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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want more you can find them at the official web site, which is just a static page now but will probably be all Web 2.0-ified at some point…

Speaking of new projects, here’s an old project: the webcomic (about math and bunnies) that I’ve been making for the last seven years finally ended.

Okay, so I’ve been not-updating it for long stretches of time so it’s not been continually updated for seven years, but it’s been a project I’ve been working on since ate 2003 (and really got started around 2000 if you count everything that led up to it), so it’s a little sad to see it end. But it’s really time for it to end both because I really don’t have the time or energy to keep it going (as evident from the sparse updates) and I’ve always planned the comic to end before 500 strips. Counting the extra-sized strips, I am probably at the 500 count about now anyway. Anyway, now you can read Meh~! in its entirety at mathbunnies.net.

Alternate title: why I haven’t had any time to blog. (I shouldn’t blame my students completely, though, since Minecraft is also a major factor in this.)

The foreman’s name was John McCann
By God, he was a blamed mean man
Last week a premature blast went off
And a mile in the air went big Jim Goff.

And when next payday came around
Jim Goff a dollar short was found
When he asked, “What for?” came this reply
“You were docked for the time you were up in the sky.”

Basically, Jim Goff was docked a dollar for the time he spent blown into the sky by an explosion. So, naturally, I wanted to know how much Jim was paid per hour. To do that I needed to figure out how long he spent in the sky if he reached a height of 1 mile. That’s a simple physics problem and I’ll let you solve it. I’ll put my answer below.

What I got was that it took Jim 10.46 seconds to fall from a height of 1 mile (which is about 1609 meters), and that his
initial/final velocity was 102.53 m/s. So that means that he spent 20.92 seconds in the air. At a rate of 1 dollar per 20.92 seconds he’d be paid 172 dollars per hour. According to the Inflation Calculator, $172 in 1888 (when the song was written) is about $4054 in 2009. At 40 hour work weeks and 50 weeks a year (which is not accurate since a railroad worker worked over 10 hours a day and probably worked everyday but Sunday, but let’s just assume they had good unions and labor laws back then) it would mean that Jim Goff’s yearly salary, in 2009 dollars, was about 8 million dollars.

Using the initial velocity and assuming that Jim weights 200 pounds, I also calculated the kinetic energy of Jim, which was about 473040 joules. I found here that black powder contains 3 million joules of energy per kg, so assuming no energy loss in the blast and supposing that all the energy was directed towards Jim then about 0.16kg or 0.35lbs of powder was used. According to the chart on page 146 of this textbook, that’s a reasonable amount of powder to use in railroad construction. So this bit is definitely realistic.

The hourly seems a little bit high. Of course, the foreman probably just rounded 20 seconds to one day or one hour because he was a “blamed mean man”. But then again, getting paid is just one part of the process. The harder part is to live to spend it and, well, it’s doubtful that Jim could survive a one mile fall, let along a blast that took him that high.

Tarriers live on work and sweat
There ain’t no tarrier got rich yet
Sleep and work, then work some more
And we’ll drill right through to the devil’s door.”

This weekend I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. With four dozen students on a charter bus. And, honestly, herding almost fifty teenagers through a city that none of the chaperones knew very well (I haven’t been inside the beltway in over a decade) to attend an event on the National Mall with almost a quarter-million people is pretty intense. Many of the students haven’t been to DC either and some of them had never ridden a subway. That’s not to mention the twenty hours of bus ride. But overall it worked out exceptionally well and was, well, pretty sane.

There’s a whole lot to say about the rally and people have all really said it elsewhere. My personal favorite parts of the rally were the Mythbusters preshow (having a quarter-million people do the wave across the entire mall is awesome; warming up a political rally with science is even more awesome), the acknowledgement of a non-binary gender spectrum in the first chorus Jon Steward sang in his duet with Stephen Colbert (despite the general awkwardness of the song) and the time when I clarified to a student that, honey, the National Mall is not a shopping mall and that the word mall predated shopping malls.

I took a bunch of videos and pictures but this one is my favorite. Like Jon Steward said we really had no idea why we were there. Some people were there because it was an Internet party. Some people had genuine political concerns. But, regardless, we all had a really good time and kicked up a whole lot of dust.