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Turning a Nail Polish Disaster Into a Teachable Math Moment
theodp writes: In The Spiral of Splatter, SAS's Rick Wicklin writes that his daughter's nail polish spill may have created quite a mess, but at least it presented a teachable math moment: "'Daddy, help! Help me! Come quick!' I heard my daughter's screams from the upstairs bathroom and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Was she hurt? Bleeding? Was the toilet overflowing? When I arrived in the doorway, she pointed at the wall and at the floor. The wall was splattered with black nail polish. On the floor laid a broken bottle in an expanding pool of black ooze. 'It slipped,' she sobbed. As a parent, I know that there are times when I should not raise my voice. I knew intellectually that this was one of those times. But staring at that wall, seeing what I was seeing, I could not prevent myself from yelling. 'Oh my goodness!' I exclaimed. 'Is that a logarithmic spiral?'" So, got any memorable teachable math moments you've experienced either as a kid or adult? Yes, Cheerios Math counts!
When dealing with the shame of owning an Emo/Goth child, it's important not to blame yourself.
It was likely exposure to some toxic chemical that turned her bad, not your parenting.
At least that is what you should tell yourself.
Nary a one
Teaching kids to go faster on the roundabout [...]
This is terrible advice for children learning to drive!
He should be too. Have you seen what septic engineers make these days? No seriously, it's insane. Some of them even get in to the six figures.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
When my window replacement contractr cheated me by installing windows with IR coating I showed my kids how so visualize it from the reflection of a butane lighter flame. (the colors of the multiple reflections should red shift if it preferentially reflects red light).
I also showed them how the sun is about the size of a quarter and lands in arizona at night.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The author of the article states that the spiral probably is not really logarithmic, though it is a very good fit. He also makes a physics based model using the acceleration of gravity.
As much of life does, this reminds me of a Far Side cartoon where a boy is sitting in front of a chalk board as his father writes equations on it, and to the right there is a broken window. To paraphrase the caption, 'Of all punishments Jimmy most hated his father's physics lectures.'
Did somebody buy out slashdot while we weren't looking?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He should be too. Have you seen what septic engineers make these days? No seriously, it's insane. Some of them even get in to the six figures.
Making six figures and at knowing you are dealing with actual shit instead of corporate shit doesn't sound insane at all.
A new kiddie park went into my neighborhood. The bridge between play sets had side walls. Slides are enclosed tubes. A thick rubber pad is underneath the bark. Every opportunity for a kid to earn a bump on the noggin or a split lip from falling down was significantly reduced to protect the city from a liability lawsuit by a helicopter parent.
No!
https://xkcd.com/spiral/
If you'd attacked the stain right away, before the solvents evaporated, you could have cleaned up the wall. But instead you chose to grab a camera and take pictures, and solve math problems with your kid. Now you've got a minor DIY nightmare on your hands. Consider yourself lucky if your wife allows you to use the same colors, and doesn't consider this an opportunity for a bathroom makeover.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Every time somebody I know turns an age that is a "round" number in my head I get a special nerd-glee. Squares and Cubes do it, for example: 9,16, 27, 64 etc.
l also enjoy hiding the Fibonacci Sequence in things, just to see who notices.
On my 27'th birthday I got a "Happy Birthday" message with Fibonacci exclamation points. I was most pleased.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Following a recipe is like following a procedure or algorithm. A segue to programming.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That's not a roundabout...
This is a roundabout!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
He should be too. Have you seen what septic engineers make these days? No seriously, it's insane. Some of them even get in to the six figures.
I haven't seen what a septic engineer makes, but I'd imagine that they make the same thing as that guy's son, but larger (though 6 figures sounds like exaggeration unless you're measuring in milligrams). Of course, it all goes the same place when it's flushed.
http://www.gocomics.com/calvin...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And if your kids are anything like mine they will still each find a stick and hit each other playing light sabers.
Time to offend someone
Definitely.
If they follow the optional turn arrow painted on the inside lane of the far entrance they'll run head-on into another problem.
Moms all over the country return to find their nail polish splattered against their basement walls.
Just kidding -- most of the nerds already left /.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
One of them once told me "It may be shit to you, but it's bread and butter to me."
That is absurd. Why have two concentric opposite rotating roundabouts? Why have the sub roundabouts? Why not just have one roundabout, it would do the same thing...?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Maybe just because it's Friday on /., but for me the "force STEM on girls" vibe brought this Onion vid to mind:
http://www.clickhole.com/video...
If the slides are plastic & there are any sticks nearby, kids could still potentially injure themselves...I once stuck a wet stick (it had rained recently) into a crack (between 2 pieces, not broken) in a plastic slide & got a big enough static shock that I just fell down the slide limp & laid there for a while until I could convince my muscles to move again. (Meanwhile, every time I have accidentally made contact with 120V wiring, it merely tingled annoyingly at the site of contact.)
So she can paint her nails black. HTH HAND.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Nothing ruins the world for parent, child, and innocent bystanders like making everything a teachable moment. Let's leave the teaching for the classroom and let the rest of the time be free of the tyranny of pedagogy.
I was helping my son with his math homework.
It was factoring polynomials: stuff like x^2 + 5x + 6 -> (x+2)(x+3)
He basically had the mechanics down.
He looked at the next problem, and picked up his pencil to start grinding his way into it.
Without thinking, I slapped my hand down on the place where he was about to start writing, and said, "No! It's easier to think than to do it."
And he thought, and he wrote down the answer.
Or Triscuits, Chex, etc... Spinning a giant wet LEGO gear as a top shows tangents...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"I was given 30 minutes to spend at the arcade. There is only 5 minutes left. Is this enough time to play the free game I just won? Or should I leave now since there may be a chance I won't be able to finish it?"
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Do not underestimate the power of gnutella!
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The counter circles allow a more experienced (with the roundabout) driver to avoid driving around the entire circle before exiting on the previous outlet. Simultaneously, inexperienced drivers freak-out and stay on the longest lane mitigating traffic in high volume areas. Swindon for the win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Momento Mori
That is absurd.
No, it only looks absurd. It does, by all accounts, work well.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Fine, I have a better citation than the AC.
A prime number (or prime integer, often simply called a "prime" for short) is a positive integer p>1 that has no positive integer divisors other than 1 and p itself. (More concisely, a prime number p is a positive integer having exactly one positive divisor other than 1.) For example, the only divisors of 13 are 1 and 13, making 13 a prime number, while the number 24 has divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24 (corresponding to the factorization 24=2^33), making 24 not a prime number. Positive integers other than 1 which are not prime are called composite numbers.
Prime numbers are therefore numbers that cannot be factored or, more precisely, are numbers n whose divisors are trivial and given by exactly 1 and n.
While the term "prime number" commonly refers to prime positive integers, other types of primes are also defined, such as the Gaussian primes.
The number 1 is a special case which is considered neither prime nor composite (Wells 1986, p. 31). Although the number 1 used to be considered a prime (Goldbach 1742; Lehmer 1909, 1914; Hardy and Wright 1979, p. 11; Gardner 1984, pp. 86-87; Sloane and Plouffe 1995, p. 33; Hardy 1999, p. 46), it requires special treatment in so many definitions and applications involving primes greater than or equal to 2 that it is usually placed into a class of its own. A good reason not to call 1 a prime number is that if 1 were prime, then the statement of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic would have to be modified since "in exactly one way" would be false because any n=n1. In other words, unique factorization into a product of primes would fail if the primes included 1. A slightly less illuminating but mathematically correct reason is noted by Tietze (1965, p. 2), who states "Why is the number 1 made an exception? This is a problem that schoolboys often argue about, but since it is a question of definition, it is not arguable." As more simply noted by Derbyshire (2004, p. 33), "2 pays its way [as a prime] on balance; 1 doesn't."
With 1 excluded, the smallest prime is therefore 2. However, since 2 is the only even prime (which, ironically, in some sense makes it the "oddest" prime), it is also somewhat special, and the set of all primes excluding 2 is therefore called the "odd primes." Note also that while 2 is considered a prime today, at one time it was not (Tietze 1965, p. 18; Tropfke 1921, p. 96).
Take it up with the many mathematicians who disagree with you. The dictionary actually says virtually the same thing as Wolfram MathWorld. So, your point was?
a positive integer that is not divisible without remainder by any integer except itself and 1, with 1 often excluded
However, mathematicians agree that 1 is not a prime number, so the dictionaries don't really matter. (You know that positive integers greater than one have precisely one prime decomposition? If 1 is prime, that's no longer true. It turns out that listing 1 as neither prime nor composite makes the math easier and more useful.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No, I was apparently just bored & wondered what would happen. I expected to get shocked, but not that badly, since I would have thought that people getting shocked all the time would have prevented so much charge buildup. (In retrospect, that obviously only applies to the outer surface that everyone else touches, not the inner one.)
Sure. Isometric grid paper is a great thing to have around to teach 2d and 3d construction, geometry and can be very creative. Like lego blocks on paper.
I prefer the dot only type.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Thanks to this video probably not anymore.
A prime number is a positive integer with exactly two different integer factors.
That excludes 1. There are many reasons to exclude 1; if 1 were prime then an integer wouldn't have a unique prime factorization which would make things messy.
Some people wear black nail polish for the same reason that Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks: because black goes with everything.
If you're as fashion-impaired as I am, it's useful to stick with something that you know will work. Dressing with some modicum of sense is a courtesy to others.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});