Attach to a headband. Tell people it's an early Google Glass prototype.
Got married.
... and we're changing the arrows to unidirectional like you suggest! But keeping them at both the top and bottom. (And making them disappear after 3 seconds of not touching a piece). They can still be dragged, which is how I like to rotate them.
When I was on chemo, the drugs would keep me awake for 3 days at a time. I lost the ability to make sense of numbers, alarming for me as a mathematician who can remember tons of numbers because each is like the face of an old friend. I sometimes lost the ability to make sense of time, I could not remember if something happened a day before, a week before, or months, and I could not sequence past events. steve made a short video about that strange experience. After treatment, I slept terribly for a year and my thinking and memory were always foggy. Lack of sleep make a huge impact on my intelligence during that period (however I was extremely production and creative during that time as well. Weird.) I had resigned myself to my condition as my new normal, but my new new normal came around to be my old normal.
Wow, that was a chilling piece of commentary and exceptional artwork.
Juggling. Used to do it all the time 25-30 years ago. Went semi-pro even. Circus. Could go 5 minutes with 5 balls and throw in a bunch of tricks. Records: 80 throws with 6 balls, 21 throws with 7. Now I juggle about 3 times a year, only when I'm asked to do something in a local show, or occasionally a math of juggling talk. Today my main hobbies are guitar and puzzle making. Bit of poetry and writing.
We're two weeks into our Kickstarter (tessellation puzzles) with 3 weeks to go, and backers have slowed down. We're contacting science centers and pulling the stops on people we know to get the word out. Still optimistic. It's been a really fun project -- I've made friends with math artists around the world licensing designs, and then it's been a really tough process getting the designs to work into a puzzle that can be put together in a lot of ways. Got the samples from the factory yesterday, and they look great, so production is a go if we get the funds. mk and steve have backed the project already -- kudos to you both! here's the link to the project In other news, I joined a men's choir. They're a bunch of fun and funny guys, with a good sense of low humor. We sing all kinds of songs. At 51 years old, I'm the youngest by quite a bit. Going on a retreat with them this weekend.
I love this. I may be the only one in Norway with it right now, so it may take a while for you to get my party invitation.
Nearly finished building an extra room on a small annex. Fun time working with a knowledgeable friend, we built it from the bedrock up. Scraped the earth, build foundation walls, leveled gravel, placed insulating sheets, poured concrete floor, framed it, translucent roof, windows, doors, siding largely done. Still to do: finish siding, electrical, insulation, and paneling. It's going to be work room for our puzzle-making business. Very satisfied.
Here's another critter we had visit in February. It's a weasel in his winter clothes. In Norwegian weasels are called røyskatt, which translates to "cairn cat", røys = a pile of loose stones (cairn) and katt = cat. "Røyskatt" is a much cuter name than "weasel" imo.
Just commenting on mk's post about the painting he's making for me and this walks by the window: Seen deer, mice and weasels walk by, but never a fox and never one this big. Guess I should share this, too. This is from Friday, three Orca whales swimming by the window: We get harbor porpoises fairly often, but Orcas only a few times every summer. Usually it's these three. Seems like a strange number to always be seen together. Very small pod, I guess. UPDATE: my fiancé just told me of this video from the same day, taken by a group of teenagers on a boat that followed the orcas for two hours. Turns out there's four of them, probably a mom and dad and two kids. Check out the footage here
Thanks! Here's the picture of the Family Tree that was a little hard to see on the video.
I get your point. A lot of our customers have expressed surprise that we are delivering on time. I suppose they are the ones most experienced with KS and know that on-time delivery is unusual! Yes, for us KS has been great for marketing. We decided last year to expand our hobby to a tiny business. We have many tiny businesses we're running at the same time and think puzzles could become the largest. Sales is the hardest part. We sold puzzles at some local fairs, visited a few local shops, got our puzzles in 3 stores in the city, did a mailing of samples to 20 stores, two of them bought a few packs, and we started to plan a sales road trip around the country for fun when corona hit and killed our plans. Selling 2 puzzles a day from our webshop is definitely hobby-level, but that is 30x increase from before we did the kickstarter. We also picked up 3 stores, 2 in the UK and one in the US that want to sell our puzzles, so from a marketing perspective our KS has been a hit. 2 puzzles a day plus 6x $10k KS next year is over $100k in sales and that's no longer hobby but small business. And if we can increase sales 30x again next year then it's really good business. We got a new machine we'll order this month with large cutting bed and double heads that can make 50 puzzles/hour. With enough sales we can employ someone to assemble and avoid manufacturing overseas, which we've tried and quality is a problem. My wife's been enjoying posting updates on KS, which lots of personal touches and touches of Norwegian culture. Some have been loving the updates and many have signed up for a newsletter, so she's going to start a blog on our website and build this brand-loyalty by drawing our customers into a kind of friend group. Fun stuff.
What!? "yur guy hit our truck with the train"? Yeah buddy, good luck getting the train company to pay for that one! My funniest wrong number story: When I first moved to Norway some 7 years ago a lady called from Denmark trying to reach her son in Tromsø. I couldn't speak much Norwegian, but she just kept talking. I tried all the simple things I could say, I had just moved from the US, the weather was nice, I worked in mathematics, etc. Found out her name was Elsi. A couple of weeks later she called again. We laughed about the wrong number and chatted a little bit more. She seemed delighted just to talk. A few days later she rang again. "Hei! Det er Elsi!" she said. "Hvordan er været?!" (How's the weather?!) No pretense of a wrong number now! This dear old lady just wanted to talk. She became a phone friend for a while, calling me at random times and talking slowly so I could understand, but I really couldn't speak many words and I guess it was too demanding so after a while she stopped. Oh Elsi, where are you today? We could discuss so many things now!
Good catch! Not so many people would recognize one right away!
We just finished watching this series last night. It's one of the best series we've watched. I was particularly struck by how exciting they made chess appear. Wonderful.
That is not very common in Norway. I was quite surprised by this attitude when I first came to Norway from the U.S. Norwegians speak out. It is part of the culture, and it takes some getting used to. Everyone feels they have a responsibility to speak or act when they see something that is not right. I have been approached by someone (not an employee) who told me I could not take pictures inside of a building, even though I was not taking pictures of people. Another time I swung my car to the other side of the street to nab a parking spot so I could run into a store to grab something quick. Someone called out to me as I ran into the building, but I was in too much of a rush to stop and see what he wanted. When I came out I saw that I had pulled into a handicapped spot - I did not see the sign because I pulled in the wrong way. The man was standing by my car and had waited 10 minutes to tell me that I parked incorrectly. A part of this is connected to the Norwegian expression "take the ball, not the man", meaning when you speak out against someone's behavior, you address the behavior and not the person. When this attitude exists at a culture-wide scale, it is easier both to speak out and easier to accept correction when you have done something wrong ("Oh, I did something wrong, I am thankful that someone let me know. I am not a bad person.")
Had to do it...
Well Pubski, I bought a viking camp yesterday. 8000 sq.ft house, 4 cottages, workshop, and a kindergarten which pays rent. It's on beautiful cape on a fjord. Renovating starts right away. It will become a mathematics creativity center with classroom, meeting space, coffeeshop, art gallery, math garden, bar, and store. I'll be giving up my job this summer to do this full-time and we'll be open for business August 1st.
21. Did you know that If all the blood vessels in your body were laid end to end, you'd be dead.
I just passed my Norwegian language tests for immigration - got highest levels on oral, writing, reading and listening (yay me!) I've been living in Norway for 10 years now. The first two years I tried to get into the language courses at the university where I was working, but because I was on a year-by-year contract I wasn't high priority. I was number 180 on the waiting list year one and number 75 on the waiting list year two. I just learned on my own. Here's my tips: Watch movies in the language, with subtitles in the SAME language. Don't put English subtitles on your Spanish movie, put Spanish subtitles on your Spanish movie. You can read along and hear and it doesn't matter if you understand only 10% of the words. You'll pick up context and common phrases and even slang expressions. You get to see how the words are being pronounced. Watch one movie per week. Go back and rewatch your favorites, you'll find over time you understand more and more. Try to speak the lines along with the actors. Learn songs in the language. Even better if you play guitar or piano and can play and sing along. Songs are some of the best way to memorize words. Run the lyrics of the songs through google translate and compare so you get the gist of what is being said. Try to learn one song a week. As mentioned here, read children's books. Rhyming books, Doctor Seuss translations, Richard Scarry books, anything. Work your way up grade levels. If you can get ahold of 1st-2nd grade school books even better. Memorize children's rhymes. Norway has a service called Klartale (clear speech), it's a simplified news service with easy words and very well pronounced Norwegian. You can read or listen or download podcasts. Maybe there is something similar in Spanish? Download podcasts or children's stories and play them in the car. Don't understand? Doesn't matter, try to repeat the sentences and phrases you hear. It may help to imagine you're an actor and try to ham up the accent as you visualize yourself as a Spanish movie star. It's partly about the mindset. I bought the Pimsleur Norwegian courses. I think for Spanish they offer 90 lessons. It's (almost) entirely listen and repeat, which means you can run the lessons in the car or while walking to work. I had a half-hour walk to work which is the length of the lesson, so I did a lesson a day, once on the way to work and then repeating it on the way home. I recommend these. (I did 10 lessons in Spanish when I was going there for a conference and learned enough that I was able to ask someone on the street for directions to a pharmacy and understand enough words he told me to be able to find it.) Extreme case: Immerse yourself in the language by moving to the country for 10 years. Be extremely frustrated for the first 6 years that you are living in a fog and not understanding shit. Be satisfied if after 10 years you can get by and don't care anymore about liberally mixing in English whenever you don't know a phrase. Tell yourself that the natives think it's charming how you mangle their language in amusing ways.
The Game of Life is just awesome. Here's a picture of me with John Conway where he signed a box of Life cereal for me. John hates the Game of Life because he thinks the mathematics are trivial and he has done so much more important work. I think he should just be happy that he is known for something, unlike most mathematicians!
Nice idea goldbludgeon! That's an unusual handle, what does it refer to? My name's Mike. I'm American but I live in Norway. My hobbies are as weird as yours. - I'm a father of 3 teenagers. They are awesome. - I'm a math guy. I've taught every level from preschool to university. Middle school is my favorite. - I was a circus artist (I did juggling, trapeze, slack wire, and clowing) and graduate of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College. I've performed with three circuses when I was in my 20s. - I play guitar and piano. Not so good. But I like to write songs. Currently secretly writing songs with steve. Don't tell anyone. - I make math art. http://nakedgeometry.com, for example. - I just bought a viking camp last week that I'll be turning into a mathematics creativity center. It's the gutsiest thing I've ever done. http://matematikkbølgen.com - I got tenure in the US and gave it up to move to Norway. I got tenure in Norway and I'm giving that up to run my own business. I think math in schools entirely misses the point. This makes me unpopular with some of my colleagues. But popular with the downtrodden. Thus my soon-to-be break with the establishment. - I like cool mathy things, such as puzzles, logic, balloon animals, magic, music, games of all kinds - I like scifi movies and tv. I don't read books like I should. Instead I read hubski. - I write. Articles, a novel, children's books, poetry. I perform in a play every year. - I have a dog. And a cat. They don't like each other. But they like me. - I have uncurable cancer (how's that for mood-killer?) I've had more unpleasant medical procedures in the last 3 years than a human should be allowed. I'm doing pretty damn good right now and should last for a while. - I hate sleeping - I have a few bitcoin. I bought my first one at $600. I like watching them lose value. mk tells me I'll be rich someday. I believe him. If I go broke, I'm going to sleep on his couch. - I'm a member of a secret organization. We meet every year. And sometimes throw axes.
This is a big surprise. I have a lot of friends in Ringling who are heartbroken. I agree with thenewgreen's assessment that circuses are going the way of Cirque du Soleil. I myself like to see smaller circuses with artistic performances and a storyline. Yes, I went to RBBBCC (Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College) in 1993 and toured part-time with Royal Hanneford circus as a clown the following year. Then I went back to school and was in the FSU Flying High circus for 3 years performing juggling, double-trapeze and slackwire. But alas that was 20 years ago and I have discovered that the muscle turns to fat. I still harbor a plan of putting together an artistic circus-style math show. We've recently applied for a cultural grant to put together such a show, and if approved we'll put together a 40-minute 3-person show where math will come alive with music, dance and visual deliciousness. We'd then perform 10-20 shows at schools or wherever.
You're the best around, nothing's ever gonna keep you down!
What a strange and wonderful thing, Newgreen! I like my hands. Juggling and piano and karate and coin tricks have made them strong, flexible and coordinated. They have endured grievous wounds and Beau lines. And I have so far avoided the crippling arthritis which plagues my family. I feel my hands are an extension of my brain, and of course they are. Here's my hands doing something my brain often does...
Drill four hundred holes Pipe pipe pipe, a hundred more A dome arises First real summer weather in Trøndelag. Shorts at last! Been out building a fast dome, 4 meters high, that will be a stage for a music festival at my place this weekend. Satisfying.
That's a great question. I've had lots of failures, but most of them turned out to be opportunities so I rarely think of anything I've done as a "failure" per se. But here's a series of failures: I dropped out of college after losing support because of poor performance. Failure. So I spent a few years performing: juggling shows and classes and later clowning. Barely scraped by. Not a success. I went back to school and finished up, got a degree in mathematics. Win! Couldn't find a job. Failure. Got accepted to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College. Win! Did not get a contract with the "Big Show" afterwards. Failure. Worked construction and part-time circus jobs for a year... That's when the fear started setting in. Friends of mine from high school whom I was no less talented than had jobs starting a $50k/year, which in 1992 was a lot of money. I was living in my car sometimes. Fear pushed my to go back to school to get a teaching degree. I took the GRE and did well enough that FSU offered my free tuition and a teaching position to get my masters degree there. Masters degree turned into PhD and suddenly I was a professor in mathematics and mathematics education. Since then, I've continued to take big chances and push myself. I got tenure and gave it up to move to Norway. I got tenure again at the Norwegian Center for Math Education and gave it to start my own business. I'm struggling with that now and once again on the edge of failure. We'll see what that brings! About 15 years ago I "decided" I was an artist. (I guess I got tired of waiting around for someone to tell me I was an artist, so I just decided that what I was and would start telling people that.) I wrote children's books and an art book that mostly bomber. But later I made some artwork that won an international prize. I'm still making all kinds of art, and some of it fails badly, but some is ok. In the classroom I tell students that I fail all the time. You start working a problem and you just try something. Don't care if you fail or not, just try! Then think about what happened, what went wrong? What worked? What new ideas did you get? Then try again. And again. It's basic math problem solving. It's basic for making art. And I think it's basic for being successful in life.
Are you looking for a fast buck or a long-term investment? If you want to be a trader and flip the coins to make some quick cash it's a pretty dicey time for that and play at your own risk. If you want to invest and hang on to it for a year or two then it's a good time to buy. kleinbl00 has some great advice -- especially his point that anyone giving advice should be sure to include: invest knowing the price could go to zero. When I buy I always expect the price to drop right away and it doesn't bother me when it does. Here's some advice I posted on cryptocompare last week: You can be a trader or a holder. Trading is very stressful. When the price is going up you don’t want to sell because you’re sure this is “the big one.” When the price is going down you don’t want to buy because you’re sure it’s going to go even lower. You miss the top point. You miss the bottom point. You feel like you’re wrong about everything. You can make money on it (and we hope you do!), but it’s pretty damn stressful. Want less stress and less risk? Commit to medium- to long-term holding — you’re probably going to do well and won’t need to be worried when the price jumps like crazy like it has been. Here’s my advice for my fellow holders: 1. Pick the price you want to cash out at and decide on a reasonable and slightly pessimistic time frame that you think it will take to happen. Maybe $1000/eth is your goal and you figure it will happen at the end of 2018. Great! Whatever happens between now and doesn’t really matter. 2. Don't feel like you've "lost money" every time the price drops. It’s a powerful psychological effect you need to be aware of and fight against. You don’t lose money unless you cash out at less than you bought for. If you bought for 100 and later watch it drop from 400 to 200, you have haven’t lost 200/eth, you’re 100/eth ahead. Yeah, you could have sold at the top, but you didn’t. That’s ok, stop kicking yourself. Just wait. And if eth is worth less now than when you bought it, realize that the quick buck you hoped you would make will just take a little longer. Eventually you will see rewards on your investment, and the rewards will almost certainly be at much higher percentages than you find elsewhere. 3. Ether will surprise you, good and bad, but it’s still on track. When ether jumped from 10 to 50 earlier this year suddenly it was “game on” and there was a lot of talk that it would go to $550 by the end of the year. That seems very reasonable, still. And we can expect to be surprised again and again. 4. There’s lots of talk about ICOs cashing out, draining the buyers and sending the price down. That may be, but then that means that there’s a lot of talent that are now very motivated to go out and make many many fine products that will use ethereum. Within a year we’ll be seeing user-friendly ether browsers and dapps with exciting functionality, all of them running on ethereum and using ether. When that happens, your ether is going to be worth a whole lot. Think of the price drops now as paying in advance for to be able to realize the ethereum dream. And then not only will you reap the financial rewards, but the world will have some great tools. 5. Obsessed with the ups and downs and wishing you were taking advantage of them? Try a little day trading with a small percentage of your ether. If you play around with 2% and lose a quarter of that in bad trades you’ve only lost 1/2%. And if you guess right it’s fun to earn a free dinner or a free vacation (depending on how many ether you’ve got). But keep a chunk of ether reserved for your target price and don’t touch it. 6. Enjoy the ride! As a holder you can laugh when you the price drops and you say “I just lost $X today!” You can also laugh when your friends say “The price is all the way up to $Y, why aren’t you selling?” Nope. Let it ride, relax, and enjoy being part of this experience.