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It is Ramadan when Muslims have a month of strict fasting during daylight hours. This includes the intake of anything – water, too. Even swallowing saliva is not allowed. I was talking to a friend about it the other day and for her, Ramadan is a time of doing without so that the needs of [...]

I saw an excellent movie about Stephen Hawking recently. The acting was brilliant (Hawking’s muscular deterioration and growing frustration were portrayed with realism and sensitivity), the story is compelling (tragedy, romance, discovery, brilliance) and there was strong encouragement to reflect on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Ever read his “A Brief History [...]

Another birthday passes by. Singaporeans don’t seem to care much about them – it is not such a big deal in the culture here. But it is nice when someone wishes you ‘happy birthday’.

The timing was interesting. Two weeks ago I read this post by Tinker, Tailor on Canon camera CCD soldering problems. Then a week later, my Canon Powershot A70 started producing images like this: It was good that I knew what was going on. Knowledge reduces stress. Canon fixed it promptly (in less than 24 hours) [...]

There have been some server errors on this blog and Interactive Mathematics over the last few days. My hosting company has been rather slow to fix the errors. Sorry for any inconvenience …

I saw an episode of “NUMB3RS” last night. The show is about an FBI agent who uses his mathematician brother to solve crimes. It is apparently “based on real cases” according to the official NUMB3RS site. Things I liked: Mathematics is respected and even elevated to something useful (The mantra “We all use math every [...]

On my mathematics website, Interactive Mathematics, I have a “Comments or Questions?” feature on every page. Some of the questions are, well, difficult to answer: how to work out mathematics? Others are much clearer: What is the degree of differential equation? Is differential equation has unique degree or not? But most, like the one above, [...]

Go figure – where does the extra man come from? (Just be patient and wait for the picture to change.)

I used to live in Broken Hill, a mining town in outback Australia. I got my pilot’s license when I was there. I really enjoyed taking fellow young teachers to places like Uluru (formerly called Ayers Rock), Coober Pedy (a really weird opal mining town) and Alice Springs. I have been digitising some of the [...]

This is really interesting: 10×10. It is a visualisation of the top news stories (via RSS feeds) of the last hour. Click on the pictures for links to more detail. Run your mouse over the words on the right of the mosaic. Could be an interesting way for students to present assignments – by taking [...]