I found this great slideshare presentation by Terri Oda via a Gizmodo post, Math Suckage Doesn’t Care About Your Sex, which is a great title, but the presentation really explains why gender disparity in math doesn’t explain gender disparity in the CS profession. Why…..because there is hardly any. Check out the paper she references. Anyway, regardless of the validity. The presentation is a smart, funny, visual, and analytic all at the same time. Check it out.
Lee over at PrimePuzzle pointed me to this cool set of dice that a mathematician devised that decides in one roll who (for up to four players) goes first. The Go First dice are designed to produce no ties, and give everyone an equal chance at going first. What’s cool is that they work for 2, 3, and 4 players.
Questions: how would one construct such a set, and can we construct a set for larger numbers of players? Also, these dice look to be 12-sided. Could the same be done with only 4-sided dice?
I’ve been driving past this sign on the freeway for the past month, and thought this problem up.
Say you’re in the market for a necklace. You want to give mom something nice for the holidays. At Beckers you find a great necklace, it’s only $100 and they have this awesome deal where you might get it free if it snows on New Years day. But before you buy, you step across the street to Lux, Bond, and Green. They happen to have the same necklace. If the LBG price is only $50 where would you purchase the necklace? I think that has a pretty easy answer, but what about if the LBG necklace costs $95. Where do you buy the necklace?
Guess who has sigma eyebrows? Clifford, why didn’t you say something earlier?
I found this stunning image over at Sadburro. It kind of messes with me and inspires me all at once.
Jay sent over this unbelievable magic square. I’d never seen one this large. Even better than the square was the blog he found it in, Futility Closet. It some sort of wierd mix of math and culture. I’m full out addicted.
Thanks, Jay!
I’ve got a bit of a tech fetish, and always convince myself that my students will like a site or app as much as I do. This almost never happens. Prezi really surprised me though. I had planned to use it as a two dimensional authoring space rather than as a presenter, and collaborate with my students to put together an “ultimate” sample final. I was ready for the whole thing not to work. We even got a late start because of storm Alfred. But, I couldn’t believe how many students stepped up to work on a voluntary project, and further the quality of the their work was awesome. It was honestly really fun. I’m looking forward to doing this more in the future.
I was blown away by this WolframAlpha demonstration in one of my feeds this week. It led me somewhat tangentially into a discussion with my College Algebra class about the future of math classes when algebraic solvers become as prevalent as the four function calculators everyone has in their “dumb” phones. If that prospect isn’t scary enough for math teachers, check this out. Natural language queries using Siri. Yikes!
The only part of my current assessments that is safe (for the moment) is the applied (word problem) section. Time to think up some new questions.
I love it when geese and UFO’s fly in that perfect absolute value V pattern.
Found this over at Sadburro
I stumbled on this at Komplexify and it cracked me up. No geek’s Thanksgiving is complete without a turkey keister graph.
Other weird graphs that this reminded me of…the batman graph I found recently. Too bad we don’t have the equation of the turkey butt graph 
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
