Muxtape, Annwn, iTunes
One thing I really like about this newfangled Web 2.0 is how easy it is to upload large things. Back in the old days with the crappy modem-centric infrastructure where a 60 MB hard drive is top-of-the-line, there would be no way for me to upload a bunch of songs for people to listen to. Here it is, my “muxtape“, which is a collection of my favorite music all available online. This doesn’t include music from one band, though, because all their stuff is freely available according to my next paragraph.
This also lets amazing but non-existent bands who have already sold out of every single one of their albums to share all of their music online. Annwn, one of my favorite bands ever, is one such example. They have a marvelous song about Anne Bonney that you really should listen to if you like pirate-related music. And, even now, I still discover new, awesome things from them like a cover of Matty Groves that I am downloading now.
Also: somehow, the idea of being able to buy a song on the iTunes music store completely escaped me until yesterday. Sure, I still like to buy whole albums, especially since most artists I like tend to put out good albums instead of merely good songs; but sometimes I just want one song from one album, despite how good the artist’s other songs are. This was the case with Ed Miller. I really like two of his songs (Prince of Darkness and The Devil Made Texas) but not enough of his other stuff to warrant buying two albums. So, iTunes to the rescue!
Subscribe to the comments for this postiPhone 2.0, Numeracy 0.0
Even though I don’t have an iPhone and I can’t upgrade my iPod Touch’s firmware yet, I’ve been poking around the new iPhone app store to see what apps are in store for iPhone app store users. One of the first things I found, thanks to the alphabetical ordering of apps, is ACTGratuity from Houdah Software. It’s a $0.99 app that basically calculates the tip for you.
Before we lament how people can’t do a simple “what’s 20% of x” calculation in their heads, let me remind you that the iPhone comes with a nice, built-in calculator software. In fact, one of the nice things about iPhone 2.0 is the fact that its calculator has improved! So, basically, this is a one-dollar piece of software that, according to the company, “minimized the number of taps” because it “calculates as you type”. Sure, there is some value there. If you were going to use the iPhone to calculate a tip, five taps is probably better than ten. The scary fact, though, is that there are probably people who need it. What are we doing wrong? What can we do to fix this? Can we blame Bush and No Child Left Behind? Blah blah blah. Insert standard “our kids don’t know math” cried here.
Their other iPhone product, ACTCurrency, which does currency conversion, is a much better reason for automation. However, there are plenty of free alternatives to that on the iPhone store but thanks to the app store’s sorting algorithm they appear much later on the page.
One final iPhone-numeracy-related thing: before ACTGratuity comes the app Abacus. There’s just something very, very wrong with the fact that you can turn your iPhone into an abacus for merely 99 cents. What’s next? iPhone sand that you can do geometry on?
Epsilon Red Riding Hood
From 101 Analysis Bedtime Stories, a wonderful paper on, well, 101 analysis bedtime stories, comes the tale of Epsilon Red Riding Hood. So little, it’s hard to quantify her!
Check out the other 100 stories too. Some of them are real (ha, real, get it?) kickers.
Viewpoints Conference Math and Folk Dance Presentation
About two weeks ago I gave a talk titled Patterns and Mathematics in Traditional Folk Dances at the Viewpoints Grand Reunion Conference. The presentation is the final result of a combination of a workshop on math and contradancing that I taught with my colleague Amy Cann, lots of late night conversations and thinking while preparing to teach that class and some communication with a mailing list full of dance callers. In the presentation I spent most of my time talking about contradancing, though there are some stuff in the end about maypole dances, sword dances and waltzes. Since I promised at least several people a copy of my slides I’ve decided to just put them up here.
Slides for Math and Traditional Dance talk at Viewpoints 2008 (12MB PDF file)
There are several important caveats regarding these slides.
- The file is a 12 MB PDF file because of a good number of pictures and diagrams.
- There are spelling mistakes and typos. I can’t fix them because the original Keynote file is 100 miles away on another computer.
- This is the 60+ slide version along with many slides that I did not actually present. So it should be more understandable without my endless ranting. The last bits are, however, still quite incomprehensible with the slides alone.
- The bibliography is not actually done yet. I’ll post it here once I have it done.
Currently I’m trying to turn the presentation into a paper. If you have any suggestions or ideas or whatever, send me a note!
Cowboys and Morris Dancers
I love the Transatlantic Acoustic Show. It’s a chick from New York and a quirky Britishman exchanging witty banter and they play wonderful indie folk music. It’s one of the very few podcasts that I listen to.
Anyway, in one of their older shows (#56, from 12/8/2007), which I just listened to while driving back home from a conference, they talked about Morris dancing. They talked about how Youtube and parts of the internet could make people think that everyone in England is a Morris dancer and that men dancing with bells on their legs while hitting sticks together is as British as the Queen. Similarly, cowboys are the American icons that the media makes everyone else in the world think that cowboys are everywhere in America herding cattle.
Sadly, it’s neither the case that England is filled with Morris dancers and America is filled with cowboys. But wouldn’t it be awesome if those statements were true? Is there a correlation between people who think that cowboys are awesome and people who think that Morris dancers are awesome? Huh?
An Engagement in Reading
Today I went to the second half of the Exeter All Day Sing in the Exeter Friends Meetinghouse near Reading, PA. It was marvelous. For one thing, it was funny seeing all the familiar faces; it’s as if New England moved down to Reading for an afternoon. Towards the end there was a dance-level volume of stomping, but we sang over it anyway. It was also really hot (almost 40 degrees Celsius) but that didn’t really matter.
I led Russia (107). This is good because it’s been exactly one year since I first led a song (Holy Manna, which is 59, I think). That happened at the same all day sing. I’ve gotten noticeably better during the year. For example, I no longer forget where the altos are. Now, I’m sure that all but one or two of the altos there have been doing this much longer than I have and don’t need me to remind them that they come in after the tenors, but it’s just not nice to forget the altos.
The title of this post is only funny if you pronounce Reading correctly as “Redding”.
Bending a Line of Four
So let’s talk about that post with the diagram that I said had something to do with a contradance.
In the last week, caller and fiddler Amy Cann and I co-taught a seven-day-ish course called Patterns and Mathematics in Traditional Folk Dancing. It was basically a short, intensive workshop on analyzing contra and English country dances as mathematicians, dancers and choreographers. The goal was to use mathematics to help us become better dancers and choreographers. As part of the course, Amy solicited from a dance caller’s mailing list various caller’s lists of favorite and least favorite transitions. The diagram I had in the previous post is a still from an animation that illustrates a geometry problem that came from one of these transitions.
First, let’s look at the problem mathematically.
The fun part is where this problem came from!
Mercy by Day
One of my favorite phrases that appears in hymns and songs is “mercy by day and safety at night” (from Family Bible, page 165 in The Sacred Harp). My two others are “joyful doom”, which appears in a lot of things including a verse of Idumea not included in The Sacred Harp, and “God pants”, which was completely taken out of context by a singer I met in New York a few months ago and sounds kind of funny. This post is kind of about the first one.
The way I see it, the job of a boarding school teacher is to, in some limited very not-Godlike manner, provide mercy by day and safety at night. That’s what kids need in an educational and living environment. They need someone to forgive and encourage them during the working day and someone to fend off the marauding bears, wild moose, hungry vampires, angry drunks and other unsavory creatures of the night. These are the bare necessities of a successful boarding school life.
Now that the school year is almost over the limited aspect of this is hitting me harder and harder. I find that I am running out of mercy and forgiveness. On the one hand, maybe this is a sign that I should figure out some way to regain that for myself. On the other, if kids are still screwing up now after a whole year of warning and forgiveness, maybe it’s time to bring out the Old Testament version of mercy. After all, even Jesus is only your friend if you do what he says. (”You are my friends if you do what I command.” John 15:14. Of course, I shouldn’t quote the Bible out of context. The command here is “love each other”. The point still stands, because the easiest way for a kid to screw up is if she does not love and respect another; or herself.)
Some Contradance Thing
The reason for the radio silence is because I’m working on something. This something is a class, a workshop, a talk, a bunch of lunchtime conversations and not getting enough sleep. Here’s a pretty picture. I’ll tell you that it’s related to math and it’s also related to contradancing. I won’t tell you how or why, because I want to ask my students that question and I don’t know the exact ramifications of this yet. I will tell you that the top of the picture is the top of the dance.
The problem was posted by my colleague Amy Cann, solved by fellow math teacher Abihah Reed on a napkin, and I just made this drawing of the solution on GeoGebra.
Tablets, Revisited
A week ago I finally caved in and got myself a Lenovo X60 Tablet PC. ($989 new on eBay.) One week-long retreat later I got it in my mailbox upon my return last night; I’ve been playing with it since then. Did I say play? I meant to say “exploring it with an intent to create innovative pedagogy for use in the mathematics classroom”.
Note: I’m actually typing this on my MacBook because it’s hard to write long things using a tablet; I am also too lazy to revert it to laptop mode from tablet mode. Also, I really like OS X much better than Windows XP (which is still better than Windows Vista, I suppose) for things that I don’t need a tablet for. Read on for some initial impressions and reasons why I bought one of these things.