http://www.area603.com/index.php?blogId=6 DavidBrooks 2009-08-18T14:04:49Z http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=2145&blogId=6 <p>Back in my math-degree college days, I happly played the &quot;purer than thou&quot; game. I was dabbling in number theory, which is about as removed from grubby reality as you can get, and we embraced the ethos of Hardy's &quot;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Apology-Canto-G-Hardy/dp/0521427061">A Mathematician's Apology</a>&quot;, which celebrated cerebral uselessness as the highest form of human accomplishment. <b>I even wrote a parody short story, in which applied mathematicians were Neanderthals who ate spaghetti with their hands beneath the appaled gaze of the theorists. </b><br /> </p><p>These days, when I could number-theorize my way out of a paper bag, I'm not so sure. Altering reality can be pretty satisfying. But <a href="http://xkcd.com/435/">today's xkcd comic strip</a> reminded me of those days; it captures the the whole thing perfectly - particularly the careful use of the word &quot;just&quot;.</p><br/> Mathematics 2008-06-11T07:49:20Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=2034&blogId=6 <p>The online forum Testy Copy Editors features, not surprisingly, copy editors who are testy (as in &quot;grumpy&quot;, not as in &quot;about to sit through their SATs&quot;). The discussions mostly consist of complaints that newspapering is going to hell in a handbasket, but sometimes they hit on about specific questions. </p><p>Those questions tend to be grammatical in nature, but today one included a question of potential interest to the geeks among us: <b><a href="http://testycopyeditors.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5603">Whether you should use permutations or combinations when calculating the different ways to create a burger</a>.</b> (And you thought copy editors had boring lives.)<br /> </p><p>Personally, I stick with French fries. You don't get a statistics debate with them.</p><br/> General 2008-04-25T07:51:15Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1960&blogId=6 <p>The Burlington Free-Press <a href="http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080328/NEWS01/803280315/1009">has a story today - it's practically a lecture</a> - about computer encryption, focusing on a University of Vermont math professor who's teaching an course in it, using recent data braches at retailers as the news hook. </p><p><b>The story is a marvel: It actually explains how encryption works, talking about prime factors and the like, instead of just saying &quot;boy, this stuff is hard&quot; as newspapers too often do. </b>The only drawback is that it includes some numbers that are so long that they screw up the browser display!</p><p /><br/> Mathematics 2008-03-28T08:51:27Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1924&blogId=6 <p><a type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.area603.com/resserver.php?blogId=6&amp;resource=Pi%20animal.jpg" id="res_299" class="nodecoration"><img width="166" height="124" border="0" src="http://www.area603.com/resserver.php?blogId=6&amp;resource=Pi%20animal.jpg&amp;mode=medium" alt="www.ime.uerj.br/~progerio/fun/joke/Pi animal.jpg" style="margin: 5px;" class="res_image_medium" /></a></p><p>Did you get up at 1:59 to <a href="http://www.piday.org/">celebrate</a>? (I'm told that this is the week MIT tells high schoolers if they've been accepted, and it's chosen because of proximity to 3.14. I don't know if that's true, but it sounds nice.)</p><p><b>There can't be an &quot;e day&quot; because of that pesky 7 - but my kids' school celebrate <a href="http://gemini.tntech.edu/~tfurtsch/scihist/avogadro.htm">Avogadro's Number</a> Day (Oct. 23, as in 10^23). </b>(<i>Trivia: Searching to find that Avogadro's number link, I discovered a restaurant by that name in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Go figure!</i>)</p><br/> Mathematics 2008-03-14T07:43:11Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1875&blogId=6 I can't say anything more without spoiling the joke in the <a href="http://www.comics.com/creators/speedbump/archive/speedbump-20080224.html">Speed Bump cartoon from Sunday</a> - but <b>if you like math, you'll like it. </b><br/> Mathematics 2008-02-25T09:20:02Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1868&blogId=6 <p>That headline <a href="http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080222/NEWS01/162047378">from today's Telegraph</a> is guaranteed to make us math-o-philes both despair and smile. Smile because it's about high school students who have learned to like math class - despair because because it says that hating math is the default feeling for everybody in school.</p> <p>Sigh ... for somebody who still looks back fondly on 10th-grade geometry (probably the high point of my intellectual life), the idea that all &quot;normal&quot; people dislike numbers is despressing.</p> <p><b>On the other hand, the Telegraph did print one of the math problems from statewide tests on its front page - we even have the word &quot;parallelogram&quot; above the fold! I'll be interested to see whether our single-copy sales tank</b>..(However, we neglected to print the answer to the problem; I wonder if we'll get any calls. Callers will have to be knowlegeable/interested enough to care, but not knowlegeable enough to figure it out themselves - which I imagine is a fairly small set.)</p> <p><b>ADDENDUM</b>: Not all studes loathe chess, either, judging from <a href="http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080222/GJNEWS_01/972238880">this Foster's story </a>about Portsmouth school chess club that is helping a community in Belieze ... by sending them 100 chess sets.</p> <p><b>ANOTHER ADDENDUM:</b> A colleague sent me this from the wikipedia article about Carr Vattel Van Anda, the managing editor of the New York Times from 1904 to 1924: &quot;<b>He famously corrected a mathematical error in a speech given by Albert Einstein that was to be printed in the </b><i><b>Times</b>.&quot; </i>My hero!</p><br/> Mathematics 2008-02-22T07:42:25Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1859&blogId=6 That provocative headline is designed to make you follow the link to <a href="http://xkcd.com/385/">today's xkcd comic</a>, which <b>will bring a bitter smile to the face of any science fan lacking Y chromosomes.</b><br/> Mathematics 2008-02-19T08:37:40Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1855&blogId=6 <p><a type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.area603.com/resserver.php?blogId=6&amp;resource=KevinShort%20math%20grammy.jpg" id="res_540" class="nodecoration"><img border="0" src="http://www.area603.com/resserver.php?blogId=6&amp;resource=KevinShort%20math%20grammy.jpg&amp;mode=medium" style="margin: 5px; width: 170px; height: 210px;" class="res_image_medium" /></a></p><p><i>Photo courtesy UNH</i></p><p>Well, not exactly. <a href="http://www.ceps.unh.edu/news/news_releases08/Grammy.html">Kevin Short was part of a team that won </a>for <b>developing algorithms that helped decipher an old, beat-up wire recorder (yes, wire - pre-audiotape) with the only known live performance of Woody Guthrie.</b> From the UNH press release:</p><p><i>Short applied some of the mathematics of compression techniques to interpret the highly irregular and broken signal from the wire recording. “I came in at the end of the project, ” said Short. “The painstaking work of transferring the sound from brittle wire to a digital signal had already been done. By fine-tuning the <a href="http://www.plangentprocesses.com/">Plangent Processes</a> </i>(a company specializing in this topic)<i> algorithms, we were able to remove the speed and timing problems in the signal.&quot;</i></p><p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7489316">Here is an NPR interview</a> with the Plangent Process folks about how it works.</p><br/> Mathematics 2008-02-18T08:21:36Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1842&blogId=6 <p>That's the &quot;<a href="http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1528&amp;aid=-1">poll&quot; taking place at Slashdot </a>right now. <b>Pi and e are neck-and-neck.</b> Great stuff, including this comment:</p><p>&quot;Seriously, as any sort of engineer it's almost impossible not to have a strong reverence for e. Take away any of my other constants and I'll survive, but you'll have to pry my e from my cold dead <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LaplaceTransform.html">Laplace transforms</a>.&quot;</p><p><b>UPDATE: </b>Disappointingly, it looks like pi is the winner, stomping e 40% to 30% with 26,000 votes in. The delegate count is still up in the air, however ... </p><br/> Mathematics 2008-02-13T10:56:47Z DavidBrooks http://www.area603.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=1794&blogId=6 <p>Or re-learn, in this case. My father visited over Christmas and found himself having trouble following his high-school grandkids' math homework, so <b>he just bought himself one of those lectures-on-DVD programs about calculus.</b> He learned it decades ago, but you know how it goes. As long as he's at it, he got the statistics and probability course, too. </p><p>He'll turn 86 in June.</p><br/> General 2008-01-28T08:45:01Z DavidBrooks