Happy Halloween! / Merry Christmas!

Yes, it's a Merry Christmas! for all mathematicians because, as everybody knows:

31 OCT = 25 DEC

Okay, lame joke, which has been told a million times, which is why I didn't put it in a cartoon.

No Halloween comic this year because Real Life caused me to be away. Oops. Be back to a semi-regular schedule soon.

R's Cube

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Not to imply that grading standards, while somewhat adjustable, are totally interchangable just by rotating your position 90 degrees ...

Benoit Mandelbrot

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


This conversation, more or less, occurred in the Teacher Center a few days ago.

Happy Birthday!

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Happy Third Birthday to (x, why?)!

When I was writing this up, I remembered that in the opening of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (maybe that should be 4um??), Psuedolus holds up the masks of Comedy and Tragedy -- except that both
are Comedy, so he turns one upside-down and ...

Oh, great! Now I have "Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone ..." running through my head!

Third Anniversary This Sunday

The blog itself might be a little bit older, but this Sunday, October 24, 2010, marks three years since I first posted the Co-medians strip, which started something that I never expected to last as long as it has. So far, 528 strips had been posted, which is an average of 176 per year. An average of a little less than one strip every two days. Not bad when I'm shooting for three times per week (more or less).

Barring any unforeseen problems in the next couple of days, there will be something posted on Sunday.

What You Gonna Do?

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


I spent a lot of time on the dialgoue. And then realized it worked better without any.
Same with the bonus text.

Chekhov's Gun

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Must be the radiation.

EDIT: FYI: The variation in spelling was to prevent giving away part of the joke in the title.

Dept. Meeting

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


To be fair ... I should've printed this on Monday.

But it's good to see Mick out of the Supply room.

Rescued!

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Couldn't make this joke two months ago. Timing is everything.

EDIT: This strip was sighted on reddit.com. It was voted down to zero, of course.

Fun With Ten

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


I went to Comic-Con, but I didn't see Ben-10-10-10 -- or Rin-10-10-10, for that matter.
I did meet some webcomic people, which was fun.

FYI: I used 20-pt type for the "Ten. Ten. Ten." So the date is complete.

Remember: In the Archives, nobody can tell you're late.

Putting the Cart Before the Meter

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Never underestimate the depths I will plumb to find trivial metric references.
Besides, with the comic's title, it was either this or something about parking meters....

Hmmmmm .... parking meters ....

The 0'Factor: Episode 12

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Don't be Dis-ing Pluto. Doesn't make for divine comedy.

Interesting Venn Diagram about the British Isles

In case you've ever wondered the difference between England, Great Britain, the British Isles and the United Kingdom, here is an interesting Venn diagram I ran across explaining it:



Had they fiddled with the Irish dots just a little bit, it would fit geographically, as well.

ObMath Content: This diagram reminds me of the Quadrilaterals Venn diagram in that the intersection of U.K. and Ireland being Northern Ireland is similar to the intersection of a rectangle and a rhombus is a square. Whether Ireland is either rectangle or rhombus is left as an exercise for the reader.

Lucas Numbers

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Not too long from now, at a theater near, near you ...

Math Playground

So it was a really, really rainy Friday morning. Half of my class, the one with the smallest roster, was absent, and half of those attending were taking a makeup test from the day before. I needed to motivate the remaining students to learn something, and, frankly, needed to motivate myself because that wasn't exactly the most conducive environment for starting a new topic.

But this one classroom had a working Smart board. So I started googling math videos, looking for something in particular. Instead I found a game that gave me the following:


At first, I thought it was just a goofy game, and the students were going to give me strange looks and ignore it. WRONG! They ate it up. The smart, go-getter had pencil in hand and was working them out, but the girl in the back was responding almost as quickly. I can't remember the last time I saw her that engaged. (And I had her in a different class last semester.)

We went through all 10 questions of level one (like the first four above) and almost made it through level two (questions five and six, above).

The site, if you're curious, was mathplayground.com, and I found this under videos. Apparently, there was a video attached to this game (which I discovered today), but my school's server blocked it. It didn't matter to me because they were solving multi-step algebraic equations!

The only difference was that they were using popsicles and clocks instead of x and y.
I captured a few of them and edited the images to make an extra-credit worksheet. It's simple enough that I can make my own in the future.

And I probably will.

EDIT: If you're going to print out this picture to photocopy, you might want to load it into paint first and work on the coloring. Those gray rectangles turned black and made reading difficult -- especially considering that I used this as a substitute lesson, so I wasn't there to clarify anything.

100 Centimeters

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Oh, yes. I did.

So, since I've used these two characters twice now, should I give them names?
Discuss.