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[cosmolinguist]

"Ooh, the math cupcakes!" somebody said when they saw me carry the shoebox out from the kitchen, which struck me because my Facebook message said (and indeed should still say; I don't change it terribly often) that I am making math cupcakes.

They're just normal cupcakes, but then when looking for sprinkles I found this little tube of decorative frosting. I wasn't just going to put curlicues on my cupcakes, of course; nothing so simple. I put an x on one instead. Then an O. Then I decided the O was a 0 and put a 1 on the next one. I admired the binary and considered doing 1's and 0's on all the rest, but then realized I'd end up with a bunch of lines and circles and I'm too masochistic to give myself such an easy decorating job.

So instead I added e and i. I was pretty proud of thei, with the italic serifs and all, so I tried π, and got all the flourishes pointing the right directions.

Then I was out of interesting numbers, and just got silly. There was =, and then of course ≠. There was ÷, my favorite of the arithmatic operators (and the only one interesting enough to count as cupcake decoration, I thought). In appearance, I mean; I hated long division. Fourth grade was a terror for me; along with division they tried to teach us multiplying two- and three-digit numbers, which I never really did learn to do properly.

I did { and }, and < and > (thinking briefly of the joy of HTML). I always liked the greater and less-than signs. Even more, I always liked ≤ and ≥, so I added those... though I quickly realized that turned 90°, they just made 4 and 6 in Roman numerals. I grinned: that'll work too!

Then I finally realized I'd missed a great trick. Especially for someone who actually liked trig in high school: three letters on one cupcake was a lot to ask of my dodgy skills with the tube of frosting, but I did end up with a legible sin, cos and tan.

Again, removed enough from their context, I realized I should've just written those on all of them. With lots more attention paid to sines than to cosines or tangents. But it was too late; there were only a few left to decorate. I put some more random numbers on them and set off with a box full of cupcakes under my arm. I think it got me a few weird looks in transit.

I was looking at it weirdly myself by the time I got there; somehow f(x) seemed a lot more like c(x) before I got too far, and the bottom half of a fraction disappeared completely. Still, I presented them proudly, and then hid them in the kitchen until it was dark out. Well, not on purpose, but when I knew it was getting close to the time I had to leave, and I hadn't even eaten any of these cupcakes yet, I knew something had to be done. That's when I passed the box around (first taking the stupid missing-denomenator one for myself), I wasn't surprised that diffrentcolours, the person who happened to be closest to me at the time, surveyed his options and then carefully plucked the one that said sin out of the center of the box.

He did nominate tan for greyeyedeve (or vice versa), but I don't know if that was due to skin tone, a penchant for digressions, or something else I don't know about! She didn't hear him anyway, or if she did she ignored him; she took one from the corner nearest to her when I held out the box, and announced, "I got 23. Because I look like I'm 23, right?"

Then someone else said that she got six, which confused me as there hadn't been a 6, but then I realized that, indeed, the ≤ had been held sideways. (I said it had also occurred to me that a Unix geek would see a text editor there, but only diffrentcolours snorted at that stupid joke.)

Next time I think I'll do diacritics. I'm always better at letters than numbers, anyway.

Comments

[taimatsu]

He told me this evening it was because of skin tone, but I don't think he realised she had ignored him!

We are SO having more parties, and you are coming. I could try to make cake, too. I do a good frosted marmalade cake. :)

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

"Now if the six turned out to be nine, I don't mind." -- Jimi Hendrix.

[cosmolinguist]

Somebody else, not the person with the vi, also sounded like they were hoping they got the six, because they wanted to make 666, so then I thought, again, "there's no six!" and my first thought was indeed that maybe it was a nine, but I didn't make a nine either. The weirdos!

[cosmolinguist]

Glad to hear it. :) I have two excellent brownie recipes, too. And just tons of bars and cookies; I grew up in a region with the blandest cooking in the known universe, but some of the best baked goods.

[goodqueenmolly.livejournal.com]

i didn't hear him :-(

[cosmolinguist]

He didn't seem too broken up about it. :) I think 23 is an excellent choice, anyway (and I know a certain contingent of my friends is bound to agree with that).

[paninogirl.livejournal.com]

I so am going to find a fun way to decorate my cupcakes like this the next time I make some. :)

[cosmolinguist]

You don't have to pick such a dorkish theme, but I think that helps. :) Like I said, I'm already planning cedillas and umlauts for next time. Or maybe just runes. Hm....

Clearly I need more excuses to make cupcakes; I'm all excited now.

[cosmolinguist]

Manchester certainly isn't cold compared to the winters I'm used to, but the summers are comparatively dreary. I'm used to lots more variety.

I'm glad you escaped the bridge too. Sheesh.

I looked at the photos; canoeing looks great fun. And I love that bridge in Duluth. And I'm seriously much too excited to see the Twin Cities skyline again. :) I might have to steal that for my wallpaper. And where did you get that pizza? I'm glad you saw the Uptown; I don't remember if I recommended that or not, but I easily could've. :)

I'll screen this comment because it's got your number in it, and I'll text you this afternoon. I've got the next couple of days off work, so am pretty flexible for meeting up I think.

[evilneal.livejournal.com]

I meant cold as in the people rather than temperature, Autumn certaintly noticed that people were less approachable while living here, though I never thought people were that difficult to talk to.
The pizza was from Pizza Luce on Lyndale Ave S in the Warehouse district, it was quite possibly the best pizza ever although we orded way too much, it's also a good place just to hang out and drink and watch the world go by.
We also saw some of the Fringe Festival at June Lune theater which was a really amazing warehouse theater that i'd definitely go back to.

[cosmolinguist]

Ah yes, of course. I think my Manc husband likes to say how nice Manchester is (compared to e.g. London) but I've found it much more intimidating than Minnesota. I figured I was just biased, being born and bred there, so I'm glad to hear it really is like that for other people too, at least some of the time.

I thought it might be Pizza Luce! Excellent. It's so good. I'm glad you liked Theatre de la Jeune Lune too; it's very well thought of in my circles, but then they involve a lot of public-radio listeners. :) I really like the warehouse district generally.

[classytart.livejournal.com]

I can teach you to long multiply. If you want. I know a lovely method, that I think will make you happy (in a maths geek way).

[cosmolinguist]

Ooh, really? I mean, it's not a thing that comes up a long in my daily life now, but that's all the more reason to learn to do it properly and not have the shadow of Mrs. Thorstad's teaching style looming over the subject for the rest of my life. :)

And though I'm not a math geek (I felt like a phony with the cupcakes really; I should've stuck to umlauts and tildes really!), I do love math geek games very much. They often get me through things I can't cope with in normal modes of thinking.

[classytart.livejournal.com]

I think it's brilliantly tidy

Here's a couple of numbers pulled from nowhere multiplied together this way:



So, you draw a grid with columns and rows corresponding to the digits in each number (here 3 and 4), then draw diagonals. Do the little multiplication for each cell, and put the tens above the line, the units below. Then add each diagonal (you'll see I've carried numbers in thee - don't forget to add those in). Your sum is then written around the grid!

It means the most difficult sum you have to do is adding up the numbers, or multiplying 7 by 8! Magic!

[cosmolinguist]

Excellent! I just copied your example, very carefully, as I couldn't quite grok the adding-the-diagonals bit and what to do, precisely, with the numbers you carried... but then I got it!

And then I tried another one that I just made up myself (723 x 461) and got really scared because I came up with an answer where every digit was 3 except one, which was 0, and I figured that didn't bode well for me, so I typed it into my calculator with some trepidation ... and that is the answer! 333,303.

I am giddy, and hoping I don't forget this before it becomes useful to me one day.

[classytart.livejournal.com]

Isn't it great!

I was giddy when that was shown to me, and I've never even tried using any other method since, because it's so friendly, and also smacks of witchcraft.

I've never shown it to anyone who wasn't sitting next to me before, so I'm glad that doing it on paper with the same example makes sense of it.

I think that having seen it and done it, it'll probably stick. I'm so happy you understand it's cool. :)

[cosmolinguist]

Of course it's cool! I'm actually glad that other people might use the word 'giddy' about such a thing.

And yes, I was impressed at your illustrious example. :) It took me a second; I was with you all the way on the first picture but then when there started being numbers in the boxes, well, I was lost right away.

And then I got that (by actually reading the directions at the bottom a bit more closely!) and then found myself stymied by how those new numbers appeared outside the square! That took a while, because it seems I'd forgotten the principle of carrying, but your example set me right and I'm good to go now. :)

The hint of witchcraft is of course appealing as well. Like I said, I do way better with the math tricks and games than I did with the rubbish they tried to teach me in school. We did learn a few but usually only after we'd had a whole chapter (with a test I'd surely gotten a D on) first. We "had" to "know" how to do it the "proper" way before they'd show us the exciting, giddy light-bulb-over-the-head kind.

I can see that, though: who wants 10-year-olds who are excited by math? Perish the thought.

[classytart.livejournal.com]

Hee! I like when other people say "giddy" about sums, too.

I was actually shown that method in school. They'd shown us the normal way, then showed us that. Happily, my teacher when I was 10 was great, and only cared that I could do the sum, didn't give a damn for the method. I wish more teachers were like that, because there are so many neat things in the world, so why not teach them?

If this way only worked for some numbers, then yeah, don't teach it, but you can even bring in decimals and it still works, you just put the decimal point in the final number by running across and down from where they are in the sum, then where those 2 lines meet, follow the diagonal line. So in my example, if it had been 543.9 * 1.26 the decimals meet at the bottom left corner of the top right cell. Follow the diagonal down, and the decimal point goes into the answer making it 685.314

Ah, sums!

[goodqueenmolly.livejournal.com]

your cakes were marvelous and it was great to see you (really, yes, I was very glad you decided to come) I am afraid maths is a closed book to me - I am dyscalculic and my brain processes numerical information in strange and esoteric ways. The kinds of processes needed for mathmatical reasoning do not make any sense to me at all. Interestingly, things like telling the time were also very difficult for me - I didn't manage to work that out until I was 10 or 11 but I am numerate and can do accounts etc because I worked out other ways of doing things than 'normal' people do thanks to a tutor. The way maths is taught now would be even worse for me I think - gods know how kids with this condition manage these days - probably they just get written off as stupid, like I was.

[cosmolinguist]

Excellent icon. :) That's always been my attitude too.

I'm pretty bad at math too, and I still feel it now because I hang around os many geeks and people whose brains work in a very logical, precise way that could not be more different from mine. I am interested in a lot of the ideas of math and I love physics and astronomy which involve a lot of numbers and a lot of careful thinking, and sometimes if I'm in the right mood I can follow that, but I don't think that way myself.