From the introduction to Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF; it’s also published as a book which is how I discovered it): A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an [...]
This week I updated Panlexicon’s Word of the Day for Twitter’s new authentication API requirements, squeaking in just under the August 30 deadline. Panlexicon has been updated tweeting a unique word every day for nearly a year and a half now. Also contemporary is P ≠ NP and generating Panlexicon’s daily tweet is an example of [...]
From the Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives: Going against the law of small numbers requires character. For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person’s actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought. good judgment, and, well, guts. You can’t just [...]
I’ve already posted the cake recipe from PopCo—a great novel by Alice Butler—so here another part of the back matter: a table of the frequency of occurrence of letters in English from Fletcher Pratt’s Secret and Urgent: the story of codes and ciphers, Blue Ribbon Books, 1939. To be fair, the table above is actually [...]
I was really proud of myself last week when I made what I felt was a valid and illuminating numerical comparison: I wrote that the amount of Broadband Stimulus money requested for projects within the state of Alaska—projects serving rural and underserved communities—was on a per-capita basis about equal to the federal poverty level for [...]
The IRS is using the last two digits of your Social Security Number to determine when you’ll receive your Economic Stimulus (e.g. free money i.e. your children’s money). Paper checks will also go out based on Social Security number. For Social Security numbers ending in 00 through 09, the paper checks will be mailed starting [...]
I’m taking Mathematical Models in Biology and we had an interesting problem in our last class. We were broken up into groups and asked to create a model around malaria infection. We received some information on mosquito behavior and lifecycles, infection rates and patterns, and effects. That was it. The primary tenet of mathematical modeling is [...]
