Archive for February, 2008:
Three Games Involving Numbers
So here are a few games involving numbers. Not exactly “edutainment”—though one of the games claims it is—but plenty of entertainment in the form of fast clicking, brain teasing and lots of number crunching in very fun ways. Best of all, they’re all free!
Frankly, the mathematical content in these games amount to arithmetic and counting. However, TwoThree, the third game, actually poses two interesting (though elementary) number theory questions: can all positive integers other than 1 be expressed as the sum of 2s and 3s, and how do you do so with the fewest number of 2s and 3s?
Subscribe to the comments for this postAn Expected Exponential Model
Short post: here’s a nice little article from Nick Confalone on Popeye’s chicken dipping sauces. It seems that the amount of dipping sauce that you can request for free is an exponential function of the amount of chicken strips you buy. You can bankrupt Popeye’s by getting enough chicken strips so that they have to give you, say, 2 to the 100 packets of sauce!
Tomorrow is Dance Flurry, so I will go pack now.
Remember the Formula
From God Plays Dice: “the cubic formula is quite ugly, and takes up a couple lines; it’s better expressed as an algorithm”.
Mathematical notation is very amazing, but sometimes they just don’t lead to very good expressions of procedures. Functions and operations (which are functions, really) express the “verb” idea very well: sin(x) means take the sine of x. But sometimes notation just doesn’t do the trick. Check out this “formula” for estimating a definite integral from Stewart’s Calculus:
This made my students very, very unhappy.
Amazon Text Statistics
So I knew for a long time that Amazon.com tells you various aweome statistics about books like the sales rank and page count. Pretty awesome. But I just found our today that Amazon also offers an incomplete concordance and some detailed text statistics for some books. It lists the 100 most frequently used words in the book along with some indices on how hard the book is. My favorite is the average syllable per word. They also have fun facts like words you buy per dollar and words per ounce of the book’s weight.
As to the book, I just finished “reading” (I read most of it but skimmed several bits) it. More thoughts later.
(Music Review) Victims of Irish Music
Victims of Irish Music
Marc Gunn’s Irish & Celtic Music Podcast
Yes, sometimes I do listen to stuff I didn’t pick up from the bargain bin! Yes, sometimes I do write about them! A word of disclosure, though: I got this CD for free for writing this.
This is a great “gateway drug” into Irish music. It’s got a bunch of tunes that even I, who isn’t that familiar with Irish music, find familiar. The playing is good and varied enough that even when I accidentally put a song on a loop for ten minutes I didn’t notice—normally I’d go insane. Overall it’s a great compilation. The energy level is a bit low for my tastes (I describe it as “why am I not drinking a Guinness?”, while my ideal level of energy is “why am I not dancing?”) and it’s certainly not as good as a live rendition complete with drinking and possibly dancing. But, hey, it’s pretty close and it does the trick when you’re driving, working, or in some other situation where you want to warm up for the drinking and the dancing later. In fact, it’s perfect for a high energy background music.
Also, I now know that presidential primaries are much, much more intense if you’re listening to upbeat Irish music while reading up on them.
Grapher in Review
Buried inside the “Ultilities” folder that non-power users tend to ignore is Grapher, one of my favorite Mac “it just works” pieces. Taking all the fancy stuff aside, Grapher is a no-nonsense function grapher. It takes a function (typed in visually and intuitively, so no need for TeX-like code or Microsoft Equation Editor type panels) and returns its graph. It’s quick, exports very nicely and it’s got that elegant OS X user interface. Add on top of that the easy inclusion of parameters, simple parameter animation, and the ability to do multiple types of graphs (polar graphs with a logarithmic scale, for example) makes this a very, very nice piece of software. Here’s a screengrab of a comparison between logistic and exponential models that I did in two minutes.