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.