Almost every day, I tell my students, “Trust me, you’ll need to use this math someday.” When they’re learning about arcs of a circle, and how two rays of an exterior angle cut through the circle can be subtracted and that the result equals half the exterior angle, their eyes glaze over and I wonder how better to convince them. “Well, I know it’s slightly boring, and maybe you don’t see the relevance now,” I say, “but trust me!”
Well, kids, take a look at this: Eight pages of mathematics, all done for the practical, real-world purpose of making new water tanks. Continue reading “A hail to high school mathematics”
Happy Birthday to me. I turned 31 on January 1st, and spent the double holiday with Matt and Jonny, on our new boat. I haven’t spent a birthday with good friends in a long time. Everyone it seems, travels for the Christmas-New Years holidays, including me, and so I just haven’t seen any close friends, which is too bad, because I don’t celebrate any holidays really. You could say that I yearned for when I was with friends partying it up for my birthday, not for new years, but me.
So being in Mexico with Matt and Jonny over my birthday was, deep down, pretty exciting and important to me, though I didn’t want to let it on too much. They came through though in a great way. Continue reading “Feliz Ano Nuevo y Feliz Compleanos”
A couple of friends have emailed me, asking about our progress. Have we sailed Syzygy yet? Is the engine running? Have we practiced motoring around the marina, in and out of our slip? Have we fixed our leaky water tanks?
Until last night, my answer was a sad litany of qualified justifications and hedged excuses. Continue reading “a challenge already”
I’ll admit it, I don’t normally buy used. I bought a new car. I bought a new condo. Consequently, I rarely have to fix things. In fact, when I tried to make a very minor fix to something in my condo a month ago — my refrigerator — I ended up breaking it. Snapped a coolant tube. Oops. So I had to replace the fridge. You may have guessed it, I didn’t buy a used model; I bought a new one. I think I inherited this behavior from my parents, who also almost always do they same thing. I also never really had experiences hanging around with my dad on Sundays, head under the hood of the car, tinkering and fixing. I’m OK with that. I get to spend my time on other things. Hey, we all make choices on where our time goes. So this whole fixing-old-stuff thing, like a 30-year-old boat, is relatively new to me. Continue reading “Hi Jon, I’d like to introduce you to acetone.”
I’m tired. We’ve worked for nearly two weeks and have yet to accomplish most of our major objectives for this trip. I feel a combination of a sense of accomplishment at working hard for two weeks, mixed with frustration at little visible progress. ‘How come you have done seemingly so little?’ some of you might ask. Other more direct people might simply say, ‘are ye incompetent?’ Continue reading ““How we’ve spent two weeks working non-stop but accomplished seemingly nothing,” or “What is the diameter of that goddamn pin?””