My favorite math moments - vanilla geekery

Joey asked me if I have a favorite math moment. Truthfully, after spending nearly a decade tutoring math to college students ranging from the most basic remedial stuff to calculus and trigonometry, I have several.

Euler's identity:

e^iπ+1=0

Oh. my. God.

When I first discovered this I was astounded. I'll let you read wikipedia's explanation of the mathematical beauty if you want. I was convinced that somehow, locked within this equation, was the secret of the universe.

How. HOW did the irrational base of the natural logarithms, raised to the power of the square root of negative one times the (also irrational) ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter... equal negative one? HOW? It astounds me even now. I've worked it out, and it comes out right and proper as it should. It's astounding.

I loved introducing this concept to a student who was just being introduced to imaginary numbers, and watching his or her eyes grow wide. Well, when the student was intelligent enough to grasp the awesomeness. They weren't always. Sometimes they'd just go "Huh?"

Why do I need to learn this?

I don't know if this is really a favorite or if it's just one of those things I loved to hate - but if I had a dime for every time a student said this to me, I'd have a sizable sum of money. My favorite answer, after years of it, was from a book I once read titled Everything Bad is Good for You. You don't learn algebra to use algebra any more than you go to the gym to learn how to use a treadmill. You do both because they build a certain kind of muscle - in the case of algebra it's a problem solving muscle. Algebra gives you the tools to solve problems you may not otherwise know how.

Another thing I'd always tell them is that you never know where you're going to wind up. I certainly never thought I'd wind up being a (mostly math) tutor for a third of my life.

Holy crap I've got it!

The lightbulb moment. When any student gets it. You've been working with the person for hours, possibly days, and the light in his or her eyes has dulled. He's resigned himself that he's never going to get it. She will plod through the exercises as you guide her, but she's never going to understand and she will fail her test.

And then, suddenly, the light returns. He's got it. She's got it. He flies through the next page worth of exercises with no difficulty at all. They can't even be called problems anymore, because they don't present any.

Guiding a person to that moment is fantastic. It happened far less than I would have liked - many students had just resigned themselves to achieve low scores and be happy just to pass, but the ones who struggled at first and then suddenly had it? Oh, yeah, that's a high.

The saddest thing

A dear friend of ours succumbed to the pressures of this life yesterday and took his own life.

I am still processing. I am crushed.

Life is precious, all of you. This friend of mine knew that I loved him, but I still wonder if I could have done more. A recent falling out between us contributed to more distance than I would have liked in recent weeks, but he seemed to be doing well - you never really know when a phone call will literally save a life. An email from him on Monday said he'd talk to me later.

...

He never will.

A primer for punctuating dialogue

I like to write. I like to read, too, but as I've mentioned before, bad writing just stops me in my tracks. It doesn't matter how wonderful an imagination an author might have if I'm getting stuck on the badly punctuated dialogue. It's especially bad for me, since dialogue is so important to my arousal. If you're trying to turn people on, you need to also pay attention to your mechanics and form, not just content. Good form isn't just for academics, you know.

So, with that, I thought I would share rules for punctuating dialogue! I'm going with American rules here, no offense intended to Brits, who have slightly different rules. 

1. Use a comma between the dialogue and the words used to identify the speaker.

"Please please fuck me now," she begged him, unable to stand the teasing any longer.

2. Periods and commas go inside the quotation marks; other punctuation like semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points goes outside unless it is part of the the quote, as in this example:

"Get over here and suck my cock," he said dangerously. "Or would you rather I flog you?" he asked, a glint of amusement in his eye.

The next example is not terribly common, I just include it for completeness. The question mark goes outside the quotation marks because it is not part of the quote:

Did he really just say, "You should try the biggest butt plug"?

The sentence ends with only punctuation mark: the question mark. Do not use double punctuation marks, just keep the stronger punctuation. Question marks and exclamation points are stronger than periods and commas.

3. When a tag line (speaker identification) interrupts a sentence, it should be set off by commas. The first letter of the second half of the sentence is in lower case - you're just continuing the sentence, not starting a new one.

"So," he whispered into my ear, "what shall I do with a horny little slut like you?"

4. For a quotation within a quotation, use single quotes, though I don't think this is terribly common in erotica:

"Have you read 'Deep Throat Made Easy' yet?" he asked her offhandedly.

5. If a quotation is more than one paragraph long, don't use end quotes at the close of the first paragraph. Use them only when a character is done speaking.

If you care about your writing, you'll care about this. If you're just spewing your fantasies forth with no regard for anyone who might be reading it, then there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise, and I wish you well anyway.

Happy writing!

Heads-up for bloggers

I don't know how many of you use google analytics to track your blog stats - but my husband has brought this to my attention. When I bristled at the suggestion that I'd do such a thing, he said "Yeah, but you might want to...share?"

Basically, fellow bloggers, if you use google analytics to track the blogs where you wish to remain anonymous, make sure it's completely separate from any tracking of non-anonymous blogs. If you use the same analytics account to track both kinds, then someone can quickly and easily find out who you are.

Read about it here

The Occupy movement

I wrote this, then thought I shouldn't post it, then thought, "WTF, who cares?" So here are my thoughts.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the 99%. I'm not wealthy at all.

I do not buy anything from Starbucks, ever, certainly not every day. My husband bought a small coffee from them once at an airport. It's not a protest not to buy from them, just an "I really can't afford that." I make our bread so that we can eat good, nutritious food without paying a high price for it. We've been out to see a movie twice in the last three years, once was for our anniversary. We don't go out to eat. Maybe once every two weeks? More like three times in two months, to be more accurate. We don't drink soda. We don't have cable TV.

We worked hard to get where we are. We started out with just about nothing, I worked at a general store and tutored as much as I could while going to school, he worked at a different store in the same chain once he was allowed to work, and he went to school and tutored too. He got a job in his field by being in his instructor's faces so he was the first person they thought of when someone came looking. He made a name for himself online over a period of years, while doing his fairly low-paying job very well. I continued working part-time and got a Bachelor's degree, and I got pregnant (while still finishing it up). We were eligible for government aid for the pregnancy despite both our jobs - pregnancy care is expensive and we would never have been able to pay all the bills otherwise.

So now, he has a good job working for a big company because of the name he'd made for himself, but we had to move and now I can't work. I was working part time to be with our child, but can't find that sort of work here. We're still just making our bills, but we have good insurance through his work and we're not starving or miserable. We do splurge on Netflix. We're happy. We have awesome, awesome sex, and we enjoy each other's company very, very much.

So, we're part of this "other 99%," but those aren't the types of stories people are interested in hearing. I'm not dissing the movement as I understand the "rage at unfairness" position- but this is my story.

A question

My relationship with my husband is easy. It's always been easy. We belong to each other, and we always have, since before we met. I am his - completely, without a doubt. But he is mine too.

We might have misunderstandings once in a while, as humans are wont to do, and our drives for sex do not always match up, but by and large we are perfect together. I can tell him anything, absolutely anything. He can do anything with me and it will not affect his love for me. I wondered for a while if it would; if me submitting to him would somehow affect his opinion of me. It never has. He says all kinds of horrible things to me during sex, but still respects my opinion and my abilities to do most things even above his own. He has his areas of expertise, but I'm better than him at most things, and he's okay with and acknowledges that with wry amusement.

I have familial relationships, and I find them to be not so easy. Like walking on eggshells, some of them. Careful what you say in case it is taken the wrong way, careful how you hold your face or move your eyes in case it's taken a way you didn't mean it, because you know you'll never be able to convince the other person that the way they took it was not the way you meant it. After a while I begin to avert my eyes when answering questions because I'm afraid of eye contact expressing something I didn't mean - and that, too, is taken badly. I'm a grown woman! Why must it be like this?

What I want to know is this: What's normal? What's the majority relationship form factor? Easy, eggshells, or something in between?