Brighter Flames Arrayed

And now, a heartwarming story about how I can make a living in this harsh economic climate thanks to My Little Pony. (Actually this is really more a tale about how I love cartoons and how sometimes the silliest things matter when it comes to admissions work. And an excuse to post ponies on my blog.)

Here’s a thing: I kind of love My Little Pony. So much that I spent part of my spring break making My Little Pony math memes. See exhibits A, B and C below:

(Note that Rainbow Dash, the rainbow-colored pony, actually produced the bad hair/mane-style on the purple pony by flying clockwise. Hence this is the best/only My Little Pony vector calculus pun in existence.)

Okay, now that my blog is covered in pictures of multicolored magic ponies… on to the story!

I first got into MLP because I bought a cheap calendar on sale at Michael’s (it was G3.5, for those of you who are pony collectors) for a dollar. I needed a cheap, expendable calendar for course planning and it was either My Little Pony or something involving trucks. Ponies won because they get lower mileage. Also, it was pink, and having a frilly pink calendar in my office would be completely hilarious. But unbeknownst to me staring at pink ponies who are best friends doing cute things like eating pie or whatever for hours everyday changed me. It made me kinder, gentler, and generally happier. It could also have been any of the other variables in my life (like eating less meat, going to church more often, drinking less coffee, having a cleaner kitchen, whatever) but I’m going to attribute it to the pink/purple ponies. Then a friend showed me some YouTube mashups of MLP and video games and Britney Spears music and whatever and *poof* next thing you know I’m watching the entire season of the new animated series and debating the merits of each pony on the Internet.

And since friendship is all about sharing wonderful things I decided to show my friends animated ponies. The most relevant part here is that one of these friends happens to be a coworker in the dean’s office. Fast forward a couple weeks and she bounced up to me and told me “Wing a student just decided to come to our school because of ponies!”. I though she meant regular ponies because we have a horse barn—it’s not uncommon for students to choose our school because they like riding. Then she clarified: by “ponies” she really meant “magical purple unicorns”.

So it turns out that this potential student was visiting and sat with my friend during lunch. They started talking and somehow the subject of ponies came up. My friend was able to engage this potential student in meaningful conversation about Twilight Sparkle (that’s the purple pony) due to the fact that I kind of sat her down and made her watch an hour of ponies with me. The parent of the student was shocked—she has never seen someone engage her child this well before! “Clearly,” she said, “my kid needs to go to this school.”

And since annual faculty salaries are about equal to tuition, this is the story of how I got my job funded due to My Little Pony. Okay, I’m stretching it a bit. Well, a lot. And it won’t stand up in court or anything. But whatever. I’m going to go and print out new business cards anyway.

Wing :: Jul.03.2011 :: Posts :: No Comments »

One of the signs of growing old is that I no longer necessarily insist on using free, open source software. Back in college I’d spend hour playing around with Linux and wrote classes and templates for LaTeX and used was proud that I was the only person who would write my papers in Abiword or whenever OpenOffice was like back then or LyX. Down with Microsoft Word! Boo!

And then at some point I didn’t have the time to spend on making open source, free applications do the things I want them to do. I just wanted to do things because that’s all I had time for. In fact, I can pinpoint the actual moment when I just said “okay, screw these free, open source alternatives” was when I needed to make screencasts.

Back in 2008 (and it’s still much the same) the major software packages for screen capturing were Cantasia Studio and the free CamStudio. I spent a few hours playing with CamStudio with mixed results. It took a while to get everything set up with my hardware, and then it took an even longer while to figure out what other pieces of free software I needed to hook to the production chain to compress the video files I made to a reasonable size.

See, CamStudio works, but in order to set it up properly and getting it to not interfere with my work flow would take me several hours. Or it’d take one of our IT guys several hours. In either case that’s enough labor/time to buy a copy of Camtasia Studio, which by default does not interfere with my work flow and streamline everything. Instead of going through arcane menu options there are three button that do things I want them to do. Hooray! I can spend all the extra time on making content.

Sometimes my youthful idealism still goes “blargh, you should be supporting the FOSS movement blah blah blah blah”, and I guess I do. I am writing this post on a machine running Linux right now. But that’s not necessarily because I’m all like “yay grassroots hooray” but more because Ubuntu works way better than Windows 7 does on this machine and that I don’t need Windows on it to run certain software (like Microsoft OneNote, which is essentially what I use 70% of the time for work-related computer tasks now) that I would otherwise need. And the FOSS movement has made huge amounts of progress. Ubuntu installs faster than Windows; I no longer have to spend two hours reading man pages to get wifi working on a fresh Linux install; OpenOffice does 95% of what I need it to do quickly. But the problem is that sometimes there’s still that 5% that needs to be fixed by, essentially, tossing money at the problem.

This is why people buy Macs, I guess. There are people in this world who chop their own firewood, and I’d love to do that. But when I need the heat running right now so I can get to five hundred other things, I’m okay with paying for central heating. Besides, being old and having a job helps.

Wing :: Mar.21.2011 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Look! I made a pattern! It’s based on the Amsterdam cross stitch font I found here, though I adjusted the widths of some letters for more uniformity. This is really just a test, so I did it on 11-count fabric and didn’t even center the thing correctly… Also the equals signs are a little too long. Oops. But, here it is. If you want the pattern, well it’s not hard to just look at the picture and count, I guess?

Oh here’s another thing I did, which isn’t as cool but it’s still pretty awesome. The stitch count on the borders are the first few digits of e.

Next up: trying to figure out how to get integral signs and such to work nicely with this font. That, and maybe actually iron these things.

Wing :: Mar.07.2011 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Since I’m too busy to write about teaching math, here are posts/articles from people smarter than I am writing about teaching math.

The Mis-Education of Mathematics Teachers by Hung-Hsi Wu, from the Notices of the AMS. Wu points out the disconnect between what “pure” mathematicians insist math teachers and math ed folks learn in terms of content and what teachers actually really need to teach mathematics successfully. He also talks about how K–12 mathematics can be taught to teachers in very rigorous ways that can be translated easily to their teaching so that they understand the mathematics fully and that everything they learn is useful in the classroom.

New Adventures in Government Waste, from Learning Curves, where a blogger suggests that instead of investing money in questionable professional development ventures we simply use that money to pay off bad teachers so they quit their jobs.

The /r/math List of Useful Free Online Math Resources from Reddit/r/math. Not super complete, but a good list.

Wing :: Feb.20.2011 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Hey, the pseudocontext problem I submitted appeared on dy/dan! Woo! I guess it really speaks more of the textbook’s weaknesses than my ability to pick out bad problems, but can I still get some credit for it?

The problem, from McGrawHill’s Algebra 1, is transcribed below:

The Caverns of Sonora has two different tours: the Crystal Palace Tour and the Horseshoe Lake Tour. The total length of both tours is 3.25 miles. The Crystal Palace Tour is a half-mile less than twice the distance [sic] of the Horseshoe Lake Tour. Determine the length of each tour.

When I taught Algebra 1 last year this problem was hailed by the students as the most ridiculous problem I assigned. Its only “real world” relevance is that if you were in the Caves of Sonora and a crazy troll-balrog popped up and asked that you solve a contrived math puzzle lest you be cast into the dark chasms below.

Wing :: Jan.09.2011 :: Posts :: No Comments »