Overheard about Math
March 19th, 2009
This post is for those of you who are feeling a bit voyeuristic. There’s this website called Overheard at College that posts snippets of funny (out-of-context) conversation between people on college campuses. I thought I’d do a few searches about math and found a couple of worthy inclusions here:
Dude: Man, when you start putting in letters in math … shit starts getting complicated. (overheard at Northern Illinois)
Prof: Our old friend, the dot product, has come back with a vengeance … like the Democrats! (overheard at Fordham University)/blockquote>
Prof: Now, if you were on a deserted island…well, you would die. But first, you’d be able to derive an equation. (overheard at Reed College)
Now that I see that in writing, I may have to rethink that old standard line about “if you were stranded on a desert island … ”
Okay, well … back to more dissertation writing.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Math of the Brown Sharpie
- New Math: A Formula for Everything
- Truth in Numbers
- The Math Purity Test (and more)
- Real World Metrics
Posted in Math Humor
Just FYI, your blog post looks fine when I go directly to your web page, but when I read it in Google Reader, lots of Microsoft Word markup appears:
/* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; etc.
I assume you copied some content from Word directly into your blogging software. One way around this is to paste into Notepad, select again, and then paste into your blogging software. Or paste into your HTML view instead of the WYSIWYG view.
Yeah … I realized it was screwed up about 5 seconds after it posted. I think it is fixed now (why you should always PREVIEW your blog posts!).
Yeah, I do stuff like that all the time and have to edit a post seconds after I first put it up.
I take it your web page also included the Word junk but you fixes it before I saw your page. So maybe it wasn’t a Google Reader problem, per se. The reader just cached an earlier version.
But there are plenty of surprises with Google Reader, especially on math blogs where people try to use LaTeX with blogging software. Often it breaks in the reader and you get “formula does not parse” errors. And here’s a post I wrote about how Google Reader renumbers lists.