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Welcome to ANI In the Air, Under the Tent, and Around Baltimore, your daily podcast briefing
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of all the goings ons, ins and arounds, our turn to do the Sudbury School.
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So at the beginning of the week, we replaced the swing board for the tree swing that broke
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on Friday.
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And by we, I mean mostly Phil.
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Well, I think there were some students who were helping.
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I think one of the members of the workshop corporation actually put in the hole on the
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board.
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That was cool.
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And then today we restored the tetherball, and by we, I mean mostly Phil, which might
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be entirely Phil.
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So yeah, the tetherball is back and as soon as it was up, people were playing with it.
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They loved the new shiny, the new shiny blue ball on a string.
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Yep, that was fun.
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There was a moment today when I saw a large group of teens simultaneously throwing some
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balls, kicking some balls, throwing some frisbees, and doing jumping jacks all at once.
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It was a pretty epic scene.
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Pretty cool, really.
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Lots of people have been outside at various points.
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I think we had an article club under the tent.
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That was fun.
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They were talking about cars and debt and all that, and yeah, so that's what's been
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going on today.
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There was JC.
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JC got interrupted yesterday because of rain on the tent.
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And so today they finished the case.
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It's been fairly late, but it went well.
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So that is basically what I've got to say for the day.
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There's also been a lot of actually kind of activity inside, lots of messes I've been
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finding all over the place, so hopefully that can either settle down or generate some JC
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cases.
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We'll see.
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And what else?
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And so this is Tip of the Week Thursday, and it is the last and final bit of my little
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math quadrilogy series of the week.
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So just thought I'd put out there some tips for exploring math.
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So when I was back in school, the good old trusty calculator was just making its way
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into the classroom.
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It was TI-82s, 4s, 3s, I don't know.
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I was definitely, before the TI-86s and certainly the TI-89s, I had to deal with them as a teacher
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at some point, and man, those things are hard to use.
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But the TI-84s, students kind of like, now they're ridiculously expensive, like, I don't
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know, like 180 bucks last time I checked, and based on technology from, that was probably
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old in the 1990s, almost everybody who's pursuing the kind of math that requires this stuff
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has a phone in their pocket, and there are a variety of calculator apps.
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There is one called Graph and Calc on iOS devices that actually is a very good facsimile
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of the TI-84, and I don't have any idea how it's allowed to be there because it's just
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so amazing and great, and I highly recommend it if, you know, you need something like that.
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That's Graph and Calc.
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I don't have a recommendation for Android apps, unfortunately, I wish I did.
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If you're listening to this and you have one, let me know, I mean, in terms of like mocking
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the TI-84.
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Plenty of other great calculator apps out there, I'm sure.
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And then there's a computer app program, web thing, it's gone through a lot of different
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faces, you might say, I mean, they're all available.
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It's called GeoGebra, or GeoGebra, depending on how you prefer to pronounce it.
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I like GeoGebra, and I'm sure it's GeoGebra, because it's supposed to be Geometry and Algebra
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combined together, but I like GeoGebra.
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Anyway, there's also something called Desmos.com, kind of does the same, try both, see which
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ones you like.
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Kind of the default setting for GeoGebra nowadays is one I don't really like, but it's the same
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with Desmos.
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It's like this kind of like weird input on the sidebar for inputting like functions and
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it's not really, I don't know, I don't get it.
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There's like a little command line viewpoint though in GeoGebra, which I like, just like
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a little input line, you just say what you want, and it pretty much does all of the mathematics
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for K-12 mathematics, allows you to graph things and explore things, and zoom and all
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that.
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It does calculus, statistics, spreadsheets.
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It's pretty amazing, it's all free, it's crazy.
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There's also Wolfram Alpha, where basically you can type in a lot of things, a lot of
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questions and problems, and it will answer these things for you, give you sometimes solutions.
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If you actually pay for it, I think it actually does give you solutions in general.
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So that can be kind of interesting.
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Wolfram Alpha is being powered by like an actual mathematician's tool, which means like
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you might accidentally get complex numbers when you don't want them and all that.
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So it'd be a little complicated at times.
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And so let's see, what else?
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There's also Math Stack Exchange for more advanced math problems.
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They are really some amazing people answering them, at least I've seen amazing answers on
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there, so that's kind of cool.
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Wikipedia is also a great place with a bunch of math history and facts algorithms and so
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forth.
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So that's a pretty cool thing to look up when you're curious about things, they'll give
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you kind of a brief overview and then resources to click if you want further details and some
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books to look up and so forth.
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In terms of studying math on your own, that's a harder one to say.
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There's a lot of math textbooks, a lot of popular math books.
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One particular one that I like from long ago, which is more of a history and math thing,
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kind of combo is Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, I think by Edna Kramer.
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I love that book, or at least I did like 30 years ago.
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And what else, if you're kind of into physics and you're in for, you're like, really want
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to go like, what is all this stuff?
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There's a Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
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It'd be hard for a math graduate student to read through it, but it's also kind of inspiring
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and cool and you know, you don't actually, it's not the same as a math textbook, which
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is almost pointless to read if you don't want to get into the details.
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This one has some validity, it's kind of cool, pretty thick.
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What else?
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There is of course, Khan Academy for K-12 mathematics.
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It's pretty much problem focused.
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So yeah, there's that, I think, let me see if I can find it.
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It's been a while, but there is, yeah, 3Blue1Brown is a little math channel on YouTube, which
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has a lot of kind of interesting, cool stuff about it, including some overviews of various
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things.
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I'm trying to delve into some of the understandings, so that's kind of neat.
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There's also the iHeart, I don't know if she's still doing stuff, but you know, a few years
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ago she would do lots of kind of like, I'm bored and I'm in math class, let me do something
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related to math and something kind of drawing and visual and stuff.
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So that was kind of cool.
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Let's see, I think also when I was younger I liked a book called Pie in the Sky.
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The fellow who wrote it just died this past year, so that was sad, but I enjoyed it very
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much.
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Some of it's probably outdated, talk about some things that we didn't have solutions
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to at that time, and we've actually solved a lot of open problems lately, so that's interesting.
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And what else, yeah, there's a great number of books, something like Not Wrong, Not Wrong
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book, I can't find it, but a book maybe like seven years ago, kind of like a more recent
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popular math book, kind of telling people how to deal with math in their own lives,
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that was cool.
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Let's see, oh, and there's also the book Estimation, which I highly recommend working through.
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It's something in the course that I teach, that I have my students read through the book,
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trying various problems, it's similar to what I do on Millions Monday, and you know, it's
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just a fantastic kind of thing to actually get math to be a tool in your life, just read
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through that, mimic those problems, look up fact checks and stuff, I have my students
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doing little blog posts, and then after they finish the book, I have them watching TED
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Talks of their choosing, and basically use math to tear the talks apart.
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There's a lot of like, well, pie in the sky kind of notions there, and so Estimation is
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a great way of getting one's hand on whether or not these things are actually practical
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and useful.
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All right, well, so that's a brief brain dump of some resources, oh, and in the future,
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there will be a site called mathpebbles.com, which will have over 400 amazing web pages
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of math content with interactive pebbles and videos and all sorts of content, beautiful,
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amazing, probably takes seven years, I'll let you know when I'm done.
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That's enough for today, y'all have a good one, and I will see you when I see you.