math
drorzel | January 20, 2011A pretty straightforward question: Which prime number do you like the best?
What's your favorite prime number?online surveys
This is a purely classical poll, so you only get to choose one favorite, not a superposition of multiple numbers. Your selection is legally binding, so choose wisely!
(There's actually a point to putting this up today, beyond providing some cheap and easy blog traffic... I'll explain later.)
drorzel | December 31, 2010Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. So I've got a new source for my book sales related cat-vacuuming.
Still, there's this great big data file sitting there with thousands of hourly sales rank numbers, and I thought to myself "I ought to be able to do something else amusing with this..." And then Corky at the Virtuosi…
drorzel | December 8, 2010The great British physicist Ernest Rutherford once said "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." This is kind of the ultimate example of the arrogance of physicists, given a lovely ironic twist by the fact that when Rutherford won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry. (He won for discovering that radioactive decays lead to transmutation of elements, causing one contemporary to quip that the most remarkable transmutation ever was Rutherford's change from a physicist to a chemist for the Nobel.)
Of course, there's a little truth to the statement-- not the part about…
drorzel | November 18, 2010I'm grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don't have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks:
You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software
While the class in question uses some quantum ideas, the poll is strictly classical, so no superpositions of multiple answers are allowed.
(Honestly, at some point, I would expect laziness alone to compel people to round their answers off before their hands cramp up from copying all these digits...)
drorzel | November 16, 2010(With apologies to Georg Cantor)
Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park.
Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space.
Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding the space. Consider a point P on L. There are an infinite number of lines passing diagonally through P at an angle greater than the smallest angle θ at which a car pulled into the space will intersect each of the bounding lines once. Any car parked parallel to one of these…
drorzel | November 9, 2010I'm taking a bit of flak in comments to my silly Bob Dylan post from Sunday, with various right-wingers spontaneously popping in to tell me that JFK cut taxes. My initial reaction to this is to think that supposing a perfect equivalence between JFK cutting the top rate from 90% to 70% during a time of relative peace and prosperity and our current economic scenario is yet another demonstration of the fine grasp of historical and mathematical reasoning that makes the Tea Party crowd such a treat.
But, then, it occurred to me that maybe their claim is that it's the act of cutting taxes that…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I'm spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I'm avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don't want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here's a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid's continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon:
How does a cow jump over the moon?
The father of one of SteelyKid's classmates, who is not originally from the US, asked why there's a cow jumping over the moon in that (or, as SteelyKid puts it: "Cow jumping MOON!!"), and I don't have a good answer. I'm aware of the nursery rhyme and the Tolkien joke, but why…
drorzel | October 28, 2010I finished Jennifer Ouellette's new book a few weeks ago, shortly after my trip to Alabama, but it's taken me a long time to get around to reviewing it due to a combination of too much work and being a Bad Person. There's finally a tiny break in the storm of work, though, so here's a slightly belated review.
The Calculus Diaries is not a book that will teach you how to do math. There aren't worked examples, detailed derivations, or homework problems in the main text. It might, however, teach you not to fear math, as it provides a witty and accessible explanation of the key concepts behind…
drorzel | October 8, 2010On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement:
And the whole thing is over in a mega-second!
A mega-second, of course, is 1,000,000 seconds, or a bit less than twelve days. That's awfully long for an at-bat in baseball, though it might not be unreasonable for cricket.
Subsequent comments made clear that Valentine was trying for "millisecond," though it remains…
cagapakis | September 11, 2010My good friend and labmate just published an awesome paper: "Emergent cooperation in microbial metabolism." His experiment started with 46 strains of E. coli that had mutations in their metabolic pathways that prevented them from being able to grow without supplementing the media with extra metabolites. Alone they died, but grown together in the same tube, many pairs of mutants were able to feed each other the missing metabolite. Metabolic cooperation was the key to survival.
Measuring and understanding metabolic cooperation can be used to build stronger, more predictive models of…
drorzel | September 7, 2010Not prompted by anything specific, but something I've occasionally wondered about: what's the threshold for "most"? Thus, a poll:
The minimum percentage of X doing Y that you would need to feel justified saying "Most X do Y" is:survey software
I know I tend to use "most" to mean something considerably more than just 51%, but I'm not sure how widely that's shared. When you say that "most" of some category of things have some property, do you mean a simple majority, or some kind of supermajority?
esiegel | August 27, 2010"The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible." -Albert Einstein
The observable Universe is huge. Incredibly, mind-bogglingly huge. When we look out, in any direction, we see galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies, stretching for billions and billion of light years.
This one picture, taken of a region of sky just one-tenth the size of the Moon, contains more than 10,000 unique galaxies. And there are maybe close to a hundred billion galaxies similar to ours in the Universe; each one contains billions and billions of stars and planets, along with huge molecular…
drorzel | August 25, 2010New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad.
Of course, there's an easy way to avoid this kind of mess: simply give all the kids the same name, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem.
In discussion on a mailing list where this came up, someone wondered about how many children Wilt Chamberlain would've fathered, given his…
elerner | August 19, 2010Letters and numbers are often mentally grouped together; they're both simple sets of symbols that are the building blocks for much more complex concepts, and mastering their relationships is a cornerstone of early education. But while illiteracy becomes a major social stigma almost immediately after a young person is introduced to letters, most people can proudly declare their innumeracy (aside from basics, like telling time or counting change) throughout their lives. This is doubly strange, as our ability to think about and compare sets of items of differing amounts precedes our verbal…
rallain | August 17, 2010I see that Doug at Nanoscale Views has fond memories of the hit show The Mechanical Universe. If you have never seen this show, it is quite excellent (even if old).
Perhaps the best thing about The Mechanical Universe is that it might be the best that traditional lecturing can provide. Oh, I know it isn't quite the same. Students can't ask questions while watching a video. But the main point is that if you want to go with some type of traditional lecture style format for a class, you would be hard pressed to do better than this. Or maybe something similar - there are other good video…
drorzel | August 16, 2010A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra).
Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…
drorzel | August 9, 2010the hot topic in mathematical sciences at the moment is the draft proof that P≠NP (warning: PDF). This is one of the biggest issues in computer science, and one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Problems, so a proof would be Big News in math/CS, and earn the prover a cool $1,000,000. Reaction among blogging theorists is mixed, with some intrigued and at least one willing to bet against it.
So what do I think of the proof? Honestly, this is so far out of my areas of competence that I need Google to remind me what the symbols mean. About all I know is that it's a Big Deal in…
gboustead | August 5, 2010
Numbers don't lie, but they tell a lot of half-truths. We have been raised to think that numbers represent absolute fact, that in a math class there is one and only one correct answer. But less emphasis is put on the fact that in the real world numbers don't convey any information without units, or some other frame of reference. The blurring of the line between the number and the quantity has left us vulnerable to the ways in which statistics can deceive us. By poorly defining or incorrectly defining numbers, contemporary audiences can be manipulated into thinking opinions are fact.
Charles…
rallain | August 3, 2010You thought I was going to talk about a problem that math teachers could use, didn't you? Well, maybe math teachers can use this. (note: when I say "teachers" I really mean "learning facilitators")
It all started when I read this valedictorian speech from Erica Goldson. Here is part of it:
"I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the…
drorzel | July 23, 2010The Dean Dad is worried about remedial math:
In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn't given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don't.
[...][P]art of me wonders if we're sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It's great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on…