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Welcome to Arts and Ideas in the air, under the sky, by the fire, and around
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Baltimore. Your daily podcast briefing of all the goings ons, ins and rounds, Arts
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and Ideas Sudbury School. So today was a cold day, very cold. People were still
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outside. We still had our announcements outside. We had our JC outside. People
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still ate lunch outside, but it's definitely been less than usual, because
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it's very cold. At our announcements, we announced creative writing free
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write. We'll be, I think, tomorrow at 2.22, and the Art Corporation is deciding to reorganize the
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art room, and the Oculus Rift is, well, has now been purchased. There's also been
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the big outdoor movie screen purchased, too, the inflatable screen, so we can have
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movie nights whenever we like. That all happened. I gave a little memorial
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announcement, you might say, of this past year. It was a year ago, on March 13th,
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that we closed in person. So, you know, it's been a long year, but we held
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together. That was nice. Yeah, it's a sad time to reflect, but there is hope that
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everything is going to get better and better. We had a one JC case today. It was
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fairly simple, just involving a tipped over water bottle in the fridge where
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the cap wasn't tightened enough, and so it spilled, and so it was considered a
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mess, with their resolution being, you know, warning to make sure the cap is on
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tight and to try to place it in such a way that's not going to tip over, just in
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case. So that was nice. Staff had their usual Monday meeting, and it went
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insanely long time, as usual. We seemed to have a lot to talk about, and to be
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fair, a lot has changed since even our last week meeting. So, that's why we have
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weekly meetings, I guess. Yeah, so I guess that was kind of the day as I knew it.
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Yeah. Oh, we also, well, at the meeting we discussed our upcoming assembly meeting
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this Thursday, so that's nice. And we drilled in, I mean, we have hopefully
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come up with a plan on how to deal with the tent, and so hopefully we'll come up,
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maybe in a couple weeks, we'll be able to put it up. That should be in assembly
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email coming up, and mentioned at assembly. We'll also go over the
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coronavirus numbers, which have unfortunately spiked up in terms of case
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rates so far. I'm hoping it's just some sort of weird glitch, because it doesn't
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make a lot of sense to me. But we'll see. By the time we get to Thursday, we'll
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have a few more days of showing whether this trend is still on the uptick, and
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see if there's any news about it. It's, I haven't really heard anything, so I'm a
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little confused. But we'll see. There is a motion tabled from a couple of
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assemblies ago about what to do once the staff are fully vaccinated in terms about
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being open or closed, so hopefully that'll be robust debate that will, you
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know, we'll see where that goes. It would be really sad to me to shut down in
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person again, so I'm hoping the numbers don't go up, or well, I just hope the
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numbers don't go up. I'm hoping this pandemic goes away, but we'll see. I do
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know the experts had warned about sort of mid to late March as the variants
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progressing through the population, so I guess we'll see if that's what's
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happening. I certainly hope not. So today is Millions Monday, and I have to confess
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that I don't really quite have anything in mind at the moment, so I just thought
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I'd share one little thing about what I'm doing as a side project. I call it
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Math Pebbles. It's an idea I've had for, well, decades really. It's become more
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focused during the pandemic time of the past year. I tried various attempts to
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make this a reality, trying different things and them networking out, although
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I've really fleshed out exactly all the math content I want to put there and
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kind of how to put it all together and all that, but I hadn't actually made all
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what I wanted. And so now I'm, and kind of the big kind of tricky thing is I want
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a really smooth interface for changing numbers. I mean radically changing
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numbers. So there is this neat little program called GeoGebra which allows you
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to say graph functions and have sliders on there where you can change the slider
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and, you know, different parameters and the function changes and you can see how
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the function changes. And that's wonderful and great, but I want to do
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something a bit more intensive where, you know, I'm a big fan of not being overly
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precise, like estimation kind of things. I think math education, one of its
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biggest flaws is the synthesis on precision, like the idea of the
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quadratic formula with its square roots that, you know, people just leave it with
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the square roots and they'd have no idea what the decimal version is and it's
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like, ah, that's the answer. And it's like, what? You know, there is a role for that
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kind of, you know, formula kind of thing, but it doesn't in some sense
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answer the question in many cases. So, you know, it's, I'm a big fan of, you know,
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playing around with those concepts of what is precise or not. And so, oddly
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enough, that leads me to wanting a system that can really handle really strong
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precision. In particular, there's a method called Newton's method which allows one
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to compute the roots of functions really accurately, but it's so powerful and
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accurate that within two or three, like, iterations you've exhausted what your
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computer can do in a typical setup. And so I want something where, you know, one
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can actually do that. Or in calculus, you know, there's a lot of kind of
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approximating functions with things called, you know, with polynomials and I
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really want to explore that and get really see the differences and find
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ingrained and, like, really be able to delve into this stuff. And just a lot of
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the computer stuff doesn't allow that because it's not actually useful in
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terms of a practical use. You know, having a few decimal places of accuracy is, like,
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often phenomenal in most fields and applications. It's, you know, I mean,
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quantum field theory is said to be the most accurate theory known to man and
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it's got, like, nine decimal places of accuracy. I'll leave aside whether or not
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it actually makes any sense to call it a theory, but it's amazing as a
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computational model of whatever's going on. So, yeah, so that's what I've been
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working on. So in particular I'm working on this kind of little interface where
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you have a number and you want to change it and you've got one slider that
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changes the number based on adding or subtracting some kind of given amount,
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the kind of a scale. And then you have another slider that changes the scale
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kind of by multiplying. So the default is sort of, like, it starts on one and it can
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multiply or divide by five and then two, I guess. So it's kind of dividing by half
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from one or multiplying by five after one to get to five. So it's kind of going
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up up by fives and tens, essentially. And so, you know, you can scroll that up and
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then you scroll the other one around to kind of where you want, then you scroll
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the other one down, down, and, you know, you just kind of, like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And pretty
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soon you can specify, like, a 30-digit place number if you want. And so once I
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have that firmly kind of done, then I can hook that number into, you know, various
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things, like being coefficients in a polynomial and playing around with some
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algorithms of computing them and changing where they are located and then,
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you know, really modifying stuff and, you know, that's kind of my hope. So I think I
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made a significant starting step on that and I'm looking forward to doing more. So
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thanks for listening while I explain this kind of interesting thing that, well,
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interesting to me. I've been thinking about for 30 years and hopefully I can
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now move forward. It was always about getting that right in our face and I
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think I'm almost there. So of course, you know, I work here, and I also teach
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for Hopkins Online, and I have a family, so my time is quite limited. But, you
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know, sometimes all you need is a good starting point and then the rest can
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fill in pretty quickly. Sometimes not. I guess we'll see.
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Well, I'm a big fan of failing a lot. I'm really, really hoping that this time I'll
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be successful getting this thing off the ground. You know, you all have a good one
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and I will see you when I see you.