Table of Contents for Home Label

                                                               Table of Contents for Home Label

Arriving in Tidewater (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

My Unlikely Hobby (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

The Envy of the Neighborhood (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Pets (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Blasting Away (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Don't Judge a Book by It's Cover (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Rural, Suburban, Urban (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Neighbors (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unlikely Hobby

                                                                                          My Unlikely Hobby I often spend a warm summer afternoon sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of that tall pine tree in my front lawn while translating a novel or short story from Russian. I have no interest in visiting Russia or communicating with Russians in any way. This hobby developed in a circuitous way. When NASA had offered a free on-site course in Russian, I enrolled in it because I thought it would help me to translate some Russian publications on ionized gases. I had studied German in college, and had maintained and improved on my translating skills by reading German stories and watching a few German language movies. This ability proved to be of some benefit in ...
Read more

Blasting Away

                                                      Blasting Away in the Neighborhood In my previous post I wrote about our neighbor across the street – the one who has a monster fish aquarium in her living room. Her son Austin is a nice young man, but he has a pick-up truck that is not so nice. He has customized it in a strange way. His mother parks her car in their driveway, and he parks his truck in the grass between their driveway and Sam's lawn. One evening when Sam and I were sitting on his porch, regaling each other with anecdotes about events that occurred 60 years ago, I was suddenly scared out of my wits by what sounded like a cannon firing right behind my back. I jumped up a couple of inches, and then flopped back down, still shaking a bit. Sam was as calm as a cucumber. He chuckled, and ex...
Read more

Ode to Math

  Ode to Math Mathematics, as such, does not exist in nature. At its basic, simplest level the relationship between arithmetic and natural phenomena seems obvious. For example, if a farmer has two cows in one field and three in another, then he can see how many he has altogether. If he wants to convey this information to another person, he can establish a one-to-one correspondence between his fingers and the cows, holding up two fingers and then another three, to produce a result for the total, symbolically represented by the five fingers. When he runs out of fingers, he has to start over, while keeping in mind the ten that he has already counted. If he wants to record this calculation, he can make two marks on papyrus to represent the two cows, or fingers, etc. When he gets tired of making all of those marks, it's natural that he will adopt a different symbol for two marks (ll - 2), (lll - 3), etc. So, we can see how the development of the simplest math wa...
Read more