Mask the Mediocrity
Oh hi there,
Pick a number. If it's odd, triple it and add one. If it's even, cut it in half. Eventually, it'll produce a chain of numbers that lands at 1 -- at least, it's done so for every number any human has ever tested. Project Euler asks, "Which starting number, under one million, produces the longest chain?"
Ben Blum-Smith argues that a good mathematical notation "packages the theorem into the notation, simultaneously encoding it and rendering it invisible."
Over at Slackjaw I have a supposedly funny piece about an evil scientist and maybe the most scientific thing would be not simply "trusting science"? Food for your thought.
A kid told me this week that if you add consecutive powers of 2 (e.g. 8 and 16) you can always divide it by 3, and that seems like some excellent kid math to me.
Scatching: "The only thing that is high level about the certification is the language that is used to mask the mediocrity that is an inherent hallmark of the certification. The National Board Certification is nothing more than initial teacher certification at the national level." I'm up for recertification this year. Will I do it? Hard to say.
I'm reading "The Pagan Rabbi" by Cynthia Ozick. "Ozick studied at a boy’s heder, gaining an early love of Yiddish and of Jewish culture that would infuse her work," from the Jewish Women's Archive.
I struggled with teaching the chain rule in calculus this week. Here is evidence of my struggle.
So I haven't really listened to Taylor Swift before but started listening this week. I was in the grocery store and thought, wow, this is actually great, is this that song that everyone says is so good? Friends, I had put on "All Too Well" for the first time.
The backwards olympics would be every olympic sport but totally backwards. So speed skating but backwards. 100 meter dash but backwards. Weight dropping. You have to catch an arrow. Get up the mountain. Get the ball out of the net. And so on.
This has been a good year for writing, but not for book writing. I have a couple ideas but haven't gotten very far in any of them. Not sure what to do about that, if any of you have advice for me, I'm all ears.
G'bye!
-Michael