(x, why?) Mini: Octonions

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Now I'm wondering about octgarlic.

Unfortunately, this is from a part of mathematics that has past me by. Something from after I started concentrating on my computer science studies in college.

I've seen the word "octonion" before, but it just popped up when i was lazily checking through a list of math blogs I bookmarked a couple years ago but haven't really visited. Sadly, I don't always know at first glance what they're talking about, and I rarely have the time to do the "catch-up" work to figure it out.

Survey Says: Granularity!

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

All I had for Annie was "Cumulative Frequencies Open, Captain.", but it fit neither the space nor the flow of the dialogue.

True story. A very similar question appeared in an online survey, and that's what I imagined in my mind.

Oh, and the History teacher would've been the doctor if I wanted to extend the metaphor, but it was going too far already.

That Moment When . . . II

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

At least most of the student work I'd hung up had been taken down. Most of it.

Another teacher, new to the school this year, asked me about document cameras, and wondered why she had the only math classroom without one. Equipment moves around sometimes, and she could request one. She told me a few days later that she happened to open the bottom drawer of her desk and found the camera in that drawer.

I stopped and stared in disbelief and told her the story. I was the first teacher to get one because the AP insisted I try it out. They were in such a hurry to set me up that they never locked it down or attached it to the desk or the computer. At the end of the year, after a brief though of larceny, I put it in that drawer so it would be out of sight and somewhat safe. Nearly a year and a half later, it was still in the same spot. Whoever had the room in the intervening time either hadn't used the drawer or didn't know how to use the camera.

By the way, this was the very same camera which was used to lure me into my surprise 50th birthday party.

(x, why?) Mini: B for Bank?

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Alas, so what then is the buzz?

(I bet you thought I was going to go with two bees or not two bees, didn't you? Not gonna do it.)

Write? Check!

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Check? Write!

I still write a few, mostly for charitable organizations where it makes for a handy receipt.

What I really need to write is a name for the Science teacher! He doesn't have one. Almost all of the other (human) characters have names -- even Judy and Chuck, who were only named in a comic that neither of them were in, but were named nonetheless!

Maybe I should have a Contest. Or maybe a Suggestion Box. Does he look like a Tim? Gary? It shouldn't be anything too "out there" if only because Mike and Ken would've made fun of it by now (especially Ken). So what do you think?

In the meantime, write "2015" on the first five or six blank checks in your board. You'll be glad you did.

(x, why?) Mini: Getting Around

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Around and around and around. That's a lot of pi.

(x, why?) Mini: Midpoint Quadrilaterals

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

It wasn't a typo. I just misread the title. I had hoped for a really cool article. Oh, well.

Fun things happen if you connect the midpoints of the sides of a quadrilateral, forming a new, smaller quadrilateral, and then connect those midpoints, and then those . . .

Teacher Haiku, II

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Five more than seven / When increased another five / Totals seventeen.

You can translate that into an aritmetic expression, or you can consider it a shout-out to Jason Deeble's Monster Haiku, which as a daily M-F strip, is on track to pass the number of strips of this comic sometime in the next couple weeks.

Sure I probably could've timed it to find when they'd be equal -- solving a system of equations and all that -- but I'd probably forget to post one day and just throw it all off.

Also check out this haiku strip from March 2014.

Those Daring Young Men

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Flying trapezoid just doesn't have the same ring.

I learned two things over the weekend. First is the word trapezium, which I don't recall encountering before. Outside of the U.S., it's a trapezoid. Apparently, inside the U.S., it's an irregular quadrilateral. That's probably the most interesting thing I've learned about trapezoids since college when a professor said that if the definition of trapezoid were at least one pair of parallel sides then parallelograms would be a special case of trapezoid, and all of it would fall under the Trapezoid Rule. (The triangular analog to this is that an equilateral traingle is a special type of isosceles triangle.)

The second thing I learned is that I have been mistaken for most of my life about a very old song that my parents would sing (and which was featured in at least one Popeye cartoon). The name of the song is The Daring Young Man of the Flying Trapeze. For whatever reason, possibly since the time I left kindergarten, I thought the lyrics were "those daring young men". It would make sense: you never see one acrobat; it's always a family or a troupe. Sure, one of them might be the "manly" one of the group to appeal to the young ladies, but to a five-year-old, who would notice? It's also possible that I've just been confusing it with the movie title Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, by which I don't mean Dick Dastardly and Muttley.

In any case, I already had four young men in the picture and I wasn't erasing three of them just to conform to an 80-year-old song.

Final notes: the background is a black-and-white rendition of a photo I took just after sunrise from my corner last week. The ones from my doorstep were better, but I went to the corner for one shot so I could avoid the traffic signal and lamppost.

The source of my initial sighting of "trapezium" was the cavmaths blog entry A Puzzling Heptagon.

Goals for 2015

"Looking at my list of goals for 2015 and I notice that the majority depend upon the acquisition of superpowers. Could prove an obstacle."
-- Christopher Burke, on Twitter and Facebook

I do have a handful of goals -- more like suggestions, guidelines, really -- which will not require superpowers, but might involve managing or creating extra time. (Okay, so maybe that one is a superpower...)

A few things which I would like to do more of this year, in no particular order:

- Read more. Goal is a book a week, particularly now that I'm commuting by train instead of car. This is malleable -- I'm not going to stick to sixty-page novellas and avoid seven-hundred page monstrosities because I can't finish in time. And I reserve the right to use that week to evaluate if the book is even worth reading -- if I can't get through chapters 1 and 2 in four subway rides, it's not likely to happen. And, generally speaking, I usually hate 700-page books anyway.

-- Write more. Not just math articles, but stories, drafts of stories, whatever. I can't self-publish anything if there's nothing written in final form. I've taken too long off. Pick a plot and go for it. Maybe I'll troll twitter for plot suggestions, and ask for crazy combos. Whatever.

-- Record more. No, I'm not going to start a podcast, but I could start recording my blog entries in the same way that I recorded my class summaries a couple of years ago. I stopped because my students weren't listening to them. I know this because I hid Easter eggs in those reviews.

-- Transcribe. I used to keep writing journals. I have all of them. These days, I make notes in whatever's handy. I have three or four different notebooks with overlapping anecdotes and plot ideas. They need to be consolidated. Likewise, there are comic ideas buried everywhere, and I need to find them. Somewhere, I have the topic for this year's Mothers Day comic, and unless I find it again or the topic comes up again, I won't be making it this year.

In any case, the old journals should be typed up. I have twenty-year-old story ideas that need to be done already. Especially now that I have 20 years more writing experience and won't write stuff that will make me cringe when I re-read it. (At least, not as much.)

-- Learn how to make an eBook, and then make some eBooks. Put them on my kindle or put them on Amazon for sale. Whether it's an .epub fiction anthology or a .pdf collection of Common Core worksheets, I should have something out there. Branding.

-- Find a permanent teaching slot. It looks like I won't be going back to either of my last two teaching positions, so I need to find a new one where I'll be happy and less frustrated, where most of the students want to learn and the rest are able to once drawn to it. It's not out of the realm of possibilities.

-- Blog as I can. No, seriously, December taught me not to over-promise (particularly since I'm overestimating the number of people I'm actually promising). I delivered pretty well on the blogging, but the comic suffered. Even though the blog entries seem to get more hits than the comics, the comics are what got me started and they're my first love and first priority.

First Shoutout of the Year

I have to give a shoutout to "Life, the Universe and One Brow". According to the statistics I've been able to gather, after social media sites and search engines, One Brow was the first blog to send me traffic, and the only one to crack the top ten. It's strange to see the blogging landscape change as more people find me through news feeds (and other RSS feeds) than through other blogs they read, but social media has risen. The people have spoken with their clicks (not even mouse-clicks) that they like a centralized repository for their links.

"Mr. Brow" is a part-time teacher and full-time software engineer, and his musings can be found at http://lifetheuniverseandonebrow.blogspot.com/ .

As for my other stats for 2014, they were actually quite boring.

If you exclude links to the main page of the blog, which were considerable, and just look at the individual pages people landed on, my comics took a bit of a hit. I'm hoping that's because people just come to the page and see them without clicking on an individual page, but I really don't know.

Of the top 20 pages, only three were comics, and only one of those from 2014. (Coffee Logic" still gets top honors because of the link from Spiked Math, which have a big cult following. I'm forever grateful that Mike always gives a tip of the hat to my site when there something here that's similar to something he's done.

I shouldn't surprise anyone that the links with the most hits were all related to the New York Regents exams. Those pages get hits in the run-up to exams as students look for explanations to old problems as well as in the days immediately following each exam as I review the new tests.

Biggest shocker was the Top 20 placement of this column: Hey, Internet: Where's My Picture of Me and Ann B. Davis?

I think that speaks for itself and the Internet pretty well.

It's All About The Year, The New Year ... 2015

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

And you know that he probably does, too.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The new year, 2015, brings some interesting numbers when converted into other bases. Granted, I find most numbers interesting in some way, but these still have interesting features.

In base 2 (binary), we have a palindrome; it's the same backward. The 0 in the middle means that we are 32 years away from all 1s and 33 away from rolling over the counter and adding another digit.

In base 3 (trinary), the number can be broken down into 2 20 21 22, which is somewhat sequential.

In base 4 (tetranary(?), ah skip it!), which is related to base 2 by virtue of being a power of 2, we get 133 133. It's not the palindrome that base 2 is; it's something more fun!

I don't have much to say about bases 5, 6, or 7. They have pairs of numbers, but that's hardly surprising. Two of them look like zip codes, so I checked: 31030 is Fort Valley, Georgia and 13155 in an area of upstate New York, south of Syracuse. (I thought it might be a section of Queens, in New York City, which is why I checked. Nope.) Last year, base 5 was 31024, which had all five available numbers in it, but we're a year too late for that.

In base 8 (octal), another power of 2, we get another repetition: 3737. Wonderful.

In base 9, meh. I hope everyone could figure out what base 10 was, so I skipped it. Base 11 likewise is boring as no alphabetic characters were required to substitute for numbers greater than 9.

In base 12, it gets interesting. While 12 is a multiple of 2, it isn't a power of 2. Using alphabetic characters, it's 11BB, but the "B" is a stand in for 11, so it's actually 1,1,11,11. Practically binary! (But it's not.) Note: in bases larger than 10, such as Sexagesimal, it is common to write the numbers in decimal form (no letters) and separate the powers with commas.

In base 13, we have 11, 12, 0 because the year is divisible by 13. Last year was 11, 11, 12. The year before 11, 11, 11. (You see: there's always something to be found!)

Finishing up, in base 14, 10 and 3 make 13. And we end with snoozy bases 15 and 16 (hexadecimal), which aren't all that interesting this year, although next year is 7E0 or 7, 14, 0. Something to look forward to!