Recent Posts - page 126

  • Playing with Trains

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    Currently I’m halfway through reading Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale, a memoir by Sam Posey. There’s a certain irony to the title. The word “passion” is accurate, for this book is truly about Posey’s deep enthusiasm and passion… Read More ›

  • MyLifeBits, Borges, and big ideas

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    On yesterday’s episode of NPR’s Living on Earth, Steven Cherry interviewed Gordon Bell about his project at Microsoft, called MyLifeBits. Bell is in the process of recording everything in his life in digital form: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s… Read More ›

  • Science, math, & engineering

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    A fellow Dorchesterite, calling himself Trxckster — yes, the third letter is indeed an x, not an i — quotes visionary Alan Kay in his blog: Today, science (a concern with what is real) is mixed with mathematics (a concern… Read More ›

  • The hub of the Hub?

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    Dot! Dorchester is becoming the city’s hip new destination after dark says the headline above Johnny Diaz’s big story splashed over the front page of the Living section of today’s Boston Globe. Not Landsdowne Street, not the South End, says… Read More ›

  • Calculus limericks?

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    I can’t resist quoting from Rudbeckia Hirta’s post in her blog today: I have been dared by one of my colleagues to write one of the questions on my calculus exam in the form of a limerick. This is especially… Read More ›

  • Getting things done

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    For several months now, I’ve been determined to implement some version of David Allen’s compelling Getting Thing Done. His book by that title was one of those rare self-help books that immediately grabbed my attention and thoroughly convinced me that… Read More ›

  • Graphic organizers

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    Many high-school teachers believe that so-called graphic organizers are helpful to students. Readers who are my age may wonder what a graphic organizer is. According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, a graphic organizer is an instructional tool used… Read More ›

  • dbar

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    Dorchester is actually getting some high-quality restaurants. A couple of years ago, the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner transformed itself from a typical Irish pub to an excellent restaurant. The new C.F. Donovan’s in Savin Hill serves inexpensive but reliably… Read More ›

  • Who buys lottery tickets?

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    Try doing a Google search on the pair of phrases “lottery tickets” “tax on the poor”; you’ll find surprisingly few hits. Change poor to stupid and you’ll collect a few more hits, but still only 507 (at this moment). I’ve… Read More ›

  • Pre-fix

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    One of my precalculus students (or is it the hyphenated pre-calculus?) thought that he was studying calculus. He figured that precalculus was a kind of calculus, just as differential calculus is a kind of calculus. What does that prefix “pre-”… Read More ›

  • Numbers and Palindromes

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    Numbers and Palindromes. No, not numbers that are palindromes: Numbers and Palindromes, the television show and the movie. I wrote about Numbers six months ago; at that point I had only seen three episodes, and it would have been premature… Read More ›

  • Identifying a language

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    I was excited to read about Xerox’s Language Guesser. If you can’t identify a sentence in a foreign language, just paste the sentence into their convenient type-in field, and the intelligent Xerox software will correctly guess the language. Sounds like… Read More ›

  • What's wrong with this problem?

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    The problem below comes from the Education Records Bureau’s Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) for middle school students. How many things can you find wrong with it? Thanks for Thane Plambeck for the pointer.

  • Pi

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    Listen closely…

  • Another B&B

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    Just got back from Narragansett, RI, where we attended the wedding of two of my former students. They became high-school sweethearts ten or eleven years ago, and now they’re married! And so we have another B&B to report on (see… Read More ›

  • Dadaism lives

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    As reported on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, we will be observing International Dadaism Month for a short month consisting of only 13 days: 4 February, 1 April, 28 March, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26… Read More ›

  • From David Allen

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    Two quotations (from David Allen’s newsletter): A task left undone remains undone in two places — at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they… Read More ›

  • Worth a detour

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    Despite the general lack of excitement in Elmira, it does boast two great attractions: the Arnot Art Museum and the Chemung Valley History Museum. Walking into the history museum, I was immediately taken aback by being offered the senior citizens’… Read More ›

  • Hotel or B&B?

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    When we go to Elmira (see yesterday’s post), Barbara and I usually stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in Horseheads. (Yes, you heard that right: Horseheads.) Like any of the low-end Hiltons, it is boring, predictable, and perfectly adequate. So… Read More ›

  • Sunny Elmira

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    Here I am, enjoying my vacation in the tropical paradise of Elmira, New York. No, wait! I must be thinking of someplace else. Elmira isn’t a tropical paradise — it’s a cosmopolitan urban center with hundreds of exciting cultural opportunities… Read More ›