Awesome Math Baby Gear

Here is some awesome baby gear that you’ll get a kick out of, whether you have a little baby (like I do) or not. [ht: Carrie Gaffney]

Check out this one, for instance, perfect for the little Fermat in your life:

Or this one, with a slightly more ‘physics’ flavor–perfect for your little one that is constantly gaining momentum:

For the baby that’s two standard deviations above the mean:

Or how about this …

And here are some more for you:

• http://www.cafepress.com/mf/13956676/2-imaginary-friend-infant-creeper_bodysuit
• http://www.cafepress.com/mf/39333792/i-ate-sum-pi_bodysuit
• http://www.cafepress.com/mf/18231164/were-skewed_bodysuit

By the way, the perfect place to collect random photos and other things you love is on Pinterest. I’ve been collecting pins for the last year or so, and you may want to check out these two boards of mine, at least:

• T-Shirts
• Math

Happy pinning!

Wolfram’s Life Data

If you haven’t yet checked out Stephen Wolfram’s blog post from March 8th, you absolutely need to. I was impressed with how many categories of data he kept, not just his presentation and analysis of it. He analyzed his email, walking, phone time, keystrokes, and calendar events. And he did this for all of the last decade! Wow. Here are his averages from over that time, shown against the hours in the day.

This was also a nice chance for him to advertise the incredible power of all of his software!

As for email, you can do an analysis on your gmail account from the past year by using this free utility from toutapp.com. I did it and really enjoyed seeing who my top contacts were, learning that I reply to 18% of the emails I receive, and that 47% of the emails I send get responses. Each month on average I received 240 emails and sent 69 emails. And in 2011, I had to deal with a total of 3299 emails. All of this is just in my personal email account, too! I have two other email accounts as well. Go get your analysis!

Significant figures

What do you think of when a newscaster shares a ‘significant’ number?

Lottery warnings

 

[Hat tip: Tim Chase]

Odds of winning the lotery

Pearls Before Swine

[Hat tip: Tim Chase]

7 billion

Looks like by all accounts, there are now 7 billion people in the world today. At least that’s what wikipedia says. Here are two blog posts on the subject from the math blogging community. I have to say, I was surprised to see that wolframalpha doesn’t know anything about this important event (I’m sure it won’t be the last time alpha disappoints me). Anyway, I hope everyone feels humbled to be just one of the crowd.

And, happy birthday to Karl Weierstrass!

Meta Multiple Choice

Love this.

 

 

[Hat tip: Tim Chase]

Null hypothesis

from xkcd.com

I’m 95% confident you’ll like this comic

from xkcd.com

Population Mean & Median

Have you seen this map, which shows the geographic center of the USA and also plots the current median and mean of the population? Very interesting! I got it from another math teacher, but I think the original source is the US Census Bureau (that’s what the bottom of the file says at least!). It inspired me to do some more poking around, and in the wikipedia article I found this map of how the population mean has moved over the last two centuries. Cool.

 

The movement of the population mean 1790-2010

 

And of course, here’s the median’s movement over time, too:

Movement of the Population Median