Archive for July, 2011
Beef apple, cumin crouton
Just a note to myself to remember two things from tonight’s dinner: If you fry apple slices in the greasy pan you cooked the hamburgers in, you get a very good hamburger topping. They are also good plain. In a saucepan fry ripped-up bread in olive oil with a lot of garlic and cumin and [...]
Filed under: food | 1 Comment
Tags: apple, hamburger, salad
The latest Wisconsin poll from We Ask America doesn’t tell us anything new. Scott Walker remains unpopular, but not Rick Scott unpopular. I bring it up the new polling only to object to the decision to report the results with two digits after the decimal point. Nothing is gained by telling us that 45.15% of [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, politics | 2 Comments
Tags: poll, polling, recall, scott walker, wisconsin
I refer, of course, to the 1860s. Stu Levitan’s superb Isthmus feature tells the story of Madison during the Civil War, when the city wasn’t exactly the beacon of progressive values it is today: Lincoln carried Wisconsin both before and during the war, but he did not carry Madison. In 1860, the city narrowly voted [...]
Filed under: history, madison | Leave a Comment
Tags: isthmus, stu levitan
Matthew White, formerly of Prickly, now of Chores, sent me these files long ago and I never got around to posting them — two live-in-studio performances by Prickly on WMBR. The shows cover the majority of their catalogue, with drastically better sound quality than the ancient demo tape I posted previously. Plus, between-song banter! Prickly [...]
Filed under: music, nostalgia | Leave a Comment
Tags: allston, boston, prickly
John Tierney can have my rubberized playground surface when he pries it from my cold, dead hands
In the NYT, John Tierney unloads this week on playground equipment, which in his view is not high enough or dangerous enough and is contributing to the weak moral fiber of These Kids Today. Kids need to break their arms more, because breaking your arm and getting over it is part of growing up. Even [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, children, psychology | 3 Comments
Tags: fear, feh, john tierney, playground, safety
Cathy’s post touched off a lot of discussion of math contests, and whether they do or do not, in her formulation, suck. My thoughts on this are pretty simple. Big good thing about math contests: They reveal that math is more than what’s taught in school, and that there’s a whole community of kids around [...]
Filed under: math | 12 Comments
Tags: cathy o'neil, contests, earthball
A press release from MIT reports on a new theorem of Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, Sarah Eisenstat, Anna Lubiw, and Andrew Winslow: the group of transformations of the n x n x n Rubik’s cube has diameter on order n^2 / log n in the standard generators. The press release quotes (Erik) Demaine as saying [...]
Filed under: math | 4 Comments
Tags: demaine, diameter, finite groups, group theory, rubik's cube, tymoczko
Sports dude dialectic
Sports dude on minor league baseball: “This is what baseball is really all about. No overpaid superstars, no lockouts, no steroids — just kids playing their hearts out for the love of the game.” Sports dude on women’s basketball: “Sure, I’d like to get into it, but it’s just not that interesting to watch players [...]
Filed under: baseball, offhand | Leave a Comment
Tags: sports, sports dude, wnba
In which I agree with Pushkin
“Imagination is as necessary in geometry as it is in poetry.”
Filed under: math, offhand, philosophy, poetry | 2 Comments
Tags: geometry, imagination, pushkin, truth bomb
From the NYTimesMag’s interview with Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of Netscape: After hearing a story about Foursquare’s co-founder, Dennis Crowley, walking into a press event in athletic wear and eating a banana, I developed a theory that bubbles might be predicted by fashion: when tech founders can’t be bothered to appear businesslike, the [...]
Filed under: commerce, offhand, psychology | 3 Comments
Tags: authenticity, banana, internet, performance, sociology
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