Archive for April, 2008:
Why Doesn’t Circling Right Feel Right
During my brief stop at the NEFFA festival last night, I was in two contradances that included circle rights. Most people around me neither expected nor remembered the circle rights; it just didn’t feel right during the first few times. The entire hall just fell into a little lull. In fact, my shadow for one of the dances had trouble with it about half the time; she seems to be a very experienced dancer, and was fabulous with everything else.
So why does circling right feel weird? In the twenty minutes that I had to think about this in the shower, this is the best answer I can come up with from a dancer/mathematician’s point of view: circling right is the contradance figure that contains the clockwise motion with the largest radius.
If you’re one of my four students who will be studing contradancing and math with me next month, you don’t get to read the rest. Instead, you get to think about it on your own.
Subscribe to the comments for this postNature Where There was None
This fractal food web site has been floating around for a while. Other food and plant-related fractal pictures aren’t hard to find either. But more recently, there are some “fractal food” web sites that reverse-engineer fractal structures into food. There’s the “fractal pizza”, which seems to be a recursive layering of pizza upon pizza. And then there’s Sierpinski cookies, which is a bunch of cookies that form estimations of the Sierpinski carpet.
Is it just me or does it feel very unnatural to put fractal structures and patterns into foods that didn’t contain them to begin with? Bonus question: would this be a good excuse to bake cookies instead of having class one of these days?
Tablets
Recently I’ve been thinking whether I want to teach with a tablet PC. Two of my colleagues in the department teach math from tablets and they are having moderate/great success with it. Currently I’m using whiteboard and marker and maybe a projection of a diagram or animation once in a blue moon, which works but probably isn’t optimal.
Here’s a list of reasons for or against tablets:
Good: It’s an excuse to buy a tablet PC.
Bad: It requires buying a tablet PC.
Bad: It requires using Windows unless I want to shell out for a Modbook.
Good: Class notes are automatically created and students don’t have to copy anything.
Bad: Class notes fall to me, which means more work.
Good: Not facing the board means that the class is more seminar-like.
Bad: The board is twice as big area-wise as the projector screen.
Bad: The projector screen has a resolution of 1280 by 800, which is very small when you deal with handwriting and diagrams instead of typesetted text.
Bad: I need to be 100% sure that the projector will work, which I am not sure of.
Good: I will never have to buy a whiteboard marker again!
Bad: A tablet PC costs as much as 2000 markers.
So I think, for now, I’ll stick with whiteboards. Maybe when we have a nice, affordable wall-mounted touch-screen, then I’ll think about this again.