Blogging is a creative art

The math/art project Aaron and I are working on has had me thinking a lot about people's perception of mathematics. In my course evaluations for calculus this past fall I asked two questions to gauge this perception. Here the responses from the 50 students who completed the survey:

Mathematics is an applicable science.

strongly disagree	0%
disagree	0%
neither agree nor disagree	10%
agree	36%
strongly agree	54%

Mathematics is a creative art.

strongly disagree	0%
disagree	14%
neither agree nor disagree	32%
agree	26%
strongly agree	28%

Roughly half do not agree that mathematics is a creative art.

Of the seven who responded "disagree" to the second question, one responded "strongly agree," three responded "agree," and three responded "neither agree nor disagree" to the first question.

Of the sixteen who responded "neither agree nor disagree" to the second question, one responded "neither agree nor disagree" to the first question, with the rest splitting agree and strongly agree 11-4.

The comeback kid

This post has been a long time coming. There is a certain amount of pressure associated with any type of comeback attempt, and I think I've found a way to handle it in this, my own personal attempt to come back down three games to none in a best of seven.

The following is a list of known nicknames for Butters. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

• Stinker
• Stink
• Stink-o-cat
• Butt
• Buttas
• Bubbers
• Stinkerbutt
  
• Stink-o-butt
• Cutsy Buttons
• Biggity Butters
• Biggles
• Biggie Smalls
• Buttface
• Bibblty-Bibblty-Butters
• Stinkerbell

It's what he would have wanted

Last night I had a dream.

I was alone at my parent's old house in Windsor.
It was sunny, autumn. The leaves on the neighborhood trees were displaying their reds, oranges, and yellows. Two men in their 60s came walking up to the house. I knew they were bearing bad news. I had been expecting it, and now I was ready to hear it.

"We would like to talk to you about your friend, Aaron Leeman."

I invited them in. One of the men handed me a burrito.

"This is part of what we are able to produce because of the work Aaron Leeman has done. As you know, his work was brilliant. He was able to create an object which had properties of exponents when viewed one way and properties of logarithms when viewed another way. You could go back and forth as you pleased, depending on the application. While not actually mathematics, his work has many interesting mathematical properties."

I held the burrito in my hand staring at it. I started to peel off the aluminum foil allowing steam to escape.

"Aaron Leeman is dead. He was making a larger one of these, the largest ever, stretching his research beyond the limits. Unfortunately, his work consumed him and he was enveloped in a giant version of his work."

I broke down in tears and ran out the back door. The men followed me, the same one talking while I, on my knees on the ground, peeled back the flour tortilla with my hands, the refried beans and cheese burning my fingers a little bit.

"He was horribly burned. When we found him, his body was charred black. There was nothing left of him but ash."

Under the layer of refried beans was a steak hoagie. I wanted to find a piece of Aaron inside somewhere. I didn't.

I needed to talk to someone, so I went in search of my mom, who was in some abstract version of New York City out near the train station at near 98th and 99th. I told her what happened, crying the whole time.

"That's awful!"

"Yea," I said. Then, chuckling, "But it's also really, really funny."

I couldn't stop laughing.

Sweden?

Swarthmore has no job for me to apply to next year.
It is time to let it go.
Head back west?
L.A.?
Canada?

But tonight it's hockey and beer.

Thursday: 

• Make transparencies for Saturday morning talk.
• Write a quiz for the Pi-rates to give to my students Friday.

Friday:

• Drive past State College to Altoona for an extra special session of the special session.
• Schmooze with people who might want to hire me.
• Drive back to State College. Sleep.

Saturday:

• Wake up.
• Give my 20 minute talk at 8:00am to kick off the special session.
• Hang around to see if anyone wants to jam.
• Drive to Wilkes-Barre for a wedding.
• Crash.

Sunday:

• Drive home.
• Regroup and start getting ready for Halloween.
  

Road Shrapnel

The Cambridge House Brew Pub in Granby, CT is quite nice. I went for lunch yesterday, and treated myself to a flight of their beers.

Blitzkrieg, Kolsch, IPA, ESB, and Stout. The Blitzkrieg was made with German yeast, English malt, and American hops. It was a nice concoction. The stout was full of roasted malt, giving it a smokey coffee-like bitterness, which helped it to win a silver medal at this year's GABF.

After my flight and spinach salad, I headed back to my car. The delivery guy, who had been unloading various foodstuffs while I was sampling beers, pointed out my flat tire.

Oh.

I get out my jack, tire iron, and spare, and get to work. I get three out of four bolts off, when I notice the fourth is not like the others.  Hmm.

The delivery guy tells me it's a knot. There should be a piece to attach to the tire iron which will fit the knot. If it's not with the other tools, it's in the glove box. Right he was, in the glove box was my knot unknotter. Thanks again.

As I'm taking care of the last bolt, an old man gets into his Cadillac to leave the pub. He slows down and lends me some empathy and good cheer.

"At least it's only flat on the bottom!" He says. I point out that that's the part of the tire which most needs to be round. "I owned a Civic once. That's a great car." Unfortunately, no car is immune to flat tires. "I suspect that's true. Have a great day!"

Flat off, spare on, I head inside to wash up and get some direction. I tell the bartender my situation. "Yeah, I saw you out there changing the tire. There's a shop a mile up the road that will fix your flat for free." Well hot damn. Fix it for free they did.

Say what you will about people in New England. I got a nice sense of community from people I encountered yesterday.

A Pentatomidae Vendetta

I was recently reminded that last year at the beginning of fall stink bugs make their way through the cracks in the old windows of my apartment.  What reminded me was the stink bugs crawling through  the cracks in the old windows of my apartment. These bugs have a lowly existence. They crawl around looking for food and if they feel threatened, they squirt out this liquid, which stinks like crazy.

The cats took a brief interest in them last year. Sid quickly learned they were not much fun. But Butters had an experience that went something like this:

Oh a bug! I'm going to eat it!

Yuck!
Oh a bug! I'm going to eat it!

Yuck!
Oh a bug! I'm going to eat it!

Yuck!

You can give her points for determination, I suppose.

Patty asked me about the bugs one day. "What are these bugs that are invading?" I told her they are stink bugs. "How do we get rid of them?" Kill them on sight. Whenever I see one in the house now, I grab a tissue, grab the bug, and squeeze until I hear a crack. One less stink bug.

Evidently, they feed on "plant juice," so it's not clear what is attracting them to the computer room upstairs. They might be hatching from eggs on the trees just outside, and our apartment is the closest stop.

I woke up last night around 4:30. I rubbed my hand across my face, discovering a stink bug had found its way to the nook between my nose and the inner corner of my right eye. The stink bug was startled by this. Fuck. I grabbed it, threw it onto the floor, and ran to the bathroom. By the time I get my some fresh running water to my eye, it's too late. I can feel the stink poison stinging my eye. Thoughts run through my head about losing sight in my right eye, but I dismiss them as improbable. I rinse my eye for a few minutes more, then head back to bed. Damn that stink bug.

The inner corner of my right eye is still sore, and that bug is still in my house. I'm going hunting tonight.

Here are some student comments from my course last spring.
Some of these won't make it into my application materials.

• You were great at communication! Thanks!
• Awesome. This is the most organized class i'm in with the best email communication between myself and a professor. I love how I can see my grade as well.
• Homework was the hardest part of the course. It was rare that I could complete it myself without visiting office hours or going to the engineering help session. The amount of homework assigned was usually reasonable, but sometimes the problems were far too tedious and time-consuming.
• It was often annoying to have a quiz every week, but I think it made me review the material after I had finished the homework. I think I retained more information because of them. I do think that they should be 5% of our grade and homework 15%
• I have always liked the format Prof. Kronholm's exams. They cover most of the material which makes it worthwhile to prepare for every possible topic. Also, the exams avoid the often arduous calculations found in the homework and focuses on understanding the material instead.
• you should give a bandana to the highest and lowest scorers in the class
• Joking with the teacher always makes math class more fun.
• Bill Kronholm is AWESOME!! He's my favorite! 
• Very effective use of colored chalk...
• Thanks for being so patient in your office hours.
• Great class! I usually don't enjoy math classes very much, but I will miss this one very much. I invested a lot of time working for this class, but it was worth it because I learned a lot. 
  

a life or death or both situation

I just read this in a BBC News article:

Richard Betts of the Met Office Hadley Centre described himself as "shocked" that so much warming could occur within the lifetimes of people alive today.

"If greenhouse gas emissions are not cut soon then we could see major climate changes within our own lifetimes," he said.

I started wondering why we are so resistant to change. It's not just catastrophic change we dislike. Fold a shirt a different way and conflict can arise. Sitting in someone else's seat can unsettle a whole class. Milk in my coffee? You better watch out.

Global warming seems a bit bigger though. Rising sea levels, increasing average temperature, melting glaciers. All of this spells trouble for humanity. We don't really want the opposite of any of these to happen either. Decrease the sea level and now our ports are in the wrong places, your beach front home is now dune front, yadda yadda.

Increasing temperatures seem to also imply an increase in the human death rate. This website (dubious and unreliable as it may be) estimates that the current death rate due to global warming is 150,000 people per year. This is about the number of people in the US who die from stroke each year.

If global warming is preventable, these deaths are preventable.

If you could, would you prevent these deaths?

Now, imagine instead of 150,000 extra deaths per year we have 150,000 extra BIRTHS per year, also preventable.
If you could, would you prevent these births?

Pick one and do it.

- Clean up.
- Grade quizzes.
- Shower.
- Brew beer with Feonix.
- Roast acorn squash.
- Cook an amazing dinner for Patty.

Those are the things I want to do today.

- Fuck around on the internet.
- Get back in bed.
- Read a book.
- Blog.
- Nap.

Those are the things the rain wants me to do today. So far, the rain is winning. But, I have a plan.

$0.25/lb.

The Swarthmore Co-op is lacking many of the things I expect from a posh uppermiddleclassorganicgrocerystore. The most obvious and painful omission is the bulk food section. It's just not there at this co-op. The members like their food organically grown, pesticide free, non-GMO, and wrapped in as much packaging as possible. Or so I am left to deduce, anyways.

What they do have is a bin. Inside, one can find unattractive but still tasty fresh food. If after the 4500 mile journey from Chile to Pennsylvania a $2/lb. gala apple develops a cosmetic defect, into the bin it goes. Or if that bag containing three heads of double washed organically grown California romaine lettuce happens to have a date stamp that says Tuesday and today is Wednesday, you'll find it in the bin.

When I patronize the Swarthmore Co-op, the bin is the first place I head.

Today's haul:

- two bags of "baby" carrots

- a pint of cherry tomatoes

- two hot peppers

- a zucchini

- lots of apples

"Lots" here means "enough so that the total weight of bin food is 13 pounds." Applesauce is on the to-make list tonight.

A tough one

Integral calculus isn't easy to pick up. The vast array of tools and trick needed to solve the typical anti-differentiation problem is, at best, unwieldy. I'm reminded of this each time I teach the class and problems like this

\int e^{\cos(x)} \sin(x) \; dx

stump some of my students on the quiz. I benefit from years of experience, and the approach is clear to me. But when you've just been crapped on by methods of integration by parts, substitution, partial fraction decomposition, trig substitution, and, the techniquetoendalltechniques, table look-up, life is not so good.

I presented a colleague with the following challenge:

\int \sqrt{\tan(x)} \; dx

I think I gave him a headache. It spread through the faculty like wildfire at lunch. They appreciate a good challenge. I was presented with one "solution" before the end of the day, though it had an error in step 2 which destroyed the validity of it all.

I've done this integral before, and I know the solution can be presented in closed form. Mathematica can produce the answer in about 30 seconds, and Wolfram Alpha even shows you the steps, although I'm convinced the algorithm is not the most efficient for this particular problem. You can probably google for the solution as well. You'll just miss out on all the fun.

Aloysius Snuffleupagus

Here is a job posting on EIMS that I intend to apply for:

--------------------

The Department of Mathematics at Colby College invites applications for two tenure-track positions in mathematics at the assistant professor level, beginning September 1, 2010. For one position, we seek someone with an active research program in number theory or algebra; for the other, someone with an active research program in topology or geometry. Candidates should have a Ph.D. in mathematics. Evidence of exceptional teaching ability is required. The teaching load is five courses annually.

[boring stuff]

Colby is a highly selective liberal arts college located in central Maine. The College is a three-hour drive from Boston and has easy access to lakes, skiing, the ocean, and other recreational and cultural activities. For more information about the position and the department, visit our web site at www.colby.edu/math.

[eoee stuff]

--------------------

Colby's a good school, and with my Swarthmore experience, I think I stand a fair chance at grabbing this tenure line. Maine isn't ideal, especially a 3 hour drive north of the closest real city, but it is beautiful.

Also, Allagash is brewed in Portland, ME. So there's that.

Tenure lines are rare and difficult to grab, what with these tough financial times. I wonder if we all just kept going, pretending that financial collapse didn't happen, how different things would be. Money is pretend, after all. Let's all pretend we had the same amount as before this "collapse" when things were "good." Wall Street is Sesame Street for adults.

I'm home today with a sinus infection, which isn't what I really want to write about.  I want to write about the orange I ate with breakfast, which is now a bowl full of tattered peels and spit out seeds.

An orange from the fridge is somewhat unsatisfying.  My teeth hate biting into a cold orange segment. The one I had with breakfast had been sitting out overnight in one of the Thousand Villages bowls I got for Patty as a house warming gift and was room temperature well before I got to it at 10:30.

I brought it upstairs and started to peel it the way I always do: by biting right into the peel.  It's the best way I know of to start eating an orange.  I've always felt my front two teeth look disproportionately large (though this may be an illusion caused by the gap between them which was never corrected by braces), and it's satisfying to get some utility from them. (I also get utility from that gap: it makes a great water gun.)

The peel itself is bitter, which is why you might cringe at the though of biting into an orange peel.  The bitterness of the peel makes the flesh of the orange that much sweeter by comparison.

After the initial bite, which with experience only cuts through the skin and not into the juicy segments, the rest of the peeling is done by hand.  And what happened this time is what I wanted to write about. 

With each tear of the peel, there was a mist or spray or orangeness. Sometimes it would shoot straight out, like salt water from the blowhole of a whale. Other peels created a rolling mist, spiraling and curling, orange motes traveling on tiny air current.

In reality, this probably happens every time with every orange every time it's peeled, but the lighting must have been just right for me to appreciate the details of the spray that simultaneously prompts "Ooh, yum an orange!" from Patty, while obscenely offending Siddhartha, scrunching up his face and chasing him from the room.

this is only a test

This is a test, you don't have to read this one.

Probably, later postings will be more worthwhile.


Edit: You don't have to read this, but you can still comment on it.