That stands for Smith and W… …Relax: the W doesn’t stand for Wesson! It stands for Wollensky, of course. Normally Barbara and I would never go to such a high-end restaurant, but this was a special occasion. We had dinner… Read More ›
Month: February 2023
What’s so beautiful about algebra?
“Nothing,” say some of my students. “You can always find the value of x,” say some others. “It’s useful in real life,” says one. “No it isn’t!” says another. By this point we’ve moved far afield from the original question…. Read More ›
It can’t happen here. (Or can it?)
What took me so long? I have finally finished reading Jo Walton’s 2006 alternative history novel, Farthing, subtitled A Story of a World that Could Have Been, Volume I of the Small Change trilogy. Walton has written two of my… Read More ›
No, APL doesn’t stand for “Alison, Phil, and Larry.”
Let’s suppose your unimaginative instructor gave you this task: add up all the whole numbers from 1 through 42. You have, of course, several options: Or, if your language of choice is APL, you could simply write a one-line program… Read More ›
Ὁ Ἡρóδοτος: A beautiful new edition (in English, not Greek)
Can you name three or four ancient world historians? I don’t mean modern writers who study the history of the ancient world; I mean writers who lived in the ancient world and wrote about the history of their time and… Read More ›
What grade should these get?
We continue to hear concerns about Artificial Intelligence, especially ChatGPT, nearly every day. As the link in the previous paragraph will take you to my second post about ChatGPT, this must be the third, and I really don’t want to… Read More ›
Globle
Following in the recent tradition of Wordle and its many spinoffs, Globle is an online game that will let you test your knowledge of geography in an unconventional format. The instructions are simple. First your opponent (the computer) picks a… Read More ›
The Next Generation
The Next Generation. No, not Star Trek—we’re talking America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation on Amazon FreeVee. Normally I don’t like cooking competitions. But I continued to watch all ten episodes of this competition because of my love for the… Read More ›
Ça va bien aller.
It’s going to be all right, as they say (in Quebecois French) in this novel. After a long wait caused by so many other library patrons, I finally had a chance to read A World of Curiosities, the latest Three… Read More ›
A known unknown? Or maybe it’s an unknown known? Or what?
You do remember Donald Rumsfeld, don’t you? Famous (or infamous) for many things, including the distinction between known unknowns and unknown unknowns, not to mention known knowns and unknown knowns. Confused yet? James Harbeck—whom I’ve cited a dozen times in… Read More ›
You are what you wear.
“Wait a minute!” you say. “Shouldn’t that be you are what you eat?” Well, yes, the familiar quotation is indeed “You are what you eat”—or “Der Mensch ist was er ißt” in the original German—but the two claims are closely… Read More ›
William stays warm.
Outside it’s –6° F, but William is keeping warm on his kitty couch, right next to the heat.
This high-school reunion was even deadlier than usual.
The senior superlatives in my high-school yearbook didn’t include Most Likely to Murder. Did yours? Probably not. But that’s the title of the fourth (and last?) novel in Carole Shmurak’s Susan Lombardi series. I reviewed the first in the series… Read More ›
Clearly a ¼-pounder is larger than a ⅓-pounder. After all, 4 is larger than 3. Right?
Americans don’t understand numbers—especially when those numbers are fractions. You may know the true story about Arby’s customers who were convinced that a new ⅓-pound burgers contained less meat than the familiar ¼-pounder, since 4 is larger than 3. Maybe… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 