Here's an optical illusion for you. This picture is rectangular, but it sure doesn't look like it to me.

Homework is like a knife on the table.

Happy Halloween.

We're teaching Dalhart how to jump. In this picture, she's grabbing a bone off of the peephole/slash doorbell on our apartment door. Next up: catching frisbees.

NYC got its first snow of the season yesterday. Supposedly, we got eight inches, but it all ended up in nasty slush. New Yorkers can't drive in snow. Minnesotans continue to rule.

Apartment news:

-No word on our heat working, yet. Hopefully, the super comes through with that in the next couple of weeks. The plan as of now: mulled wine and hot toddys.

-Met a dude named Fred who lives in the building next door. The dude has Kramer hair. He's throwing a halloween party. Anna is going as my bodyguard. I'm going as her long last pal.

-We've got a solid cooking rotation going. Gareth is a vegetarian, so we go meatless for four nights out of the week. It's surprising how reasonable it is to feed 4 people when you're not buying meat.

Teacher news:

-I taught my first Bard-observed lesson on Friday. It went well, except for that was supposed to take 10 minutes took the entire lesson time. My mentor teacher is nay happy, but I say it's a good thing. We talked about like terms for half an hour--evidence that the pace the class is moving at might is too fast. They were supposed to know like terms three weeks ago. It's frustrating that a group of ELL students, many of which are (speculatively) up to 6-7 years "behind" in content knowledge, are expected to succeed in an algebra II course. State standards can be terrible things, especially when teachers aren't given the support/time they need to meet them. They're even worse when you work at school with no psychologist/no way to assess special needs, which translates to no way of providing IEPs for students that need it.

-People in my program are freaking out about coming home from the Bronx on Halloween. Evidently, tomorrow is a known gang initiation day. In my opinion, a group of 15 student teachers in shirts and ties walking two blocks to the subway in a crowd of school children seems pretty safe. Errbody gotta chill.

-I'm still studying sandpiles.

Anna says these look like people walking. G says he likes the white rose. I like them bricks.

Going to Greenpoint tonight to chill with G, David Price and Uncle Ray Ray. Takin' the g train.

-scotch bonnet

NY update: it's cloudy and misting and gray. It's also raining cigarettes. Saw a dude get hit in the shoulder with a lit cigarette butt as he was walking down the sidewalk. Our neighbors just throw them out the window--no look style. Some unlucky cabrón is gonna get his hair set on fire.

Math update: just wrote up a proof of the fact that the minimal ideal of a finite, commutative monoid is an Abelian group. Taste it. I'm still studying piles of sand.

Shout out to Josiah Burns; I hear from a reliable source that you're keeping it real.

I went with Anna to visit her rooftop garden in the Bronx. She hooked me up with some jalapeños and cilantro--both awesome. We already have mad* tomatoes from this place, and they've overstayed their welcome in our kitchen. So many tomatoes. I've knocked out five in the last few days, but we've got a long way to go.

Occupy Wall Street is still happening. Gonna go and check that out tomorrow and take pictures.

If the NYT coverage of Occupy isn't doing it for you, or if you wanna see some great photos, you should check out the adventures of Ben Valentine on the Brooklyn Bridge:

http://www.contemporaryartruck.com/2011/10/occupywallstreet.html

He got some great shots and didn't get arrested.

Meet Ms. Dalhart Skrivanos, our three-year-old pitbull mutt. She's a sweety.

I start a full schedule of student teaching this week. I got lucky and will be working with the same teacher I've been observing in September. I'm really looking forward to it. The kids, 10-12 graders, are awesome. In my class are students from

-the Dominican Republic
-Yemen
-Senegal
-Liberia
-the Ivory Coast

They all address me as Mr. James--which is sick--and they think that I'm crazy for wanting to teach math. Hopefully I'll have some good stories when I start teaching lessons. Right now, I think I've been teaching more English to students than mathematics. Some of them are already whiz kids, it's just a matter of re-teaching math in English well enough so they can pass the NY state regents exam. Everybody wants to learn idioms. They love them.

My first embarrassing language use faux pas as a teacher:

"Mista James, why you wanna teach kids about triangle?"
"I don't. Geometry isn't my thing, but polynomials...now there's a serious turn on."
"A what? Ms. Aiza [my supervising teacher], what's a turn on?"

Radiohead is playing in NYC next week. Gonna see if I can score some tix.

In the meantime, I'll be considering this logic problem. You should, too. It's a good one my professor showed me the other day. Been thinking about it on the subway on the daily.

Crossing the Desert

An unlimited supply of gasoline is available at one edge of a desert 800 miles wide, but there is no source on the desert itself. A truck can carry enough gasoline to go 500 miles (this will be called one "load"), and it can build up its own refueling stations at any spot along the way. These caches may be of any size, and it is assumed that there is no evaporation loss.

What is the minimum amount (in loads) of gasoline a truck will require in order to cross the desert? Is there a limit to the width of a desert the truck can cross?

(My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles, Martin Gardner, Dover 1994)

I've found a solution which uses four loads, but have yet to prove that it's optimal. If you get anything good, drop me a line.