All Those Geeky Things

Everyday Math for 2-20-09

2009-02-20T23:07:00.003-05:00

My older son has Type 1 (juvenile) Diabetes. Because of that we need to know how many grams of carbohydrates there are in the food he is eating.

Sometimes that is easy - the package will tell you that one bagel is 50 grams of carbohydrates. But other times it says that the serving size is 1/5 or whatever of the whole thing (like pizza). Often times it isn't very convenient to cut it into the number of pieces they want us to. Pizza is a good example - who wants to cut a pizza into 5 pieces? Eight is MUCH easier.

So tonight we had brownies from a box. We didn't cut it into 20 pieces like they wanted but rather 8. But we still needed to know how many grams of carbohydrates there were in each larger serving.

This is pretty straight forward. Multiply 20 pieces by 23 grams per piece to get 460 grams for the whole thing. Now we just divide 460 grams by 8 pieces to get 57 grams of carbohydrates per piece. We also divide that by 15 to get the number of carb exchanges. 4 in this case, which is a lot for such a little thing - but it is all sugar and flour.

German Engineering at its smallest (sort of)

2009-02-13T20:58:00.004-05:00

Germans make really cool model trains.

This one is from 1959.

The locomotive has lots of small intricate pieces/details.

The locomotive is a Marklin 3003 (BR 24).

What Every Woman Should Know About Home Computers

2009-01-04T19:12:00.001-05:00

This article came with a Commodore 64 I picked up at a garage sale. Judging from the computers in the pictures, it must date frome the early to mid 80's. The actual article was a bit disappointing - too straight forward and factual. It does have some interesting insight into the olden days.

It looks like the photographer and models didn't know much about computers. What is the girl looking at? The TV might be off to make it easier to take the picture. To be fair, the Adam did work like a fancy electric typewriter in its default mode

You can find out more about the Coleco Adam Computer here:

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

This is from the last couple of paragraphs one this page:

Memory is measured in terms of kilobytes (K). Every kilobyte is equal to 1,024 characters - a character being a letter, numeral, punctuation mark, or space. If a computer has 32K RAM that means it can temporarily store 32,738 characters or about 22 pages of double-space typewriter type.

Computers come with as little as 1K, as much as 64K, and MORE; additional memory can often be added.

I don't think most kids today know what a Kilobyte is anymore.

Pictured is a Timex Sinclair 1000 and Coleco Adam Computer System.

Everyday Math for 12-31-08

2008-12-31T19:53:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-31T19:35:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-24T15:29:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-24T15:10:00.001-05:00

Just mpg computation today.

384.2 miles divided by 20.2 gallons gives us 19mpg.

New kind of window

2008-12-23T12:56:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-23T12:37:00.001-05:00

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).

2008-12-23T12:21:00.001-05:00

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.