I've got what I consider to be a poor memory. Or, at least, I try not to rely on it too much (perhaps that's why it's no good?). But anyway, I have a hard time remembering what the current speed limit is when driving. On my drive home yesterday from my holiday travels I got an idea for a helper. I was thinking, if you make a felt cover for the top half of your steering wheel (say), and indicated on it mileages from 25-65 in increments of 5, then with another felt ring you slide around to the appropriate place, you'd have a handy way to remember the speed limit. As long as you remember to update the position of the ring when you see a new speed limit sign, of course. I suggest felt, because it seems to me that two layers of felt might hold eachother together mostly, while still allowing some freedom of motion.
I dunno, maybe it's a poor idea. But as of right now, I like it. Plus when I tell my mom about it, it'll give her something fun to do (she sews, rather a lot).
Of course, it's only a temporary solution until the speed limit signs communicate wirelessly with a sensor in our cars that changes a heads-up display on the dashboard which always indicates the current speed limit. Unless, of course, self-driving cars come around before that, and the issue becomes moot.
Monday, December 29, 2008
A Year of Running
Yeah, yeah, everybody is doing end of the year review posts, or posts looking forward to the next year. But I wanted to mess around with the Google Charts API, and figured my running mileage data was as good a data source as I'd find. So here's the chart I made with my monthly miles:
The lightest blue indicates months with less than 100 miles run, and the one darkest (August) was the only month I passed 200 miles.
Perhaps I should have waited through the next two days to post this, in case I decide to run. But even if I go both remaining days in December, I probably won't go more than 8 miles total. That won't affect my totals too much. Currently I've chalked up 1259 miles this year, occupying a little over 168 hours (= 1 full week). That puts my average pace at just slower than 8 minute miles. I thought about making another chart for my average pace each month, but don't feel like going through the computations. Another useless stat: I went for 178 runs, putting my average run length at just over 7 miles. That's an extra 250 miles and 28 runs over last year.
After August I was looking to crack 1500 miles this year, and was on pace for it. In September I ran my first 'ultra', though really the shortest ultra, a 50k. At that point, my running was looking pretty good, and I was thinking about a sub-3 hour marathon in Richmond in November, and doing a 50 mile run in the spring. However, my research was, as my advisor put it, 'stagnating'. Around the same time I met a girl (lucky me :)), and these factors put a 2 month halt in my running. I'm working on getting back into it, though still at a lesser volume. My current goal is the Charlottesville marathon in April, for my third consecutive year. I have no delusions of beating last year's 3:13, but I'm still hoping for sub-4 (had a 3:55 my first year). Guess we'll see.
Perhaps I should have waited through the next two days to post this, in case I decide to run. But even if I go both remaining days in December, I probably won't go more than 8 miles total. That won't affect my totals too much. Currently I've chalked up 1259 miles this year, occupying a little over 168 hours (= 1 full week). That puts my average pace at just slower than 8 minute miles. I thought about making another chart for my average pace each month, but don't feel like going through the computations. Another useless stat: I went for 178 runs, putting my average run length at just over 7 miles. That's an extra 250 miles and 28 runs over last year.
After August I was looking to crack 1500 miles this year, and was on pace for it. In September I ran my first 'ultra', though really the shortest ultra, a 50k. At that point, my running was looking pretty good, and I was thinking about a sub-3 hour marathon in Richmond in November, and doing a 50 mile run in the spring. However, my research was, as my advisor put it, 'stagnating'. Around the same time I met a girl (lucky me :)), and these factors put a 2 month halt in my running. I'm working on getting back into it, though still at a lesser volume. My current goal is the Charlottesville marathon in April, for my third consecutive year. I have no delusions of beating last year's 3:13, but I'm still hoping for sub-4 (had a 3:55 my first year). Guess we'll see.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Camera Box
Last weekend I bought a Nikon S550 digital camera (on sale at Staples for a little while still, if you were thinking about it). I've been having a good time taking pictures (and getting them off my camera from the command line using gphoto2, totally sweet). When I went to clean up my room a bit and recycle the box, I noticed that the box itself was also pretty cool. The box had a cardboard insert separator, which, when unfolded, looked like:
What's nice about that is with the cuts it has, and the folds, it folds up through a series of rigid motions (no folding/rolling except for on the pre-scored lines) to the following separator:
The whole box itself was also folded from a single unit, which lies flat (when unfolded):
And here they are together:
I don't know. Perhaps it's not that impressive. But I really liked it. No tape on the box, just lots of nice folding. As an origami fan, it appealed to me. Plus it gave me more excuses to take pictures, and play with Picasa.
A Few Quotes
The other day on slashdot, the article "Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty" showed up. I was intruiged, and read the pdf it mentioned - a lovely handwritten paper by Dijkstra. I'm not a CS educator, so I don't have much to comment on about that aspect of the paper (the main point of it). However, I pulled two quotes out, and thought I'd share.
"... by developing a keen ear for unwarranted apologies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today."
"And when it comes to mathematics, you must realize that this is the human mind at an extreme limit of its capacity."
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
I'm 1!
Yep, my first post was one year ago today (though technically, I suppose, my first actual post was a week later). Four short months later I got my first comment, and two more months after that I'd had a visitor from every continent except Antarctica. I've gotten 60 comments (though nearly half of them are from me, responding), and had 125 posts. A post every 3 days, and a comment once a week... I'll take it. Especially because this blog tends to ramble and be pointless, even when it pretends to have something to say. All the same, it's been fun.
I thought I'd go back through and pick out my favorite posts so far. But then I couldn't decide what to link back to, and felt bad linking to myself. Most of my favorites were math posts, so you can find them here, because they were tagged. Perhaps my most useful post, if you live in or near Charlottesville anyway, was my writeup about the Rivanna Trail. According to my feedjit widget, this is also the most popular post (at least, from the past n days, I think that's how it works), followed closely by GPS in Ubuntu (which I find kinda surprising, but who am I to judge?). The post I wish more people had seen was this one, about a decent travel mug. I'm still interested to hear about a good travel mug (lid, in particular), especially now that it's almost gift-giving season :).
So, anyway, Happy Birthday blog! I'm a mostly proud parent. Don't get too jealous of your younger sibling (even if it does math better than you). For those following along, feel free to follow me on twitter, or my reader shared items, if you aren't already. I'd love to reciprocate.
I thought I'd go back through and pick out my favorite posts so far. But then I couldn't decide what to link back to, and felt bad linking to myself. Most of my favorites were math posts, so you can find them here, because they were tagged. Perhaps my most useful post, if you live in or near Charlottesville anyway, was my writeup about the Rivanna Trail. According to my feedjit widget, this is also the most popular post (at least, from the past n days, I think that's how it works), followed closely by GPS in Ubuntu (which I find kinda surprising, but who am I to judge?). The post I wish more people had seen was this one, about a decent travel mug. I'm still interested to hear about a good travel mug (lid, in particular), especially now that it's almost gift-giving season :).
So, anyway, Happy Birthday blog! I'm a mostly proud parent. Don't get too jealous of your younger sibling (even if it does math better than you). For those following along, feel free to follow me on twitter, or my reader shared items, if you aren't already. I'd love to reciprocate.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
A Teaching Statement
Such as it is, I have prepared a reflective (use caution in direct sunlight) teaching statement. I'm neither a deep thinker, nor a proficient writer, so I can't convince myself that the result is any good. Either way, here's what I came up with:
I have no idea why I bother teaching.
I can convince myself that many of my students will need to know mathematics in their future careers. My science students clearly need mathematics, but so do the business students. The fine arts are a little harder to justify, so perhaps pawn it off on "general education." Numeracy, people claim, is practically as important as literacy, even if it doesn't get the same attention (in fact, some people pride themselves on their innumeracy). If nothing else, mathematics courses are a requirement at the University, and I have enough of an understanding of the subject to try to get others through it.
So my issue with teaching isn't that the content isn't important.
My issue with teaching is that, in this connected age, there are effectively unlimited sources for the knowledge that I am supposed to cover in a calculus class. Certainly there has always been the textbook, and I love for my students to read it. But now, online, there are more places to learn calculus than one could possibly use. Entire lectures and individual problems and short snippets get posted as videos to YouTube. Wikipedia contains more information than any one person can know (and it's constantly growing!). I also must compete against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who not long ago started posting all course materials online (for free, accessible by anybody).
So why would a student bother coming to my class? Anything I'll be covering in class could be found online, from the relative comfort of a dorm room. It's not my job to tell students when to think about calculus, so I have no attendance policy. Who am I to tell them when they should be learning? If they are motivated enough to learn the material on their own, I don't want to frustrate their ambitions by making them come to class.
It is this sense of competition that drives my lectures. When planning lectures, I make sure to use examples that aren't covered in the book. I also try to find as many "fun" examples and extra problems as possible. Students don't necessarily want to look at other resources to learn the material I will be teaching. Even motivated students might not take that step. Students might not know where to look on Wikipedia for interesting mathematics that is, at the same time, easy enough to digest without having taken lots of math classes. It's my job to show these things to my students.
It's lucky, then, that mathematics is so fascinating. Surprising amounts can be boiled down and understood without having spent years taking math classes and reading math textbooks. This is my job. Anybody can present material, and cover examples. I think it is important to go further, to find more interesting examples, and historical tidbits. I always hope to show my students some of the beautiful things in mathematics.
During the times I am doing fun examples and presenting material that isn't strictly necessary for the class it is easy to be an excited speaker. However, there is something interesting to be found in nearly every example, and I try to keep my enthusiasm high throughout every lecture. Judging from course feedback, my students feed off this energy, and are more motivated to learn the material. If I can create motivated learners, who start seeing interesting things in the content I teach, then all of those external resources are more likely to be accessed and dug through. All the material in world is worth nothing if students aren't interested in looking at it. It is my hope that I can encourage some to embrace this interest.
I have no idea why I bother teaching.
I can convince myself that many of my students will need to know mathematics in their future careers. My science students clearly need mathematics, but so do the business students. The fine arts are a little harder to justify, so perhaps pawn it off on "general education." Numeracy, people claim, is practically as important as literacy, even if it doesn't get the same attention (in fact, some people pride themselves on their innumeracy). If nothing else, mathematics courses are a requirement at the University, and I have enough of an understanding of the subject to try to get others through it.
So my issue with teaching isn't that the content isn't important.
My issue with teaching is that, in this connected age, there are effectively unlimited sources for the knowledge that I am supposed to cover in a calculus class. Certainly there has always been the textbook, and I love for my students to read it. But now, online, there are more places to learn calculus than one could possibly use. Entire lectures and individual problems and short snippets get posted as videos to YouTube. Wikipedia contains more information than any one person can know (and it's constantly growing!). I also must compete against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who not long ago started posting all course materials online (for free, accessible by anybody).
So why would a student bother coming to my class? Anything I'll be covering in class could be found online, from the relative comfort of a dorm room. It's not my job to tell students when to think about calculus, so I have no attendance policy. Who am I to tell them when they should be learning? If they are motivated enough to learn the material on their own, I don't want to frustrate their ambitions by making them come to class.
It is this sense of competition that drives my lectures. When planning lectures, I make sure to use examples that aren't covered in the book. I also try to find as many "fun" examples and extra problems as possible. Students don't necessarily want to look at other resources to learn the material I will be teaching. Even motivated students might not take that step. Students might not know where to look on Wikipedia for interesting mathematics that is, at the same time, easy enough to digest without having taken lots of math classes. It's my job to show these things to my students.
It's lucky, then, that mathematics is so fascinating. Surprising amounts can be boiled down and understood without having spent years taking math classes and reading math textbooks. This is my job. Anybody can present material, and cover examples. I think it is important to go further, to find more interesting examples, and historical tidbits. I always hope to show my students some of the beautiful things in mathematics.
During the times I am doing fun examples and presenting material that isn't strictly necessary for the class it is easy to be an excited speaker. However, there is something interesting to be found in nearly every example, and I try to keep my enthusiasm high throughout every lecture. Judging from course feedback, my students feed off this energy, and are more motivated to learn the material. If I can create motivated learners, who start seeing interesting things in the content I teach, then all of those external resources are more likely to be accessed and dug through. All the material in world is worth nothing if students aren't interested in looking at it. It is my hope that I can encourage some to embrace this interest.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Slackware!
I've been using Ubuntu for a while. It's got some great features, notably it's package management and update setup (which my friend has complained about, but I've always appreciated). But I've recently been frustrated with things responding slowly on my computer. I've tried turning off services and such, but it never seemed to improve. In the past, I've used gentoo and slackware, and I remembered them being a bit snappier for me. With a new version of slackware out, I thought it was about time to try something new(ish).
So I downloaded the iso images and burned them to cd. I backed up some data (been meaning to look at Amazon's S3 online storage... apparently that'll be another day though), and took the plunge. The setup seemed to be going well, until a failure when it got to installing mysql. Retry, and still fail. Took the disc out, tried cleaning it off, and still fail. So I came back to my ubuntu install, and found these directions about installing slackware without cds. I only skimmed through them, but got a good enough idea how things should go. Since the cds I had would properly boot and let me run setup, I think most of those directions weren't too necessary anyway. I downloaded new iso images, and rebooted with my install cd in the drive. When setup came around to asking for my source, I pointed it at the mount point (which I had made, and mounted things to before running setup) for my iso image, and was good to go.
One thing that confused me was that there are multiple install cds, but the directions at the link above didn't seem to care about that. They only indicated one disk. I mounted discs one and two in different locations, but I think you could save a step and mount both in the same place before running setup. I would have also mounted disc three, but it gave me an error about being able to find loop devices (perhaps I'm only allowed 2?). Anyway, after disc one was done, I was still in setup, and told it to install more packages from the second mount point. Seemed to go fine.
After a reboot, there was lilo, waiting for me. My ubuntu image wasn't there, but I've edited /etc/lilo.conf before, so I wasn't too concerned. First step: make a non-superuser - useradd. Next up, start the windowing environment (as pretty as the command line is) - startx. FAIL. "could not open default font 'fixed'", then "waiting for X server to begin accepting connections" and "giving up". That's not what I wanted to see.
Lynx, to google, and asked about it. This turned up, and using alt-F2 and alt-F1 to bounce between terminals, I got the commands entered. Fingers crossed, 'startx'... Hurray! Xfce.
Now I get to configure things again. Always a good time. I've got firefox 3 installed, and twitterfox, and the flash plugin, and my old bookmarks. I've got my desktop set back up basically the way I had it. That's probably enough for one day. Besides XEmacs and a terminal, that's pretty much all I use anyway. On that note, the default terminal isn't behaving at all for me. I type, and it doesn't even show the characters I type. I've been temporarily using xterm, but it's something I'll have to look at some more.
So I downloaded the iso images and burned them to cd. I backed up some data (been meaning to look at Amazon's S3 online storage... apparently that'll be another day though), and took the plunge. The setup seemed to be going well, until a failure when it got to installing mysql. Retry, and still fail. Took the disc out, tried cleaning it off, and still fail. So I came back to my ubuntu install, and found these directions about installing slackware without cds. I only skimmed through them, but got a good enough idea how things should go. Since the cds I had would properly boot and let me run setup, I think most of those directions weren't too necessary anyway. I downloaded new iso images, and rebooted with my install cd in the drive. When setup came around to asking for my source, I pointed it at the mount point (which I had made, and mounted things to before running setup) for my iso image, and was good to go.
One thing that confused me was that there are multiple install cds, but the directions at the link above didn't seem to care about that. They only indicated one disk. I mounted discs one and two in different locations, but I think you could save a step and mount both in the same place before running setup. I would have also mounted disc three, but it gave me an error about being able to find loop devices (perhaps I'm only allowed 2?). Anyway, after disc one was done, I was still in setup, and told it to install more packages from the second mount point. Seemed to go fine.
After a reboot, there was lilo, waiting for me. My ubuntu image wasn't there, but I've edited /etc/lilo.conf before, so I wasn't too concerned. First step: make a non-superuser - useradd. Next up, start the windowing environment (as pretty as the command line is) - startx. FAIL. "could not open default font 'fixed'", then "waiting for X server to begin accepting connections" and "giving up". That's not what I wanted to see.
Lynx, to google, and asked about it. This turned up, and using alt-F2 and alt-F1 to bounce between terminals, I got the commands entered. Fingers crossed, 'startx'... Hurray! Xfce.
Now I get to configure things again. Always a good time. I've got firefox 3 installed, and twitterfox, and the flash plugin, and my old bookmarks. I've got my desktop set back up basically the way I had it. That's probably enough for one day. Besides XEmacs and a terminal, that's pretty much all I use anyway. On that note, the default terminal isn't behaving at all for me. I type, and it doesn't even show the characters I type. I've been temporarily using xterm, but it's something I'll have to look at some more.
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