When you are a parent, you have to answer the tough questions. Questions like, “how big would all of the germs in the world be if you had them all together?” This is what my daughter asked me yesterday and, like an idiot, I decided to find out. Google was no help. Apparently this is […]
Category Archives: Math
The Top 10 Numbers Between 1 and 10
Hey people! It’s Friday! That means you want to read something fun and easy before your weekend. Something like a list! But lists are so overdone, aren’t they? So many numbered items… But why do we never rank the numbers themselves?! I will fix that right now. Here are the top 10 integers between one and […]
The Impact of a Good Teacher
Two years ago I wrote a post that explained why I did not become a mathematician. It was a negative story about a negative experience with a negative person. But it suddenly occurs to me that I ought to tell you the story of why I became a musician. This is a more positive story […]
Circling Vergennes
It’s about a five and a half hour drive home from New York City, and by the last hour of that drive, you really want it to be over. This is why it is so cruel for those signs for Vergennes to be messing with you so much. Vergennes is a city about half an […]
My Battle With Costco
Let me preface this story by saying that I love Costco. From the moment I stepped inside their giant warehouse for the first time I have been dumbfounded by the amazing deals and the unbelievable sizes of their items. To me, it is exciting because you never know what they are going to have there, […]
The Speedometer or the GPS?
While driving back and forth to the Yellow Barn Music Festival rehearsals last week, I noticed something strange about my speed. Since it was an almost 3 hour trip, 95% of which was on the highway, I had set the cruise control to somewhere just over the speed limit and was not really thinking about […]
Ordered it Median, Got it Mode
I think my waitress must have been confused. Perhaps she got her mathematical terms mixed up. I know that many people leave school and quickly forget about the differences between the mean, the median, and the mode, but the differences were quite plain to see in my cheeseburger. Now first of all, if you stand […]
The Impact of a Bad Teacher
When I was in elementary school, my mother fought hard for me to be in advanced classes. Generally all children were supposed to be learning the same things, but I wasn’t learning anything and I was bored. Luckily I had some great teachers who taught me from books that were a grade ahead. I was […]
Math and OCD
While I have never been officially diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, I know the signs, and I know that I am a little OCD, but generally not to the degree that it interferes with my life. Then there are days that it makes itself known and I have to roll my eyes at myself. One […]