Omorka's Lair

So james gave me: Tropical fruit, Squares, Hurdy gurdy. *rubs hands*

1) Tropical Fruit: One of the interesting things about Houstopolis is that, being semitropical and near a large warm blob of ocean, quite a few tropical plants will grow here with some minimal winter protection during the one week a year it actually freezes (especially in the central city's heat dome). Banana plants are actually kind of invasive. I keep getting tempted by the actual tropical fruit trees at the annual Urban Harvest and then contemplating when those freeze-danger weeks are and how busy I usually am with both school and Owlcon prep then. (Citrus aren't strictly tropical. They don't count.)

I have successfully grown pineapples indoors before, but my last couple of attempts have succumbed to root rot before blooming.

2) Squares: Quadratics give my kiddos way more trouble than I expect, every time they come up, and I'm never quite sure why. My best guess is that they're taught in complete isolation in Algebra 1 and the kiddos never quite realize how connected they are to everything they learn afterwards (especially, but not exclusively, rational functions). By the time they get to trig and calculus, this is a real problem. Last school year, I made the conscious decision to pull u-substitution down into Precal and start rewriting some of the exponential and trigonometric equations that required quadratics to solve explicitly in the u-form, to make the u-squared part as plain as I could make it. This seemed to help, so I'm going to keep doing it; it also resulted in a couple of students shouting "stealth quadratics!" every time they appeared, followed by groans from the other students.

3) Hurdy gurdy: The Beloved owns one of these; he bought it from another musician who never played it and was selling it off cheap. I've heard him play it all of twice. I think he only uses it when the piece they're playing would usually require a bagpipe but an actual one would just blow everyone off the stage (for those just joining in, the Beloved plays in a Celtic band that does a lot of very traditional tunes). Both he and I are vaguely fascinated by the nykelharpa, which has the same tangent system for pseudo-fretting, but requires that you bow it instead of turning the wheel to vibrate the strings.


Comment and I'll give you three things to talk about!

. . . R-rated, not NC-17, get your minds out of the gutter: Punk Mathematics (hat tip: oxflop). It's a begging-for-money link, but the pitch is pretty amusing.

Normally, I'd object to the use of "punk" in this context, as for me the essence of punk is the extreme democratization of the writing and performance of music to the point where skill doesn't matter, and I do think skill matters in mathematics. But "Metal Mathematics" sounds even weirder and less punchy, so I'll let it stand.

From io9: Links to some images from the 2009 Crazy 4 Cult art show. Includes two Ghostbusters and two Back To The Future references. (hat tip: calliopes_pen)

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The Tau Manifesto, or why 2π is more important than π. As a trig teacher, I'm one of the culprits here. And while I don't think the half-turn/full turn distinction makes that much of a difference, mathematically - twos are a dime a dozen in formulae, anyway, and I prefer Euler's formula with the negative sign - I agree that getting kids to remember that π radians is half a circle can be tricksy.

A good article on conditional probability and ways to improve one's intuitions about it at the Opinionator Blog. Touches on the False Positives problem I was talking about a while ago. (Hat tip: twistedchick.)

. . . But Happy Pi Day to everyone anyway!

I suspect all of us could use something calming:



No happy dancing monkeys, however.

"There are two types of people in this world; those who dichotomize, and those who don't."

With all due respect to my father's old joke, I'll admit that I find paired dichotomies - tetrachotomies? - generally more useful for classifying the world. They're just so useful!

Earth/Air/Water/Fire (the Classic)
Pentacles/Swords/Cups/Wands (the Tarot suits, and essentially the same as the first)
Gold/Blue/Green/Orange (the True Colors test)
Driver/Analytical/Amiable/Expressive (PeopleStyles)
Totalitarian/Socialist/Anarchist/Capitalist
Civic/Adaptive/Idealist/Reactive (Strauss & Howe again)
Power Gamers/Real Roleplayers/Loons/Munchkins

. . . and a new one on me, Achiever/Explorer/Socializer/Killer. This is obviously adaptable to the MMORPG world, and to some extent to gaming in general. I play as an Explorer/Socializer; I'm not great in tournaments because I, as a player, don't play to specific goals (although I'll pursue the character's goals, no problem, for the sake of the roleplaying). I GM for Explorer/Achievers. People who either play or GM to 'grief' piss me the heck off, and it's one of the reasons I won't play Paranoia.

Anyway, there is something fundamentally satisfying to me about quarterings. There are a few quartered-quarterings - the Myers-Briggs, several of the OKCupid tests - that are interesting as meshings of mutually perpendicular quadrant axes, diagnostic hypercubes. Good ol' A. Square looking not so much upward as outward . . .

So quantumduck and I have been having an extended debate about How Much Trouble We're In. I think we as a culture are in serious trouble, and he seems to think that the current difficulties are little more than the normal growing pains. I have been deeply offended by how lightly he has taken the political swing to the right, and I suspect he in turn has been shocked by how little faith I have in the public as a whole. This, along with an extended riff on the Myth of Progress that has cropped up in several places recently, has led me to the following terribly geeky question:

( What function best matches your idea of Progress/Regress? )

Today's xkcd.

It's not really funny, although I suspect it is to anyone who doesn't do that. It's just . . . touching, for multiple levels of meaning of the word.

After reading an awful lot of stuff these past few days that is either explicitly anti-sex, or about other topics but with very strong possible anti-sex connotations, this is actually quite a relief.

(Left unfiltered to share the love)

Interesting (yeah, the Stats teacher had to go look at all of this):

CNN's Exit Polls

Look, in particular, at the age breakdowns, the income breakdowns,and (most telling, I think) the breakdown by education level.

Although the issue breakdown is also fun. And the "most important quality" question.

Ah, hell , read it all.