Mostly a mathematician.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw that someone had left a Chromebook in my building’s printer room. It was labeled “Free; working.” So, of course, I took it. What about my life couldn’t be improved by a dodgy laptop with an eBay value of about $50?
“The beginning of wisdom is this,” says Proverbs 4:7 (NIV): “Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” To modern eyes, this appears to be circular, or even sinister, since Proverbs 4 is written by someone who claims to teach wisdom and therefore has a vested interest in people wanting to be wise. In the world of the Old Testament, though, wisdom was not always thought of as a product that you acquired. Rather, it was a state of being. You didn’t want to know what to do in complex situations; you wanted to train your mind so that, when you were put in complex situations, your instincts would turn out to be right. The beginning of wisdom, that is, the first and most important thing that wise people know, is this: above all else, put effort into training yourself to be wise.
I get my love of puns from my father. I am sure of this for two reasons: first, everyone on his side of the family adores them, and, second, I sure didn’t get it from Mom. She considers them the absolute lowest form of humor. In most cases, I don’t dispute this – indeed, it’s often what I like about them – but, very occasionally, I find one that rises above. In particular, I believe very strongly that, in 1890, Rudyard Kipling published the Perfect Pun.
Lasers & Feelings, by John Harper, is one of my all-time favorite one-shot TTRPGs. It fits on one page, it’s easy to pick up, and it’s beautifully designed from both a rules and a graphical perspective.
Partway through the film Aladdin, Aladdin rides into Agrabah under the name of Prince Ali. Thanks to his new friend the Genie, he’s got all the trappings of wealth and power. He certainly makes a splash – but one must wonder just how much the Genie gave him. After all, purchasing-power parity is a slippery concept, and it could well be that 95 monkeys isn’t actually all that many.
One year of grad school down, ~4 to go. It’s been one heck of a time. These are some of the things I did, in no particular order:
It’s final exam season, which means it’s grading season, which means I’ve been looking at student work for nine straight hours and need to blow off steam. So I thought I’d try to get ChatGPT to do something interesting, or, at least, mildly funny. What I got was a surprisingly informative look into the inner workings of large language models, which, once I’ve explained it, will lead me to propose a new Turing test paradigm for determining if you’re talking to a human or a neural network chatbot.
I’m apparently several years late to the party on this one, but I just saw the following tweet:
I’m teaching Math 1A, single-variable calculus, right now. The following problem and solution are for those of my students who found the Intermediate Value Theorem interesting. The problem I got from an entrance test for a university I applied to, which I’m keeping secret in case they still use this question; the solution is my own.
We’re on strike. Here’s what I’ve learned.