All the Math You Forgot to Remember From School

And if I'm not pretentious enough to indicate that's all in my blog post today, although the small volume subtitled this -- among the eighty-one items mostly books that I picked up in two bags for six bucks at Minot Public Library this past Saturday (and with the two bags totaling six bucks, that's about seven and a half cents a book!) -- couldn't possibly contain all that ... it comes close. Liz Strachan's A Slice of Pi (ISBN 9781435127470) comes close. This mathematics teacher from Scotland knows how to make things interesting and something you really would care to know, among them how the producer of the Pythagorean Theorem also had his own cult (really, why has a book or movie not been made about this?), giving numbers their distinct order in the universe, forbidding the eating of beans, and so on.  Retain? That's quite a different story, although I like both the idea that with algebra 2 = 1 and the thought of Florence Nightingale making in into a math book! (Statistics.)


123456789 X 8 = 987654312 (Try it!)


And now that Sarah and Jeffrey whom I had to bring with me since Martha Jean was at work Saturday have discovered the Internet in the main floor children's library, we may be going more often. (Especially since Martha asks and flutters her eyes when doing so that I not buy more books for as long as I can since we pray and we plan to get our finances caught up again, but I digress.) Anyway, the kids and I slept in Saturday morning and after running another errand and we got an excellent deal on a DVD of Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel-goes-galactic movie Jeffrey loves and Sarah found while we were out. So we settled in, watched the movie, and after church Sunday where in Sunday school we packed 47 school kits for Lutheran World Relief we got home to watch Mrs. Doubtfire which is still a hit and I am surprised it hasn't been targeted by one of the latest cause célèbres to tout their ... cause. 


All the fractions you use are vulgar.


Meh. Spring Break's ended with a on-rain off-rain look outside and Sarah's fourth grade at Longfellow taking their state standardized testing all week. I remember taking ours in Florida and those were practically free days, but I don't remember getting to wear pajamas or bring junk food for lunch like our daughter does! At least -- as far as I'm aware -- Sarah does not have super powers because her mom's really from another dimension, and I didn't open a portal there with my nuclear powered vacuum cleaner. That's the premise of David Hopkins and Brock Rizy's comic book/graphic novel Emily Edison (ISBN 0977788326), four stories of the title character knocking about super robots, pulling an all-nighter on an essay, going to a school dance and crushing on a guy while this giant monster rips apart the school, and ultimately facing down ... growing up. Well, someone's got to do it. Oh halaboloo.


Mathematicians say the Gregorian calendar is still ever so slightly accurate and in 3,000 years' time, it will have to be adjusted by one day.

But let's not bother ourselves about that,


David