Dispersity in the classroom
Here’s an amusing way dispersity, a measure of how different the sizes of objects in a collection are, crops up in classroom management. Imagine that I’m a teacher who wants more participation in class. More specifically, during class discussions a few of my students are regular contributors, but I want everyone to join in on […]
Tug of Cooperation
I used to imagine that when two people are trying to act in their own self-interest, the result is a kind of tug-of-war: In other words, there’s a loser and there’s a winner, and the winner is the one who pulls harder to get their own way. These days, however, I find it helpful to […]
Sigmoid Perception: Lateness
Clara and I were running late a few times in the last couple days, and we noticed that the difference between arriving on time and arriving five minutes late feels much bigger than the difference between arriving 10 minutes late and 15 minutes late, or between an hour late and an hour and five minutes […]
Organization takes space
We recently organized our freezer with a shelf riser and a couple of storage baskets from the Container Store and learned two things: I had been buying bag after bag of frozen chicken thighs because I kept thinking we were out. I think there were four bags in total, two opened. Once we had the […]
Break the wool at the knot
Elizabeth Zimmerman, titan of modern knitting, remarks on the fact that knitters who would never join two strands of yarn with a knot often accept the knots that come in the skein: …But one thing is certain—never knit a knot. No matter how careful you are to keep it on the wrong side, it usually […]
Spontaneous Inequality
A fun problem making the mathematical rounds: if you give everybody some number of dollars (say you give 45 people $45 each), and at every tick of the clock everyone with money chooses one random person $1, how will the money eventually end up distributed? You might think it’ll stay approximately equal—”approximately” only because of […]
That which cannot be pursued
I’m fascinated by cases where, in order to achieve something, it’s better to focus on something else instead. Here’s Viktor Frankl’s take on success and happiness: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; […]
“Genie” Coefficient
Summer break!
This past week I completed a full year of writing weekly posts for this blog. To celebrate, I’m taking a break! I might write some more when I feel like it, but for now I’m just going to enjoy summer vacation and see if I can catch up on friendships and outdoor activities. I also […]
It’s on the tip of my tongue…
I like to write a short Goodreads review for each book I read, if only to remind myself what I liked or found interesting later. I was recently reviewing the children’s fantasy novel A Face Like Glass, and I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the way all the small mysteries related to one overarching […]