Natural Blogarithms

Stumbled across an interesting little post about 5 ways that you can lie with your graphs.  Actually, a better lesson to take from the post is “5 ways other people lie with their graphs and now you can call them on it.”
The post was on Talking Squid, entitled “Five Easy Lies”: Two of the most [...]

I have a calculator.  I can answer all the math problems I’ll ever need because I own a calculator.  There are many people that worry me when they say they were never any good at math: the nurse administering the medication, the clerk counting my change, the broker managing my investments, the salesman offering me [...]

Did you know that 95% of all statistics reported on blogs are made up?
Not only that, but you have to be particularly careful when reading reports coming out from the media that interpret poll results. Here’s a perfect example.
Two stories came out from the Associated Press in the last two days. The first [...]

Three guys in a hotel call room service, place an order for two large pizzas. The delivery boy brings them up with a bill for exactly $30.00. Each guy gives him a $10.00 bill, and he leaves. That’s fact! When he hands the $30.00 to the cashier, he is told a mistake was made. The [...]

UPDATE: (4:54pm, November 6, 2006) Here’s the letter I sent: Letter to Pizza Hut.pdf
No, I am not really calling for a boycott of Pizza Hut, but it was an eye catching title, wasn’t it? My family went to eat at Pizza Hut today and while we were waiting for my favorite pizza (thin [...]

I didn’t think I fit into the typical category of an absent minded professor. Perhaps those that know me will disagree. However, today, I proved myself wrong. I realized just a few minutes ago that I taught my entire Intermediate Algebra class with my sweater vest on inside out.
I blame [...]

Vector products are non-associative. Apparently a neuron misfired as I wrote out the properties for the cross product of two vectors. Fortunately, one student was on their toes and asked, “Are there more properties than are in the textbook?” To be honest, there are but the one of the ones I [...]

Maybe this is not a true mathematical blunder but I still left the whole situation a little embarrassed. Over New Year’s, I started playing with a “Rubik’s Cube” variant at the in-law’s. It’s apparently called Square 1 or Cube 21.

As has always been my approach with such puzzles, I began by just make [...]

Think numbers not dots!
Problem: (from eon)
A simple little puzzle. Suppose you are given two ordinary 6 sided dice. Is it possible to put the numbers 0-9 (with repetition) onto the faces of both dice, such that using both dice you can display all the days of the month i.e. 01 – 31 .

My Response:
Can�t [...]

The title of this blog seems to imply that this is the second in a series of blogging my mathematical blunders and in a way it is. The first blunder went untitled as such and I am almost afraid to bring attention to it again but was placed in the entry, “I should be [...]