Comments on: How Can We Break This?

By: Touzel

Touzel — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:46:05 +0000

Hey Dan, I was just wondering why you named proportional reasoning as The Mathematical Skill I’d Most Like My Students To Retain After High School. Why not understanding exponential growth? (you know… because Americans have such problems with credit and all) Or interpreting graphs? Or discerning whether events are independent? (since we are such a superstitious species) Or factoring? (j/k)

By: dan

dan — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 02:23:05 +0000

Shoot, Darren, good link. Never bothered to click it any of the previous ninety-nine times I've seen it 'cause I thought it was a bunch of shots from deep space or something. Frankly, I have no idea how to use most of them. There are some interesting "what shapes do you see here?" shots, but that question doesn't scratch past the surface nine conversations out of ten. I do love this one, though – the shot of the Las Vegas housing tract – because it sets up what seems like an unfair, unanswerable question: "how many people live there?" As I try to pin down this visual math aesthetic, I find that the media that interest me the most are the ones that provoke those seemingly unfair, unanswerable questions, which we then answer through estimation, good sense, and mathematics.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:59:17 +0000

Angular diameter is banging around my head like a moth around a lampshade. Not sure if this app would be necessary...but a credit card (or just your hand for that matter) would be a useful measurement tool for angular diameter. Might not be a useful measurement for many outside of astronomy, but who knows?

By: Darren Draper

Darren Draper — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:24:15 +0000

Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but I see math everywhere here:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/earth_observed.html

What could you do with these amazing shots?

By: Posts about Apple Hardware as of January 15, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge

Posts about Apple Hardware as of January 15, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:20:30 +0000

[…] Computer actually hired him to be in one of their iPod commercials (although the Daft Punk track How Can We Break This? – blog.mrmeyer.com 01/15/2009 I like this. The iPhone application RulerPhone will measure anything, […]

By: Mr. K.

Mr. K. — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:50:59 +0000

Hah! I'm sure your iPhone wielding kids will be able to find this list of how to break it. In some ways, I'm impressed by how simple they made it, in others I'd think they could use the computing power in there to compensate for parallax and perspective.

By: Cam Bennet

Cam Bennet — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:02:00 +0000

I agree with your comment about “The Mathematical Skill I’d Most Like My Students To Retain After High School.” It’s amazing how many kids really don’t get this. I teach high school Physics and so many do not “get” ratio’s. The other skill that I’d like them to retain is percentages. (which of course is really a form of a ratio, but I won’t confuse the kids with that.

By: Steven Peters

Steven Peters — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:56:30 +0000

You can throw off the measurement slightly if the credit card isn’t perpendicular to the camera or it’s at a different distance from the camera than the object you’re measuring. Then there’s also the trick where you get a 3 foot long credit card and pretend you’re in Honey I Shrunk the Educational Blogger.

By: dy/dan » Blog Archive » What Can You Do With This: The Bone Collector

dy/dan » Blog Archive » What Can You Do With This: The Bone Collector — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:12:56 +0000

[…] BTW: The application RulerPhone ties into this nicely. More here. […]