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Jason's 19th birthday

Jason -

Its your birthday. You are at the end of a hard week, in the middle of a hard semester. The good news - you have a party tonight to help you wind down. Better news - if you wake up in time, it is the putnam competition.

Even better news - I put together a random collection of math cartoons to celebrate your birthday!

Some cartoons reference math without requiring any more than a passing familiarity.

Some delve into both math and philosophy

Some demand an in depth knowledge to understand why it is funny in the first place.

And in the best of all cartoons - math is raised to an art form.

Happy Birthday Jason

- love dad.

Blogger does not work on my iphone. Rats!

Interstate Highways at 50

I was reminded, listening to Morning Edition this morning, that today is the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway Act. They ran a story which talked about history, impact, the good, the bad (as usual). But along the way they mentioned that the first section of the highway started was Highway 70 in KS.

They mentioned a museum, I still have to track down the details.

Anyhow, see the dot site for more info for now.

things to say

Laura has created a blog to cover her wanderings this summer. I told her that I would comment on it in e-mail, maintaining the purity of her narrative. I also figured that I would not have much to say, other than the obvious - that she and the girls are great. She is a wonderful parent to put the trip together etc. All of which is worth saying, but might get a little boring on a day to day basis.

Now while she is trekking across the heartland, I am at home in the woods of new england. Every once in a while when I am out and about in the morning, I feel like it is wild life central. This morning, I had just come in from walking the dogs when I heard someone knocking. It sounded like they were banging the side of the house.

So I went back outside, thinking it was a woodpecker, casting aspersions on the quality of our cedar siding. It turned out it was a pileated woodpecker, actually two, but not on the house, luckily. These things are big, 15" according to the books , which for a bird is pretty good.

Anyhow, I guess there is an advantage to having big dead trees in woods. The two of them pounded and dug away at a big old tree branch for almost half an hour. I would have taken a picture, but Laura has all the cameras.

Other things we have seen, or heard in the neighborhood

red-tailed hawks
deer (of course)
squirrels
chipmunks
rabbits
moles
racoons
fox
coyote ( heard only)
wild turkeys
ducks
geese
spotted salamanders
way too many frogs
skunks

I am sure I am forgetting something.

Off to work

School is back in session

Ok. Summer is over and the kids are back in school. All through August, the popular press has been running articles about the activism of the Intelligent Design movement. If you don't know what this is, consider yourself lucky. If you have heard about it, but aren't sure what is going on then check out Prof. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve. He has been doing a great job of dealing with this as a scientist and as a public speaker. His interest started when Ohio started to deal with revamping science standards and ended up punting the question by saying that "controversy over evolution" should be taught in high school.

The last time around, when the issue was 'creationism', one of the most vocal defenders of evolution was Richard Dawkins, whose "The Blind Watchmaker" does a wonderful job of describing how intricate solutions to life's problems can arise from evolutionary mechanisms. See Dawkins review of Michael Behe's book about Intelligent Design.

With each word in the popular press about this crap, they lend more credibility to the Discovery Institute, simply by acknowleging it.

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