Everyday Math for 12-31-08

Today was pancake day. The recipe is fairly simple but small for our family. To make enough for everyone, we quadruple (times 4) the recipe.

Most of it is pretty straight forward, 1 cup becomes 4 cups, and so on.

But 8 teaspoons of something can be tedious to measure and error accumulate easier with 8 spoonfuls than with 2 or 3.

So it makes sense to convert teaspoons to tablespoons when there is a lot of them. There are 3 teaspoons in 1 tablespoon, so therefore there are 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons in 8 teaspoons. (8 divided by 3 is 2 with 2 teaspoons left over).

Everyday Math for 12-29-08

As we prepare to depart South Dakota, our oldest son, Tobias, says "Lets visit a million museums."

I asked him "If we dedicate 15 minutes to each museum, how many hours will it take to visit 1 million museums?"

The easy answer is to notice that 15 minutes is 1/4 of an hour and just divide 1,000,000 by 4 and get 250,000 hours.

The harder way to figure it out (which we worked out first) is to multiply 15X1,000,000 or 15 million minutes. Divide that by 60 (60minutes / hour) and you still get 250,000 hours.

I also asked him how many years 250,000 hours are. He got 28.51 years, longer than we were willing to take to get home.

I also mentioned that there aren't 1,000,000 museums in the world. I really didn't have a concrete number at the time but according to Wikipedia, there are tens of thousands of museums in the world.

Here is a short list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums

Everyday Math for 12-24-08

This one came from my oldaer son. He observed that we travelled 1 mile in 46 seconds. The question was, how fast is that in mph?

Our speed was 1 mile / (per) 46 seconds. Which is 1/46 miles per second or .02173913 miles per second. Mulitply that by 60 to get miles per minute. Multiply that by 60 to get 78.2 miles per hour.

Another question was "If we're going 70 mph, how long will it take to go 51 miles?

Put the unit type you want on top (time, distance, etc)

1 hour per 70 miles or 1 hour/70miles times 51 miles or 1X 51/ 70 or .72857143 hours (the miles cancel each other out). Multiply that times 60 minutes per hour to get 43.714 minutes. For comparrison, 80mpg gives you 39 minutes. And 500mph gives you 6.2 minutes.

Everyday Math for 12-22

Just mpg computation today.

384.2 miles divided by 20.2 gallons gives us 19mpg.

New kind of window

Last week there was some freezing rain and the van got a nice coat of ice on the windows.

But it was kind of warm too so the ice was barely frozen.

So there was a layer of water between the sheet of ice on the window and the glass.

I started to lower that window and noticed that the glass was going down but the ice was intact.

So I raised the glass and got the camera ready. I was able to lower the window completely and get several pics. You can see the glass in the lower right.

From the 'you know you are a nerd when' department

So I'm watching the literal version of that great 80's music video 'Head Over Heals' on YouTube when the thought strikes me that what the world really needs is a Planet of the Apes version of this video.

I mentioned this to my wife and kids and they thought it sounded like a good idea. I think most families would have just chorused "NERD".

Welcome to YAGB (Yet another geeky blog).

I'll be writing about al kinds of geeky things/thoughts, space stuff, math, scifi stuff, etc.

One of my goals will by to post every other day about how I used math in real life.