Happy Easter everyone. In Australia, Easter is accompanied by a four day long weekend, so hopefully everyone will get a break from work.
You would have seen that I recently served on Jury Duty. I was lucky to be assigned to a short three day case and was able to get back to work fairly quickly.
Just a quick note to keep you informed. I have been summoned to appear in court next week and so will be out of the office from then for an unspecified amount of time.
I am unable to provide any details about the case or how long it will take before I am fully available again.
Last week, I mentioned having a chat with Jim in the US about Order of Operations and algebra mathematics problems. He sent me a link to a video on Order of Operations title “The Order of Operations is Wrong”. The video description does go on to explain that Order of Operations is “Morally Wrong, that is…”.
I actually agree which much of what the video says and wanted to clarify what I see as the issue with blindly (and sometimes incorrectly) following the Order of Operations mnemonic that you were taught at primary/elementary school.
This week started for me with a very interesting phone call. It was from a gentleman from the United States looking for algebra based educational materials. I thought he must have the wrong number and forwarded him to Winthrop Australia (a Perth based computer firm associated with the University of WA)*. I thought that they would be able to assist due to their association with the university and education.
Anyhow, they sent him back to me and during the second call, I realized that the caller, Jim, was talking about my Friday Funny posts which sometimes included algebra problems! Once we had worked out the common ground, Jim and I had a long chat about Order of Operations and adding negative numbers. Jim is part of a Facebook group and often posts puzzles for the others to solve.
He found the same problems that I found. Many people don’t know about Order of Operations, or do know, but cannot implement them correctly or just cannot add negative numbers. For more information see: Answer: Only for genius ?? 3 – 3 x 6 + 2 = ??.
That phone call prompted me to find a new graphic algebra problem for you to solve….
Today for the Friday Funny article I have decided to revisit a topic I posted about three years ago…. Our national sport: AFL or Australian Football League or Australian Rules Football or Aussie Rules or just Footy.
I am originally from the UK and was only introduced to AFL when I arrived in Australia as a 13 year old in 1981. I have never been a huge sports fan, but enjoy watching skilful athletes playing regardless of the discipline or code. FYI: We have seven football codes in Australia: Aussie Rules, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Football (Soccer), Gird Iron (American Football), Gaelic Football and International Rules (a Gaelic football & AFL mashup).
I wanted to share AFL with you again after my recent trip to Fargo when I showed some videos to one of the staff at the hotel and he was amazed by what he saw. It seems that many people outside of Australia mistakenly believe that Rugby is the biggest football code in Australia and don’t realise that AFL is completely different from Rugby (even if the ball is a similar shape).
I believe that by now most of you should know that I love Lego. I have always had Lego in my life as a kid and also as an adult.
In recent years I have used Lego Mindstorms to design and build robots to help me be a better robotics mentor for the school my son’s went to.
Even though both my sons have left the school for university, I still mentor for the robotics club and am also on the Robocup Junior Australia Western Australia committee.
I did mention in my last few posts that something was coming up and the title has given the surprise away, but here it is…..
Jennifer and I left South Africa after the GPUG Amplify South Africa 2018 conference (click for the wrap-up link) and headed for Spain.
