Thoughts?

So, I still have no idea what exactly we are supposed to write for these blog posts. I guess that’s why I like math and science. They’re straightforward. Either way, Tuesday rolls around every week. I could complain about how much homework I have, but that’s college, right? Instead of doing that, I’ll tell y’all a few ideas I had for blog posts.

One of the ideas I had was short stories. This can be interpreted in two ways. For the first interpretation, each blog post could have a few stories of things that happened to me in the previous week. Some people do this, but they can write a lot about a few events. I feel like I would need a lot of events, since I can’t write very much for each event. The second interpretation would be a traditional short story. While this doesn’t seem like it would tell you much about me, everything is autobiography, right?

Another idea I had for blog posts was just making up prompts and answering them.

Examples include:

Who was your favorite high school teacher?

What was the best advice you ever received?

If you were to give a TED talk, what would it be about?

While these might sound like college essay prompts, I assure you, they are. These could also be attendance questions, but it might be interesting to get longer responses on Blogger.

              I had service learning yesterday. I think blog posts about this would be cool, but I feel like they’ll get old pretty quickly.

              I think the most interesting blog post that we could write would contain a list of quotes that we like. Maybe there could be some clarification for the quotes, but it would be interesting to just see a list of quotes. I don’t know if it would count as a blog post, since we didn’t write any of them, but it’s the combination of ideas that makes something original, right? I think it would be pretty cool to see each person’s individual combination.

              On a slightly different note, do you guys think π should be 3.14 or 6.28? I think it would be nice to be consistent with notation. While there is a constant, τ, which is 6.28, I think either π should have been made 6.28, or τ should be used to teach math instead of π. When I say consistent with notation, I mean that many equations in math and physics are in the form ½ab². They are in this form because they are the integral of ab in terms of b: ∫ab db = ½ab². For example, the integral of momentum (mv) is kinetic energy (½mv²). The integral of angular momentum (Iω) is rotational kinetic energy (½Iω²). The integral of an elastic force (-kx) is elastic potential energy (½kx²). The integral of electric work (CV) is the stored electrical potential energy (½CV²). The integral of velocity due to gravitational acceleration (at) is the displacement (½at²). The integral of the area density per second (ρv) is the dynamic pressure (½ρv²). As you can see, this form (½ab²) appears frequently. The perimeter of a circle is 2πr. Using τ, the perimeter is τr. The area of a circle is the integral of the perimeter as the radius goes from 0 to the radius length: p = 2πr, A = ∫₀^r2πr dr = πr². Using τ, these equations become: p = τr, A = ∫₀^rτr dr = ½τr². Also, instead of 2π radians in a circle, we would be taught that there are τ radians in a circle. For x, any angle, τ/x, would just be from the fraction of a circle, p/x, A/x, centered at the vertex, that is in the angle, whereas with π, any angle π/x, is the fraction of a semicircle, p/(2x), A/(2x), centered at the vertex, that is in the angle. I think that learning it this way would help prepare one for the rest of the math that one will learn.

Sincerely,

Adrian