Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@WeirdWriter @nellie_m

Ah.

@RnDanger @ryanprior @PetraOleum

If she laid systems with more variables on you ... you would have figured it out.

@ryanprior @PetraOleum

We were doing Riemann sums! Which I think are almost a little cruel if you don't write a program. But, few students have the foundations in programming to do this efficiently.

So, instead most teachers only give dead simple problems with easy calculations which are.. I think boring. As if it wasn't boring enough already.

The interesting thing is seeing how changing the parameters improves the result.

@ryanprior @PetraOleum

I had a math teacher who let us use graphing calculators but we had to erase programs before the test (fair) I asked "but I can write a program during the test?"
"why not?"

That was when I started like math TBH.

@ryanprior

I sometimes forget that I have a very low threshold for busy work. And a high level of excitement for finding a way to avoid it even if it MORE work.

@PetraOleum

I don't really get it. All I wanted at that age was a program to do all that stuff.

Student: But instead of writing a program to reduce the fraction could we just do it by hand?

(She came around after I showed her some of the fractions we needed to reduce for the spirograph project.)

@catsalad

*angry old lady noises*

I had a dream last night that stuck with me. I was waiting for the 4 train at 86th street. Then there was sound of the train coming, but when it pulled up it wasn't the train... it was #picaTheCat. She was as large as a subway train and stopped at the station and started eating the people on the platform like kibble. "No, Pica! No!" I cried, but she wouldn't listen.

I distinctly remember thinking "But I STILL support public transit"

Then I woke up, Pica was on my chest staring at me.

In the hagfish cosmology the universe is a great knot. This knot, like all knots, is slowly working itself apart, and when it is at last untied only then will paradise (which is a chunk of the universe we cannot see beyond the knot) be free'd from the substance of deep space, like a chunk of flesh, and all those who are slimy will get to go to paradise.

Those without slime? They will become a part of a new knot... in the next universe.

Wanting to live in the end times is kind of cowardly since it absolves of you of the burden of building a better future. Some great compelling force will come down from on high and sort it all out.

Since you don't really know what times you face it's more responsible and brave to live as if these are the "Beginning Times" instead. And with great effort you may do a tiny bit of good that lasts a few decades beyond your grave.

Look at the textures and colors on the thorax and petiole of this trap jaw ant I saw on inaturalist! This is the very definition of functional elegance-

Were I a designer I would make ballgowns based on the beauty of ants—

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/186705931

A group of ants arguing about lady bird conservation. Some of the aphid rancher ants complain that the ladybirds, especially the larvae eat too many of their steer. But the urban ants think they are majestic creatures who don't deserve to be hunted and they even have a whole study showing that hunting them isn't effective.

Much ant grumbling and arguing.

No one thinks it's odd at all that the ants too sometimes eat aphids. (They're our aphids!)

It's kinda strange to me that my students can get this joke.

They deserve new media IMHO.

Still an oldie but goodie.