Blogging 104. Exam 1.

January 30, 2011 in Math 104

104 links. The first exam was last week. I’ve posted grades into the appropriate intranet doo-hickey; students can look up their own grades, administrators can tell I’m actually doing the part of the job that matters most (to the machine), and I have some insurance against the almost-unthinkable fate of losing my gradebook. I haven’t [...]

across the universe

January 28, 2011 in Music, Rambles

so let’s take this puppy for a spin. [[0,0,1,2,2,0]] =[[E]] the “standard E-chord” learned by every beginner i know about. (i learned it at lesson one: “the house of the rising sun”; Am, C, D, F, Am, C, E Am, C, D, F, Am, E, Am. [thanks, darrell!]) i threw the notation out on the [...]

today’s morning ramble: music theory

January 26, 2011 in Cool Tricks, Music, Rambles

how to study guitar as if you were being taught math by me. part zero. (in which i pretend we’re here together in a room with a guitar.) okay. gimme the guitar for a second while i get it tuned. okay. over to you. grab a pick if you want. (a lot of *your* work [...]

time considered as a sequence of many-named values (modulo twelve)

January 18, 2011 in Graphics, Music

E__F__*__G__*__A__*__B__C__*__D__*__E B__C__*__D__*__E__F__*__G__*__A__*__B G__*__A__*__ B__C__*__D__*__E__F__*__G D__*__E__F__*__G__*__A__*__B__C__*__D A__*__B__C__*__D__*__E__F__*__G__*__A E__F__*__G__*__A__*__B__C__*__D__*__E so here’s a picture of the neck of a guitar. i’ve been drawing it a lot; here it is in cold type. it looks all wrong already and will no doubt be munged up altogether by the miracle of the god-damn internet by the time anyone sees it. [...]

remarks on recent work

January 13, 2011 in Math 104

there’s info on assignments here; i’m hoping everyone knows this already. i only graded three homework problems. three points possible apiece, plus one for appearing-to-have-done-most-of-the-rest: ten points possible. the 5-day-a-week classes have a scale of “grade *two* problems at *two* points apiece, plus one for completeness”. so, while any slight mistake (using my scale) is [...]

Our Medium Is Handwriting

January 13, 2011 in Graphics, Music

In Standard Musical Notation, one has so-called “sharps” and “flats”. This is one of the things that makes it hard to read music. It’s as if the notation were designed for pianos in particular: the sharps and flats show up as black keys on the piano. From “C” to “C”, on the white keys only, [...]

smallest repunit prime base 8

January 9, 2011 in Carnival

73rd carnival of maths at walking randomly. gas station without pumps on high school computer science.

#(A)\times#(B) := #(A\cross B)

January 7, 2011 in Uncategorized

Devlin on multiplication. Again. Joshua Fisher’s take on the bilinear functions approach at Republic of Mathematics; the key Number Warrior thread of May ’09. Math doodles by Vi Hart. Wow. Oh. George Hart‘s kid. That explains much.

Some Finite Projective Spaces

January 7, 2011 in Lectures Without Words, Projective Spaces

Blogging 104. Week One.

January 7, 2011 in Math 104

(Homework and other administrative stuff is here.) Blogging 104. Week One. There were an unusual number of walkouts on the first night… and a much smaller class the second night. We’ll see how things shake out when the points-for-a-grade start going in the log next week. For all I know, One-Oh-Anything students at Big State [...]