We have a Christmas blog:

http://yateschristmas.blogspot.com

Have fun.

I ran into an annoying bug with GDI+ yesterday.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=245730

Somebody didn't check their edge conditions :(.

At the previously mentioned Christmas party I spent most of the time chatting with a pharmacy grad student about math education. He felt ripped off by the educational system because it did not make math interesting enough and now he doesn't readily have the mathematical tools at hand to most effectively do his work. So we mostly ended up talking about what we wished we had different about our math education. One of the things that struck me was that nearly all of the exciting things that happened in my pre-college math education were from my own investigation/curiosity and if it involved a teacher it was in a group of three or less.

I've talked to Rebekah before about how neither of us can remember where we learned many core math concepts that we do not struggle understanding, but we can clearly see the way that math we learned later built upon that foundation. From my perspective now if I see someone struggling to understand addition or multiplication I revert in my head to an axiomatic basis for the natural numbers that asserts the number one and successor that is also a number. Should schools teach math and numbers at that level until the kids get it then move on to higher concepts like addition and multiplication? After that the concept of inverses so that division and subtraction come for free? Really shouldn't students understand our place value number writing system inside and out as soon as they dare to count passed nine? Can this be avoided with such tactics?

One thing that I think helped Rebekah and I was an ability to have negligible regard for math application in the course of learning. Neither of us needed justification to study math beyond obtaining a deeper knowledge of math. Word problems only become annoying in that they bother to contrive a situation that must be abstracted out to get to the real problem. Maybe we were motivated at times in the thrill of solving a puzzle, but what makes a puzzle interesting is the beauty or wit of the solution.

So how was I inspired to recognize and appreciate the beauty and wit of mathematics? Sadly I don't remember.

Rachel, my sister-in-law, doesn't think I post anymore so she is going to unlink me! I have an excuse though... things at work have been really busy these days. We have had a lot to do with our new version of the software (which is really cool and I can't wait to have it all working) and the owner of the company has been out as his wife is having some critical medical problems. Sandy's swift recovery is in our prayers.

For Christmas we will be traveling down to California and then after Christmas we head east to Pennsylvania. When we get back to Montana we will have our new car (Toyota Yaris liftback). Currently it is somewhere on a boat in the Pacific ocean.

Last night was the Math department Christmas party. We made sugar cookies shaped like trees, candy canes, gingerbread women (they have skirts, so maybe they are Scottish gingerbread men), numbers, a minus sign, a less then or greater then or hat symbol, some dots, and a T-Rex. Rebekah puts lemon in the mix for flavor and thinks that that is unique (I don't know if it is but it tastes good).

Our house and cat are being house sat by one of the youths from our church. She visited today with her two kittens which inspired some territorial responses by Mobius, but they seemed to get along well enough. As they were leaving one of the cats didn't like our neighbor's dog and sprinted (cheetah style) back through the hose and across my left second toe. I'm ok though, just a little bleeding, nothing like this.

This afternoon we made fudge (chocolate and peanut butter). Rebekah likes to make "finals week fudge" for her students to consume. I'll make her post about it on the cooking blog.

In sports news, I've been too busy to do anything active recently (we should be getting out on the snow sometime soon), but both Wheaton's soccer teams were in the NCAA III finals with the women delivering a resounding victory and the men loosing, but making for an outstanding finish to Joe Bean's career.

So I decided to move the whole blog thing to blogspot. Next week I will be at the IFAI expo in Atlanta. Hopefully I will get to see some friends from the time Rebekah and I spent there. Recently I got a shiny new laptop (no really it's shiny), an so the old one is going back to the corporate headquarters so I'm reinstalling everything on the old laptop. I started by trying to install Windows Vista RC1 on it, but apparently Gateway hasn't updated their BIOS for Vista yet. So I loaded XP and stuck in the Gateway drivers CD and it took over and started installing and rebooting after each install. It said in large print, "don't push any keys or buttons", so I didn't but it still required me to click on my user name ever time after it booted. Now I feel like John Locke, existing to push the button...

Now it's bedtime as XP SP2 is installing.

Mobius' latest film is an action thriller where she goes Stallone on all her favorite baddies. "Hey plastic bag, you're the disease and I'm the cure!" You can tell when she is about to bat crime off the map by the size of her pupils.