September 10th, 2008
There’s a lot of them!
I’m having second thoughts. This looks like a depressingly tedious thing to do.
Let’s speed things up by looking at a small sample.
I don’t have a ruler, but I have a Nintendo DS!
Here’s a part of my ceiling with a width and height of 1 Nintendo DS. (I’m tall enough to touch the ceiling.)
There’s about 240 bumps in there.
Now, here’s the speedy part. I’m going to assume this sample represents my ceiling as a whole. That lets me use multiplication to get my final answer.
All that’s left is to measure how big my ceiling is in units of Nintendo DSs.
(No photo evidence of this measurement is available.)
29 by 28! Let’s round up to 30×30. That makes a total of 900 squares.
Victory…
Tags: approximation, counting, rounding
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
August 20th, 2008
Let’s pretend you’re a manager in a publicly held company that wants to disguise the reason why profit was low this quarter.
Say the reason is “x = 3″.
That’s too clear, we need to fluff it up a bit. Add “5″ to both sides.
x + 5 = 8
That’s better, but even people with a basic understanding will be able to decipher the problem, better square both sides.
(x+5)^2 = 64
Hmmm, not long enough. How about distributing that (x+5) square?
x^2 + 10x + 25 = 64
Looking good! Now throw in a red herring.
x^2 + 10x + 25 + 2z = 64 + 2z
Almost… mix everything up?
10x + 7z + 25 + x^2 = 7z + 64
Good job team. With any luck we won’t be held accountable for our setbacks this quarter.
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August 8th, 2008
Check out this article about Math Education: A Mathematician’s Lament
The best way students learn is if they’re curious about the subject. Let them play with math and algebra!
Tags: math education
Posted in teaching | No Comments »
