On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:36 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote: << SNIP >>
How about scholarships for veterans to enter nursing, other medical professions?
The health professions are ravenous for computing and data services.
My daughter is the Portland district champion debater at 15, having started her high school's team in the first place. I worry though: why waste her talents at some backward academy that doesn't even teach about tetrahedral mensuration? How many dead mineshaft canaries does it take I wonder?
Maybe by the time she graduates we'll have some respectable colleges out there.
Of course the above won't make a whole lot of sense if you're just tuning in, as what means "tetrahedral mensuration" and why should any respectable college -- such as Earlham in Indiana (the topic of a cell phone conversation from the Pauling House this morning) -- include that on a syllabus? The following three posts may provide some elucidation, plus they are using Python (the 1st shows execution, the 2nd shows source code) and so are especially apropos on edu-sig: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58259 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58260 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58262 Basically I'm using the Decimal type to give the flavor of some extended precision "arithmetic" regarding some basic polyhedral relationships. As some of you know, our subculture (ethnicity) has a unit volume tetrahedron, per this TV segment outline (more storyboarding for CSN): http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-bar-lcds.html Also here: http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/4aa4b568e87ba... A problem with the Synergeo archive, however, is it doesn't support significant whitespace, whereas this Mailman archive does, making it much better for sharing actual source code. Therefore I am taking the liberty of reposting that here: #===== import decimal from decimal import Decimal import re print """ I will now give you the radius of a rhombic triacontahedron of volume five, computing in tetra- volumes. """ myothercontext = decimal.Context(prec=100, rounding=decimal.ROUND_HALF_DOWN) decimal.setcontext(myothercontext) print decimal.getcontext() # long limo vip numbers one = Decimal('1.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') two = Decimal('2.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') three = Decimal('3.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') five = Decimal('5.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') print "Five: %s" % five radical2 = two.sqrt() radical3 = three.sqrt() radical5 = five.sqrt() print "2nd root of 2: %s" % radical2 phi = (one + radical5) / two print "Phi: %s" % phi scalefactor = (two/three) ** (one/three) print "Shrink by: %s" % scalefactor print "Radius: %s" % ((phi / radical2) * scalefactor, ) """ phi to a 100K places (potentially, check this resource: http://goldennumber.net/PhiTo100000Places.txt ) """ phi_million = "1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720309179805762862135448..." # add more digits for a match strphi = str(phi) results = re.match(strphi, phi_million) if results: print "Successful match for phi value: %s" % (results.span(), ) # (( ),) returns tuple as single %s else: print "No match with phi_million" #===== Kirby