibility for their grades. I have zilch for those who show zilch. I perceived these women to be showing zilch.

On the tail of Dr. Dunston asking Who do you say I am?, I didn't realize my students may have been asking me the same question. And where I shuddered and backed away from answering the former due to her titles and aura/presence, I raced ahead and categorized the latter without a second thought.

The quarter is still so young and I've already learned something. Go figure.


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Audio book ad - click on the picture for more detail.
Where would this ad go in a women's room?
Speaking of ad placement, someone wasn't thinking—or were they?

One small word, one huge document

Today's blog is brought to you by the letter 'A'. More specifically, I mean the word 'a' that was not lost in the transmission of the first words from the surface of the moon, spoken by Neil Armstrong. Turns out he didn't flub it and the apparent redundancy in his oft-repeated quote can be chalked up to transmission static. Hmm, I'll be blaming my next mis-step on transmission static. Is this the 1960's version of "the spam filter must've deleted your email message?"

In this same vein, I want to point you to a very cool offer regarding some other words being forgotten, ignored, mangled, warped, bent, and just all-around trod upon. As a collective, these words are known as the Constitution and the Amendments and they're good reading. I have a way cool pocket-size copy of these words, as well as the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation and it was (practically) free. For less than a latte, you two can own an ultra-portable copy.

I found my cool book while looking for a small copy of the Bill of Rights (like I couldn't just print myself one, right?) Some enterprising folks out there are selling metal, wallet size Bill of Right plaques. I love the fact that they're metal and sure to set the teeth of any TSA personnel on edge. Since I have been targeted for [ahem] random searching four out of the last five times I've flown, I think this is a great idea. I have been one of the lucky winners of the "back of my hand" special touching. Years of Sesame Street education telling me what to do if ever touched inappropriately have been cast asunder. Listen lady, you touch me with the back of your hand one more time, you're damn right I'm going to request a private room. And there is no way that the TSA's puff machine would ever be put into service if it inadvertently dropped men's pants rather than raised women's skirts as it does its thing in the hunt for explosives. Dumb machine, dumber people.

Somehow, I have digressed. Back to my cool little book. I was flipping through the book and the quotes and anecdotes about long dead men when a blurb on the back catches my eye. I must've been tired because this is what I read:

Which Supreme Court Justice said of obesity, "I know it when I see it"?

I didn't know the who but I knew I couldn't argue with him. Truly a timeless, living document.