3MF

M.A.T.H. Challenge

You know you're a math geek when you spend your Saturday morning at a math competition. Today was the 2006 Michigan Autumn Take Home (M.A.T.H.) Challenge. I wasn't exactly looking forward to it because these tests always have a way of showing you just how much you don't know. We had 3 hours to tackle 10 problems. I worked with one other person as a team. We did some pretty good work i think. The nicest part of the exam is that as soon as you are done, you can see what the answers were.

I'll leave you with a sample problem: The three points (4,14,8,14), (6,6,10,8), and (2,4,6,8) which are vertices of a cube in four-dimensional space. Find the center of the cube.

Back home

My father is back at home. There hasn't been much change in his condition. He is still unable to move anything below his waist, though he can feel some slight sensation as well as pain. His last 10 days in the hospital were spent at Mary Free Bed where they taught him how to get around in a wheel chair and do other things to adjust to life as a paraplegic. We've had to make a few changes to my parents house to accommodate such as putting a big ramp up to the front door and raising some of the furniture so we can get the mechanical lift under it. He is glad to be home watching the Tigers on his big screen television without the interruption of a nurse. It's a big change but we are all slowly adjusting, especially my mother and sister who are with him every day.

Halloween cookies

While we're no strangers to making Christmas cookies, my sister and mother thought it might be fun to make some Halloween cookies this year.

My sister was in the more creative mood. She dressed up a ghost as a roasted pig and and put a pumpkin in a watermelon costume. The ghost skeleton, tiger kitty, and jack-o-lantern are mine.

Last call for homework

Lately i've been judging the amount of homework i have by which late night talk show is on television when i'm finally done and head off to bed. This week has been especially rough: all Carsons.

Bottom rung

I'm told there's an intellectual hierarchy in the world of numbers. The pure mathematicians are at the top, then the applied mathematicians, then the statisticians, and finally the applied statisticians are at the bottom. This isn't exactly good news given that i'm considering a career in the bottom category. I began to wonder where this order may have come from. If my own stat classes are any indication, i think i have an idea. It's odd how stat teachers go out of their way to hide so much of the math in statistics. Almost everything we do involves remembering some pre-derived formula. The only thinking involved is picking which formula to use. In the directions to my last home work assignment, i was instructed to "not use common sense" and put everything in one of the given formula. This is so bizarre to me because you think you would want to encourage an intuitive understanding of the material we are covering. Things should make sense to us and we should be able to come up with a formula when we need it instead of just memorizing one. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of beautiful mathematics in stats, but it is all hidden so as to not scare stats students away.

Molecular bouquet

For my Idea of Nature class, we had a quiz about "green" buildings. One of the questions was what does CFC stand for? As i turned in my quiz, i noticed that someone else had responded "chloro floral carbons." I wonder what a dozen of them costs.