Dear Weather,
When I first left sunny California to be with you, I thought you were exciting and fun, even as you made me uncomfortable at times with your cool demeanor. And over the last few years I’ve come to love you more and more, even learning to be comfortable with the iciness you sometimes show.
Our [...]
Archive for October, 2008
Dear Weather
Posted in Frivolity on October 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Atheist meme
Posted in Atheism, Memes on October 21, 2008 | 18 Comments »
Alright, alright, I’ll do my duty to our self-replicating overlords!
I’ve been tagged by Splendid Elles, and now also by Metro State Atheists, to do this meme, and since I forgot to do the last one Elles tagged me for I’d better do an extra-special job on this one.
Can You Remember The Day That You Officially [...]
A good day
Posted in Math, Teaching on October 15, 2008 | 7 Comments »
In other other news, I had the pleasure today of working in the tutoring room with a calculus student who was just learning how to take derivatives. After a week or so of taking the derivative as a limit, he’s now learning the “easy way”, starting with the power rule: if f(x) = x^r, where [...]
Topology is like…
Posted in School, Topology on October 15, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Topology is like lion taming. You fend off the beast with your wits and all the tools at your disposal, you struggle and struggle and you start to beat it down. Finally you think you’ve tamed it, and you turn your back and it bites you in the butt.
In other news, I’ve just realized that [...]
Who uses algebra?
Posted in Math, Teaching on October 14, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Via Uncertain Principles, I came across this article:
I am told that algebra is everywhere – it’s in my iPod, beneath the spreadsheet that calculates my car payments, in every corner of my building. This idea freaks me out because I just can’t see it. I sent out a query on my blog last week asking, [...]
Argh!
Posted in Math, Media, Rants on October 11, 2008 | 16 Comments »
Ugh, forgive me. I need to rant again. Via Abstruse Goose (who is excellent, by the way), my attention was drawn to a BBC documentary called Dangerous Knowledge which
looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them [...]
