Recent Posts - page 121

  • McCall Smith in Botswana

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    In a much earlier post, I discussed Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the first in a series of mystery novels taking place in Botswana. In the intervening months I have subsequently read the next four in the… Read More ›

  • Jasper Fforde

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    I have recently read Jasper Fforde’s first three Thursday Next novels: The Eyre Affair (2002), Lost in a Good Book (2003), and The Well of Lost Plots (Feb. 2004). Where do I begin in describing this offbeat series? One reader… Read More ›

  • Mathematical Gangsta Rap

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    Filled with in-jokes about cryptology and computational complexity, Mathematical Gangsta Rap is an amusing combination of high culture and low culture. But you’ll have to make your own decision about which is which.

  • Suddenly a new car

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    Our trusty Ford Escort station wagon, which was relatively cheap but reliable, finally stopped being either and just died. When you have a nine-year-old car and you’re faced with a $1000 estimate for repairs, you have to decide whether it’s… Read More ›

  • End of hiatus!

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    Finally back from a blog hiatus of almost three months! I am very much looking forward to the new vesion of Blogger, which will permit labels on posts to denote categories. This feature will help viewers who are interested in… Read More ›

  • Quotation from a math student

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    Quotation from a math student at a college that will be unidentified to protect the innocent: That exam was unfair. You made us understand the material. I’ll memorize the phone book if you ask me to, but you can’t expect… Read More ›

  • Chau Chow

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    Dorchester finally has a good Chinese restaurant! For years we’ve had to cross the border into Quincy to eat at the best Chinese restaurant around, the Great Chow (which, as I only discovered two years ago, is owned by the… Read More ›

  • Weston supports its schools

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    On Saturday the residents of Weston voted to override the restrictions of Proposition 2½, thereby providing another year of adequate funding for its schools. Yes, I know that “they can afford it,” but in all too many well-to-do towns the… Read More ›

  • Art Show

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    Yesterday afternoon, Barbara and I attended the third annual art exhibition, “At Home with the Arts,” at The Boston Home, a nursing home for adults with advanced MS. Didn’t buy anything, but there were a number of works we liked…. Read More ›

  • Team-teaching CS and Art

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    So I’m teaching a course called “Create Your Own Computer Game” to fourth-graders at The Saturday Course, and last week I’m talking to Eileen, an artist who teaches “The Art of Drawing”; I happen to remark that some of the… Read More ›

  • Black Orpheus

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    Just watched Black Orpheus on DVD. I hadn’t seen it for at least 35 years, but it still holds up as a classic masterpiece, especially the cinematography. Highly recommended.

  • Converse or contrapositive? (And what does this have to do with the price of oil?)

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    On NPR’s All Things Considered, Robert Siegel just interviewed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about his article entitled “The First Law of Petropolitics.” Friedman stated this law as follows: There is an inverse correlation between the price of oil… Read More ›

  • Another play about math!

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    Or about mathematicians, at any rate: On May 15 and 16, the Underground Railway Theater and The MIT Office for the Arts will be performing a play by Ira Hauptman entitled Partition: A fantasy based on the life of self-taught… Read More ›

  • Rating high schools

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    What kind of metric should we use in order to rate high schools (assuming, of course, that we should rate high schools comparatively, which is a big assumption). According to Newsweek, we should be calculating A/S, where A is the… Read More ›

  • School Days

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    I just finished listening to Robert Parker’s School Days on audiobook. This must be the 75th novel in the Spenser series…no, wait, let me look it up…ah, it only feels like the 75th, it’s actually the 34th. So, with that… Read More ›

  • Charles Swift and Edwin Lewis

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    This afternoon, at the Dorchester Historical Society, historian Charles Swift gave a first-rate presentation to an overflow crowd about the famous-in-some-circles architect, Edwin J. Lewis Jr.; check out Swift’s summary in his blog, including four of his beautiful photos.

  • The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

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    I often find that I’m in the midst of reading two books at once, especially if one is fiction and one is non-fiction. That’s what happened to me recently, finishing both Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,… Read More ›

  • Freakonomics

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    Just finished reading Freakonomics, the much-discussed popularization of applied statistics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, economist and writer respectively. Although Levitt won the Nobel Prize for Economics, this best-seller really is about “applied statistics” rather than economics…. Read More ›

  • Math and Magic

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    The Weston High School Math Club just returned from an enjoyable and informative talk on “Mathematics and Magic Tricks,” presented by Prof. Persi Diaconis of Stanford University and sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute. As always — well, as we… Read More ›

  • To the Power of Three

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    Just finished listening to Laura Lippman’s To the Power of Three on audiobook. This post-Columbine mystery presents a school shooting that’s partly predictable but mostly not so, starting with the fact that the shooter is a girl and concluding with… Read More ›