innumeracy, etc.

today was a spectacular day,... after i got home from church, i met up with scott to study for the afternoon. originally the plan was "grab lunch from the nearest subway and then go to a nearby park to study for a few hours"

instead, our route was this:
click it!

A: we started off at scott's house in piscataway, and then went to
B: south plainfield for subway sandwiches
C: when we missed a turn due to construction we meandered around until we caught the garden state parkway near clark, NJ, and by then we decided we were on an adventure and headed to
D: south orange. this is where seton hall university is. it's also home to a decent size (for jersey) mountain which overlooks newark and manhattan... we studied there for the better part of 5 hours before we grabbed ice cream at the south orange train station and then drove for
E: perth amboy, and studied at the beach on the shore of the raritan river mouth for a few more hours... after that we drove through
F: old bridge (within a block of my church), and had dinner at baja fresh before heading back to scott's place
G: (=A) once back in piscataway, we split the bottle of bull's blood (the most famous kind of Hungarian wine) that we bought last weekend while reading random math books for fun... i finished innumeracy by paulos, and scott's been reading my copy of letters to a young mathematician by stewart. since we've both been reading about the philosophy of being a mathematician as well as doing our own work, there was quite a bit of discussion of "when did you know you wanted to be a mathematician?, what percent of you really is one?, etc. etc. etc." which kept us both entertained for hours.

finally,... 13 hours after i left to meet up with scott this morning, i got back home. it was a fantastically productive day.

this is a rambling post anyhow, so i'll end with the 4 quotes of innumeracy that made me laugh the most in the final chapter or so: (enjoy!)

"Adding, though pleasant and easy, is often inappropriate... Recall that mathematics as simple as '1 + 1 = 2' can be thoughtlessly misapplied: If 1 cup of popcorn is added to 1 cup of water, we do not end up with 2 cups of soggy popcorn."

"There was once a state legislator in Wisconsin who objected to the introduction of daylight saving time despite all the good arguments for it. He maintained sagely that there is always a trade-off involved in the adoption of any policy, and that if daylight saving time were instituted, curtains and other fabrics would fade more quickly."

"Statistical analyses of works whose authorship is disputed (books of the Bible, The Federalist Papers, etc.) also depend on related clever ways of gleaning information from uncooperative (because dead) sources."

"Zealots, true believers, fanatics, and fundamentalists of all types seldom hold any truck with anything as wishy-washy as probability. May they all burn in hell for 10^10 years (just kidding), or be forced to take a course in probability theory."

night y'all!