good to know

One of my memory sticks made it through the washing machine alive. It didn't even have a lid on it. Phew. I'm glad it was in the pocket of pants that don't go in the dryer.

The sensible versus the ordinary

I was explaining to Dion yesterday how unthinking students can be in applying rules for significant figures. They try to memorise and apply rules of thumb instead of reason. Many will tell you that "Zeroes after the decimal point are significant; therefore, 0.00182 m has five significant digits." I suppose it would have eight if written in km. 0.00000182 km. No consideration of certainty or precision is to be found here. Dion's response was that they should just be using scientific notation, i.e., 1.82 X 10^-3 m. Indeed, scientific notation is superior to standard notation in this respect. Unfortunately, in everyday life and definitely in most Physics textbooks, most values are stated in standard notation.

This reminded us of an incident I meant to blog. At Chinese New Year with Dion's extended family, we played the name game. One clue provoked later discussion on the relative merits of improper versus mixed fractions. Most of us prefer improper fractions. Mixed fractions are computationally inelegant. We're snobs with engineering, science, accounting, ... degrees. However, as a math teacher, I felt obliged to point out that in everyday life, no one uses improper fractions. Would I say that I'm 15/2 months pregnant? Of course not. The paper is 17/2 by 11 inches? equally stupid.

Dion's cousin, who is in Grade 9, was in the game for the first time rather than just time keeping and recording scores. He had put in one clue then later picked it up himself. He was able to get his teammates to say, "improper fraction," but despite clear appeals to the equivalence of another form, they could not come up with "mixed fraction." After some time and several tries, he exasperatedly retorted, "Don't you guys know math?". Pwned.

Good Workout

For the first half of my pregnancy, I was heeding the old-fashioned advice of limitting my heart rate at 140 and doubling the during of my workout. But since that was about as boring as can be and I had done a little more research, I upped it to 160, which is the most conservative limit being suggested these days.

I had taken a couple of weeks off the treadmill since I'd been feeling a cold coming on. I never got sick but the feeling has been lingering. So when I went for a workout today, I decided to go easy, keeping my heart rate around 140. I control my heart rate with the pace and incline settings on the treadmill.

Well, today, I had to increase and increase the settings - way past the settings that normally get me to 160. I took me 30 minutes of increases to get to 140 and I was sweating buckets, so I just stuck with 140 for the rest of my workout.

Just a good day? or am I in the best cardiovascular condition I've been in all year - maybe since playing varsity? I felt like a machine.

I'd heard that pregnant women oxygenate better than other women and that elite endurance athletes who are mothers outperform non-mothers (I don't know if that is controlled for age/experience). I guess pregnancy is like altitude training.