"So there are Oliphaunts. But no one at home will ever believe me."

I haven’t been sleeping well so I was almost relieved when I got back to my CHU after teaching math for two hours at the end of the day to find that the Internet had gone down and I wouldn’t have to make a post. Then of course nature kicked in and I had to fiddle with it until it started working again.

The math class had an interesting problem on some of the homework I had assigned. I knew how to figure it out using a brute force-like approach but I stumbled for a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out an elegant way to explain the problem: something simple enough to be understood while providing a good foundation for future reasoning, rather than a simple trick based on memorization or a pseudo-formula magic incantation. The problem was “If it takes 5 men working 4 days to load 5000 tons, how long does it take 8 men to load 10,000 tons?”

Well, the elegant way is to figure it takes one man four days to load 1000 tons, or “1000 tons per man per 4 days” which is trivially rewritten as “250 tons per man per day.” Now, you multiply the whole thing by 8 men: 2000 tons per day. Then 10,000 tons divided by 2000 tons/day is (10,000 tons/2000 tons) * 1 day, or 5 days. It looks a lot better written out because you can see the units build up and then cancel out, which is how you know you have the right answer. The units in this case are: tons, days, and men.

Scrabble on the iPad has become a part of the morning ritual along with the illy café from the moka pot. Sometimes games take days, other times we decide that we have wrecked the board with too many tightly played words and start over. Sometimes we forget whose turn it is and only realize after the next person goes.

The game has a terrible built in dictionary, accepting words like, NE, QI, QUOD, ENVIRO, ZINE and AE. But we aren’t playing seriously so it is tolerated. The official Scrabble dictionary is only about 660k, and this is a licensed version, so I don’t see why they couldn’t include that.

They need to add the ability to store multiple in-progress games, and a customizable dictionary. Worth the $9.99 price, though.

I have a few chores to take care of tonight. I’ll simply leave this hilarious anecdote from Christopher Hitchens about Margaret Thatcher as excerpted by the neo-neocon:

(From “Political change: Hitchens encounters Margaret Thatcher as dominatrix“, via neocon.)

The Instapundit notes where the US is falling behind Russia, India, and now Japan.

India. Russia.

We could have had this here, too. Perhaps we can power our future cars with rainbows and unicorns, since we are about to experience 30 years of irrational panic about off-shore drilling. On the other hand, spending some time up close and personal with Mother Nature in her untamed state has a way of whetting people’s appetite for risk.

(From “Japan Activates the Monju Fast-Breeder Reactor…“, via Instapundit.)

Why I don’t do Facebook:

So I don’t know if this is true from personal observation, like I said, I don’t do Facebook, but I could have guessed at exactly the types of brain dead behaviors he describes. Been there, hated it.

(From “Facebook is Dying – Social is Not (by @baekdal) #opinion“, via Marginal Revolution.)

Reading the headline of the post, “How much for Newsweek?,” my first thought was: “liquidate the company and pay dividends to the shareholders.” Seriously, Newsweek? Why bother? There can’t be enough lobbies in America to keep that magazine going.

Perhaps that is a better idea. I’d guess that my suggestion isn’t feasible because the liabilities from outstanding pensions makes the whole enterprise underwater. Good riddance.

(From “Roger L. Simon » How much for Newsweek?“, via Instapundit.)

This reminds me of a short story by Italo Calvino, in which an aged accountant awaits the utter collapse of the bank where he has worked his entire life, waiting the entire time for the error of pennies he had made as a young man to multiply and compound until its magnitude dwarfed the holdings of the bank.

I strongly suspect that the true state of the market is more like something out of a Borges short story.

Hard to put my pessimism into words without sounding ridiculously melodramatic.

(From “Dow Takes a Harrowing 1,010.14-Point Trip – WSJ.com“)

This is, maybe, the worst outcome for the Iraqi elections.

The Shi’ite parties have been trying to get as many candidates—and in some cases, actual election winners—disqualified as possible on the basis of Ba’athist ties. In principle I support de-Ba’athification but not when used as a political lever to shift the outcome of an election. My understanding is that this alliance may not be legal under the interpretation of parliamentary rules that were in place prior to the election.

Also, another reason to be grateful we don’t have a Parliament of the United States.

(From “Iraq Shi’ite blocs to join forces in parliament
| Reuters“)

I guess this wasn’t too hard to predict either.

Regrettable, because Tony Stark is a pretty cool superhero, since his superpower is being really smart and audacious. Yet they ruined the movie for kids by throwing a completely unnecessary sex scene in there. It’s no Spiderman, which is the perfect comic book adaptation for the movies. Spiderman is a good hero too, but not everybody can be bitten by a radioactive spider. Every can, however, study engineering and make cool stuff. Unfortunately, the question of who the winner would be in an Iron Man vs. Spiderman contest cannot be answered by the Internet.

(From “Critic Review for Iron Man 2 on washingtonpost.com“)

Since the Times Square bomber’s father was Pakistani military, I wonder if the conspiracy theory will emerge that it was an inside job, an intended failed plot, to make anti-terrorism enforcement look good—a sort of Christmas Bomber redemption. I had a similar thought about the BP oil rig explosion and the pending environmental legislation, and I started reading that the theory was gaining some traction a few days later.

(From “Shahzad’s father questioned in Times Square inquiry – CNN.com“)