Eat this today — tacos al pastor pizza at Ian’s

30Mar09

While we’re on the subject of glorious culinary syncretism, I want to endorse in the strongest possible terms today’s special pizza at Ian’s:  a “tacos al pastor” pie with juicy chunks of marinated pork, fried onions, and pineapple over mozarella cheese and tomato-chipotle sauce.  It’s one of their finest achievements and I believe it’s today [...]

Filed under: food, madison   |  2 Comments
Tags: genius, ian, ian's, ian's pizza, pizza, tacos

Pastrami fried rice, or: is there Chinese food in Mountain Brook?

29Mar09

I still don’t know what the largest U.S. city without a Chinese restaurant is, but I know it’s bigger than I thought.   I posted an Ask Metafilter question, which yielded a great candidate:  Mountain Brook, AL, a toney bedroom suburb of Birmingham, with just over 20K residents and no Chinese restaurant, per Google and [...]

Filed under: food, offhand   |  1 Comment
Tags: chinese food, kiryat joel, kosher, mountain brook, pastrami, pastrami fried rice

Two estimation questions

20Mar09

It\’s apparently customary, when being interviewed for a job in the consulting industry, to be asked to estimate various numerical quantities:  how many cars are rented each week in the United States?  What proportion of the total mass of American citizens is made up of males?  I think that in asking these questions the interviewer [...]

Filed under: bad statistics, food, madison, offhand   |  12 Comments
Tags: chinese restaurants, consulting, estimation, heuristics, uw

Blogging is good for math, or: Kakeya problems over finite fields

14Mar09

New paper on the arXiv by me, Richard Oberlin, and Terry Tao:  “Kakeya set and maximal conjectures for algebraic varieties over finite fields.” The paper got started in an interesting way.  I read about Dvir’s proof of the finite field Kakeya set conjecture on Terry’s blog.  To an algebraic geometer the proof is extremely striking [...]

Filed under: blog, math   |  2 Comments

Major league honkbal

11Mar09

Once again, in dramatic fashion, the Dutch baseballers give the Dominican club the finger like it was a leaky dike.  After a tense pitchers duel, the Netherlands go into the bottom of the 11th down 1-0.  Rob de Jong doubles to lead it off.  Then clutch Eugene Kingsale comes through with an RBI single (eenhonkslag), [...]

Filed under: baseball, language   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: dutch, eugene kingsale, honkbal, netherlands

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to sports radio

11Mar09

They were interviewing Billy Beane on the sports talk station this morning.  “What music are you listening to lately?” Dan Patrick asked him.  “A little Joy Division,” said Billy Beane. I have a new favorite team in the AL West.  Until Ken Griffey, Jr. announces that “Debris Slide” is his new walk-up song, that is.

Filed under: baseball, music, offhand   |  1 Comment
Tags: billy beane, indie rock hegemony, joy division, oakland a's

Two wise men I know

10Mar09

Allen Kornblum, founder and publisher of Coffee House Press, interviewed on the future of the book industry. Eric Walstein, mentor to a generation of little kids in Maryland who liked math, tells the Washington Post we’re using calculators wrong.

Filed under: books, commerce, education, math   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: allen kornblum, calculators, coffee house press, eric walstein, math ed, publishing

Newton…. for the ladies

08Mar09

Just read an interesting paper by Robin Valenza, an English professor at U Chicago:  “Fiction and the Factual, or, Why Were There no Female Mathematical Geniuses in Eighteenth-Century England?”  Two things I enjoyed learning from this paper: There was a book called Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d For the Use of the Ladies in Six [...]

Filed under: books, history, math   |  2 Comments

Netherlands magic, feel it happen!

07Mar09

In this sad era you take good Orioles news wherever you can find it.  Today, the Netherlands national team shocked the mighty Dominicans 3-2 in the World Baseball Classic.  Longtime Oriole Sidney Ponson pitched four solid innings and, longtime Oriole Eugene Kingsale (well, he was on the team for five years, though he racked up [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  1 Comment
Tags: dutch, eugene kingsale, nederlands, netherlands, sidney ponson, upset, wbc

19th century “algorithms”

07Mar09

Emmanuel observes in the comments to the last post that the use of “algorithm” in the Felix Klein lecture predates by a few decades the earliest OED cite for the modern sense of that word; but adds, correctly, that it’s not at all clear Klein has the modern sense in mind. Fortunately, the Cornell collection [...]

Filed under: books, language, math   |  4 Comments
Tags: algorithm, etymology, history of math, oed