Media-rich Data

Best quote ever: "I've just spent the last 5 minutes trying to piece you together with the 8 other Asian girls I know, and it turns out that you're not any of them! I've never met you before!"

...It happens more often than you'd think. (Not the act of confusing me with other Asians -- which I don't mind so much -- but the verbalization of such. Tact seems to be a lost art these days.)

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Funniest story told to us by the realtor lady we had met yesterday: One time, the contractor she worked with went to a place in Newark, NJ, while there were still tenants living there. Afterwards, he had to call the cops, because he had seen a fresh body in the crawl space of the house. WHAT?! That's insane!

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Some interesting things I dug up while going through the archives at FlowingData.com:

• Good for your stats class or a discussion of how people (BP, specifically) manipulate(s) statistics.


• Regression-able data about TV sizes as a function of time? ...Could be a good intro to Pythagorean Theorem-related discussion about the sizes of TV's.


• Simply fun to know: Legal drinking ages around the world.


• Maybe for the econ teachers: a visualization of the causes of the 2008 US financial meltdown.


• A fascinating representation of how the recession does not hit everyone equally. (Move your mouse up and down to see "hidden" ethnic-age-education lines that are either above or below the national unemployment average.)


• More about unemployment in the States over time.

Some of it is teachable material; others are just cool to check out. It's really interesting how media can enhance your interpretation of numeric data. The guy has some other really neat stuff, but I figured I would link to the short list that appealed to me the most.

Inception and Math

I went and saw Inception yesterday; it was fantastic! There were some inconsistencies in the plot, like what happens when people get shot (Do they die?? do they go back up one level?? Does it depend on their level of sedation??), but the fight scenes were original and the plot kicked some serious ass.

Spoiler Alert -->

And, make no mistake -- I did not miss the math references in the movie. They said that every time you go into another dream-within-a-dream, the time expands by a factor of 20. So, 10 hours in real life is "about a week in a first-level dream, about a month in a second-level dream, and about 10 years in a third-level dream." They then did a similar analysis towards the end of the movie, to figure out how much time they still have left in each dream to get stuff done. --Not to mention there was a good amount of Geometry -- transformations (reflections, rotations), and even a discussion of impossible Geometric constructions (ie. infinite-loop staircases)! Beautiful.

Awesome WCYDWT material, once I can get my hands on a copy of the movie. :)

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If you are an aspiring PreCalc teacher (like me!), you might be looking around for tools or demos that will illustrate / elucidate the sometimes-confusing concepts of radians, degrees, arc lengths, etc.

Fortunately, Mr. H has a slew of good tools you might be able to use. :) He creates things with GeoGebra that I had no idea were possible! AMAZING.

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I am frustrated that Geoff and I don't have cell phones while visiting in the States. I waited for a friend for an hour yesterday at the corner of Columbus and 82nd, but still missed her in the end! argh. I felt really bad because we were waiting at two different places, and I didn't have a phone to call her with. Boooo.

But, on a good note, I did get to hang out and catch up with my friend John for a bit, before he rushed off to the airport. (This seems to be a trend with me/him.) :) It was lovely, and totally worth the two-hour commute from Jersey to grab breakfast with him at 9am in the city! (That meant I was waiting outside for the bus at 7:10am, after catching only about 5 hours of sleep!)

In other news, Geoff and I went swing-dancing on Thursday, and it was lovely! Geoff sweated through 3 t-shirts; that's a pretty good measure of how great the night was. Now my old people knees are hurting, and I'm hoping that they will recover by next Thursday (the next Fram). :)

In the meanwhile, I am going to look at property with Geoff. I anticipate this being loads of fun. (Not.)

Cameras, Shutter Speeds, and Suspicious Half-Chickens

In the interest of taking motion-blurred pictures of rotating objects (a la this, this, this, this, or this), I did some mini-research about my digicam and about the iPhone. I'm not one to be particularly bogged down on electronics or to be nitpicky about what tools I own, etc. But, the results of my research have spurred me to want to get another camera (or one of the newer iPhones)!!

It turns out that the Canon Digital Elph -- which Geoff and I have and love -- only has two modes: one being instantaneous exposure (with flash) and the other being long exposure (1 second or longer). For the purposes of math-teaching, if I were to take motion-blurred pictures myself, the exposure should be somewhat variable in the 0 to 1 second range. And, more depressingly, it looks like because Geoff has an older iPhone (iPhone 3G, with OS version 3.0), its built-in camera does not have all the spiffy features that I would need, either. --Doh!! I'll have to keep looking around for another solution, I guess. In the meanwhile, the Flickr photos will have to do (provided that their owners are kind enough to share their shutter speeds with me).

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By the way, it's pretty amazing that Geoff and I have not gotten really, really sick from food poisoning in our 12 months of living together. Case in point, two nights ago I decided to try cooking a new chicken dish. Now, I'd say that I'm a pretty decent Chinese-food chef, but whenever I try a new dish, it's still really nerve-wracking because my mom's recipes are hand-wavy at best. In this case, it was something like, "You boil half a chicken with some salt, and then when that's done, you scoop out the oil at the top of the broth, and you add the oil to some chopped ginger, scallions, and you add some salt to the dip. You take a big butcher knife to chop up the chicken into slices, and -- tada! You'll have what's called the Scallion-Oil Chicken." Sounds pretty easy, but it turned out that for some reason, part of the chicken we boiled was pink even after a while of cooking (and we were pretty sure, by the way, that this chicken was well-defrosted before cooking). We sliced it up pretty well and threw it back in the broth for some more time, and then took it out. After a couple of bites, Geoff and I decided to be safe and to microwave the chicken before eating.

I'll never know if that chicken was fully cooked or not. It tasted oddly tender and looked oddly pink even after the microwaving. But, I'll say that this is the first time I've topped off any cooking feat with microwaving! It's royally sad. And, amazingly, Geoff and I didn't get sick from that meal; we just might have stomachs of steel!

Stormtroopers Fun

Cute, and possibly in the "What Can You Do With This?" teaching department:



For those of you non-teachers, WCYDWT (What Can You Do With This?) is an innovative way of formulating lessons that I am going to try to incorporate into my classes this year. It involves taking a piece of interesting, rich media (ie. video or picture), and asking the kids a question that naturally arises as they observe this. Then, the kids brainstorm the pieces of data that they will need to collect before you reveal the available info to them piecewise. The calculation comes in the final part of the problem, not immediately, thereby maximizing the amount of meta-processing they need to do. You should anticipate me updating regularly throughout the year, to reflect my efforts in this area.

(Pictures taken from What Stormtroopers Do on Their Day Off.)

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By the way, this is a cute application for the sum of a Geometric sequence, that I found over at the NCTM site.

Each spring, a trout pond is restocked with fish. That is, the population decreases each year due to natural causes, but at the end of each year, more fish are added. Here’s what you need to know.

• There are currently 3000 trout in the pond.


• Due to fishing, natural death, and other causes, the population decreases by 20% each year, regardless of restocking.


• At the end of each year, 1000 trout are added to the pond.

Find a mathematical model for the trout population over time.