Archive for January, 2008:
Kitten Singularity!
Monorail Cat aside, this is my absolute favorite LOLcat. Why? Well, because it’s actually a fairly accurate model of a singularity! When you approach a point in a rational function that has 0 in its denominator (and the limit exists) you do get a clear funnel like this. Perhaps not as orange, but it’s still pretty accurate. And if you tossed a cat at it the cat would most certainly fall into the hole that is (negative) infinity.
My calculus class is studying infinite limits, limits at infinity, and indeterminate forms now. I’ve been showing the faster sections this picture and talking about it in class while the slower sections catch up. Really, talking about a stupid picture of a cat sinking into a chair is a nice diversion from taking limits of exponential indeterminate forms. Besides, it’s a lot of fun saying “the butt of the cat is approaching negative infinity” in class.
Subscribe to the comments for this postBargain Bin Reviews: Rise
Rise
American Music Club
Price: $1.67
Verdict: Lies! Deception! This album was not what I was promised! If this was the original album I was promised, I would definitely pay $5 for it. But seeing how this is just a single (a good single, however) I’d say maybe $2.50. But in any case it’s a solid alt rock CD with a nice sound.
This is part of a sequence of reviews on CDs I found at bargain piles in the local CD stores, thrift stores or some other place that sells really cheap CDs. Want to read more bargain bin reviews?
Math and Contradancing Link Dump
This entry has three purposes. First, I want to get all these links in one place and, somehow, I don’t use bookmarks. Second, in case you are ever looking for a list of relevant links to the relationship between contradancing and mathematics, you found it. Third, apparently I am on the first page of Google if you search for some combination of the words “mathematics” and “contradance” in their various forms. Whoever clicks on that link would be left completely unsatisfied because it leads to a dead-end page (my online CV with the title of two talks I’ve given on the subject). So let me pick up the slack and actually write something useful on the subject; by that I mean I will try to compile on the relevant links on the subject. Why write my own blog post when others can write it for me?
Simple As That
Just a quick post; my computer broke so I’m using an old iBook that doesn’t have the stuff I need for a longer post I had in mind. In any case, I found this picture on Reddit a few minutes ago. Seems like the general Internet public finds mathematical writing amusing! The issue is that the author(s) of the article described several steps in the proof of the Central Limit Theorem as “easily seen” and utilizing “simple facts”.
So the words “simple” and “easy” appearing next to large, complicated-looking formulas (I actually have no idea if the proof is in fact complicated or not—the only thing I retained from graduate statistics is a demonstration of precisely how one should not teach) is pretty hilarious. The question that this brought to me is, well, exactly how academic should a Wikipedia article be in the case of mathematical proofs?