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A Nice Day
Apr. 21st, 2004 07:21 pmAnd so it has been. Despite a brief shower this morning, the day has been mostly sunny, and warm enough for comfort. I hear it's been bad further north, up near Utica - a town of which I'd never heard until today. (My brother is a worrywart; when he heard about the tornado there, he e-mailed me to make sure it was nowhere near Edwardsville.) (It's nice to have somebody who worries about you.)
Today in calculus, we were covering conic sections, so I took some time to tell them about Archimedes and the siege of Syracuse. I think they liked that; when I told them how Archimedes came to be killed, one of them murmured, "Oops!" (Of course they liked it; anything that doesn't directly require them to learn is gravy. But I think it's good for them to hear this stuff anyway.) In my algebra class, I introduced the use of cycle notation for the symmetric groups. (Yeah, yeah, but it's a beautiful piece of notation, and makes so many things transparent.) All in all, a fun pair of lectures, for me at least.
I'm rereading Anderson's The People of the Wind, and I've finally gotten around to reading Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds. It was one of her earliest works, but it took me a long time to get my hands on a copy. I think it's the only one of her novels (apart from some of the collaborations, which I can take or leave) that I haven't read yet.
Oh - the picture today is of Murphy. I'll put Ben's picture up next time.
Today in calculus, we were covering conic sections, so I took some time to tell them about Archimedes and the siege of Syracuse. I think they liked that; when I told them how Archimedes came to be killed, one of them murmured, "Oops!" (Of course they liked it; anything that doesn't directly require them to learn is gravy. But I think it's good for them to hear this stuff anyway.) In my algebra class, I introduced the use of cycle notation for the symmetric groups. (Yeah, yeah, but it's a beautiful piece of notation, and makes so many things transparent.) All in all, a fun pair of lectures, for me at least.
I'm rereading Anderson's The People of the Wind, and I've finally gotten around to reading Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds. It was one of her earliest works, but it took me a long time to get my hands on a copy. I think it's the only one of her novels (apart from some of the collaborations, which I can take or leave) that I haven't read yet.
Oh - the picture today is of Murphy. I'll put Ben's picture up next time.
