tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-98715122009-07-12T21:29:04.801-04:00math is stranger than fictionjtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.comBlogger234125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-36859987154330091842009-07-02T15:52:00.005-04:002009-07-02T16:50:40.701-04:00

Lockhart's Lament (PDF, 25 pages) starts out like this: Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.“ Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-74676856009890763022009-07-01T08:08:00.006-04:002009-07-01T12:16:28.191-04:00

This is a little self-portrait, "The Artist Trying to Learn Abstract Algebra", probably of no interest to anyone else. I read an introduction to rings (in Gallian, fifth edition, which I enthusiastically recommend). Now I'm trying to come up with some conjectures and prove or disprove them before I start on the exercises. (This book has great exercises, and doesn't bother teaching anything in

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-31267315976078879022009-06-22T12:35:00.004-04:002009-06-22T17:39:01.213-04:00

I've played this game a few times now and have really enjoyed it. I've only tried it with two players. It might work with more. Rules Each player starts by jotting down a very brief story outline: just five lines. Each line should be seven words or less. It's OK to steal the outline of a familiar story, as in the example below. a girl in red a wolf with a plan the wolf eats grandma the

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-78653097049601618652009-05-19T22:17:00.001-04:002009-05-20T23:21:51.713-04:00

I read the Handbook of Epictetus. It's very brief, just a few pages really. I'll quote a few paragraphs that should make it clear what Stoicism is about. (I'm quoting a recent translation by Nicholas P. White which I really like. The translations I found on the Web seem stilted, or florid, by comparison; though Higginson isn't bad. Of course you can try the original Greek.) Some things are

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-61164743868257376802009-05-18T05:00:00.000-04:002009-05-18T06:01:38.550-04:00

Once I wrote two lines of what would have been an awesome sonnet. Shall I compare you to my friend Matt Jones? You are more lovely and not half so drunk. In San Francisco, while everyone else was napping, I managed to sneak out to City Lights Books. There I stumbled on Sonnets by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, translated by Mike Stocks. Translated. Imagine translating sonnets. I opened it up and

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-53937953970828736912009-05-09T13:08:00.001-04:002009-05-09T14:10:53.050-04:00

Your browser uses the public suffix list to determine whether two web sites may share cookies. This is not very robust but better than the previous strategy. If you take a long strip of paper, fold it in half as many times as you can, and unfold it, it'll make an approximation of the fractal shape called the Heighway dragon. If you take two fractions, say 1/2 and 1/3, and add the numerators

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-43643116986129051682009-05-09T11:05:00.002-04:002009-05-09T13:40:27.470-04:00

I was talking to one usability expert and he was describing how they measure task completion. Did the user press the buttons in the right order? Their ideal app resulted in new users completing tasks 100% of the time. This isn’t exploratory learning. You need to be able to fail and explore the possibility space of a particular tool. Through repeated failure and success, users build up robust

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-90814439505763091222009-04-06T14:39:00.004-04:002009-04-06T14:48:11.649-04:00

Hey, listen to this song: Listening to the first 15 seconds, I didn't think I was going to like it. The reasons I like this song are interesting enough to write about at length, but... oh, just hit the button.

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-1564936775442655512009-04-05T06:05:00.005-04:002009-04-05T06:33:12.180-04:00

Several years ago I predicted that in the future there will often be a mysterious beeping which no one can identify or locate. This has happened to me several times since then, but tonight was special. Something kept going BEE-doo loudly, about once every two minutes. I suspected the smoke detector and my laptop before tracking the noise to a cell phone. It was 3 AM. My house is full of

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-65614837009885910702009-03-11T08:22:00.005-04:002009-03-11T09:24:48.852-04:00

I started to read J. the story of Moses last night. As a kid I probably scorned story bibles, but someone gave us this one when J. was a baby, and flipping through it I was pleasantly surprised. Now I think you can probably do a whole lot of deleting and clarifying without hurting much. You do lose the texture of the Bible. But we've already read the kids D'Aulaire's Greek Myths (miraculously

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-53240649867135383222009-02-26T17:56:00.001-05:002009-02-26T17:57:45.852-05:00

The handwriting is our babysitter's.

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-83144015326828598552008-12-31T19:22:00.002-05:002008-12-31T19:25:09.070-05:00

It's wonderfully easy to contribute on the Web, and as an unfortunate side effect of this essential fact, hoaxes, cranks, and general nonsense abound. I'll euphemistically call this stuff “junk”. Because so much of what you see online is junk, smart people such as yourself develop a finely-tuned junk detector. This is fine—in any case it's important to have one if you plan to use the Web for

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-23579474254458446472008-12-31T18:46:00.005-05:002008-12-31T19:28:24.304-05:00

On the Web, alternative reading to whatever you're looking at is never far away. There are even links in most Web pages, forever calling you to random-walk. The result, for the reader, can be a haphazard adventure of reading, interesting at every point but without overall purpose. The result for writers is that time spent organizing thoughts is usually wasted—nobody wants to read all that.

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-69541731382179208252008-12-17T09:41:00.005-05:002008-12-17T11:02:29.524-05:00

JJ had me look at a set of old mathematics textbooks, and I found this. 4.1 Division and repeated subtraction We can write 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 = 7 × 9 = 63. (a) What is 63 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7? (b) What is 63 ÷ 7? (c) Explain the connection between the last two questions. (d) If you were to work out 65 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7, what would you find? How

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-18965102859026908082008-12-09T08:27:00.009-05:002008-12-09T15:38:03.380-05:00

I like Language Log, but I would like it even better if there were less of it. Wouldn't it be keen if there were a site where you could enter the URL of any blog, and it would give you back a feed containing only half the entries—the best ones, according to whatever metric of popularity the service could find (links, diggs, whatever). I proposed this on IRC, where mhoye and humph reacted with a

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-29531452222412098772008-11-21T10:11:00.005-05:002009-05-09T03:10:43.653-04:00

I am flushing the buffer of old posts. Here is one I delayed posting because it's just too boring. Well, I'm posting it anyway. Sorry. xkcd has a provocative comic about cryptography. I imagine many geeks are moderately in favor of gun control but staunchly opposed to cryptography control. The two issues are very similar. Having a gun lets you do two basic things: intimidate unarmed people

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-68421650250610563972008-11-18T13:48:00.002-05:002008-11-18T15:23:27.369-05:00

Some people are, at this moment, running around the world. As of this writing they're about 16% done. Seattle is farther north than Montréal. It is in fact farther north than all but the northernmost tip of Maine. Someone with a browser history like mine is more likely female than male. (My history includes a lot of pages on bugzilla.mozilla.org and developer.mozilla.org, which should peg

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-32722182483747339262008-10-23T09:09:00.004-04:002008-10-23T09:31:58.402-04:00

Bill Poser is annoyed that the state of Kentucky has decided to seize a bunch of domain names on the unlikely theory that they are “gambling devices”. Among the silly things going on here is the name of the case, which Bill explains in the comments: Yes, the nominal defendants are the domain names. This is an example of a lawsuit in rem "against a thing". It is the typical form of action in

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-66937189290368358982008-09-30T12:47:00.003-04:002008-09-30T14:05:17.953-04:00

My search continues for something substantial to read from an economist in favor of the bailout. On TV, they all appear to favor it (using vague language and lots of clichés), but on the Internet, they all seem to oppose it (with compelling economic arguments). I thought I may have found it when I ran across a dire quote from Nouriel Roubini in a newspaper, warning of economic woes to come.

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-60907030356270060612008-09-30T11:57:00.006-04:002008-09-30T12:46:27.845-04:00

I wrote to my Representative, Jim Cooper, and three days ago, he wrote back: ...I hate the thought of paying ransom to Wall Street, especially when Main Street is struggling. I am furious that our financial situation has been allowed to get this point, and that Treasury is considering bailing out the lenders who helped caused this to occur. Then he voted for the bailout. According to this

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-9637809438064719272008-08-12T19:21:00.003-04:002008-08-18T14:14:49.187-04:00

Yesterday, apropos of nothing, J. announced that 9 is not the only square number. 4 is, too. Even 1, he added. It turns out he didn't hear the phrase “square number” anywhere. He's just been playing with blocks. Today I got out some extra blocks and showed him that 16 is a square number, too. He wondered, apparently at random, if 100 was a square number. So we counted out one hundred

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-12215012779152164312008-07-24T09:07:00.009-04:002008-07-29T14:06:43.568-04:00

When volcanic eruptions created the island of Ferdinandea in 1831, it was quickly claimed by Italy, France, the UK, and Spain. While they were arguing, the little island eroded away. How to put this? Language isn't what I thought it was. (This definitely falls into the category of thought-provoking stuff I won't pretend to understand.) A little background. Before your third birthday, you

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-84010840855310557102008-07-23T23:53:00.000-04:002008-07-23T12:53:32.994-04:00

Twelve thousand years ago, a gigantic dam of solid ice blocked the Clark Fork River, creating Glacial Lake Missoula. The lake was almost 2,000 feet deep. And periodically the dam would explode, laying waste to parts of what's now Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Thundering waves and chunks of ice tore away soils and mountainsides, deposited giant ripple marks, created the scablands of

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-85250736418908419342008-07-02T00:28:00.001-04:002008-07-03T10:04:35.721-04:00

But what about earthquakes and concerts and wars, values and weights and costs, famines and droughts, redness and fairness, days and millennia, functions and purposes, craftsmanship, perfection, enjoyment, and finesse? —Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution I learned in school that a noun is a word that names a person, place or thing. A few years after

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9871512.post-46021140582508150852008-06-14T11:19:00.002-04:002008-06-14T11:25:03.880-04:00

See earlier puzzles for, er, something of an explanation. “Now listen close-like,” said my new friend, “'cos I'm only going to say this once. All the inhabitants of Barleycorn Bay, and I've met them each and every one, are either heroes or vagabonds. Or both. Every one of the heroes is blonde; every one of the vagabonds is a magician, except for any that be Quakers; and all the magicians are

jtohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03968844388108605008noreply@blogger.com0