www.mathreallycounts.com

Thanks!!

-Alice

Creamy Rigatoni with Gruyère and Brie. First of all, any recipe involving a cheese with an accent mark is going to be good. It’s just one of those rules. Second of all: yum!

I immediately trotted off to the grocery store, as I really (really) want to cook this recipe. When I got to the cheese section I looked over the selection of Gruyère cheese, and picked a likely candidate up to see if it was the 5 ounces the recipe calls for. The label told me this:

Oh, darn you, American units of measurement! If this were the (ahem) metric system, I would just have to move a decimal. Instead, I used the margin of my grocery list to convert ounces to pounds, to see if this was an appropriate amount of cheese. I knew I need 5 ounces, and I (luckily) knew there are 16 ounces in 1 pound, so the conversion would be:

So this would be more than enough cheese – and hey, a little extra cheese can only improve a recipe.

But I do wonder what people do who aren’t as comfortable with math, and can’t convert from ounces to pounds on the fly? How, among other things, do they buy an appropriate amount of cheese? I can only hope it doesn’t thwart their cooking, because the recipe was delicious!

Speaking of food, I had the honor of being a guest blogger at The Croissant Diet. about the secret to making delicious brownies. No math is involved. (Thanks, Avery!)

Because we were down to one car, we needed to be creative about transportation today – my husband had to go to work and I was going to the community college I teach at for math training (double yaaay!!). According to the NJ Transit website, I could easily take public transit to the college: hop on the train for two stops, catch the 814 bus, and I’d be there!

This morning my husband dropped me off at the train station with a kiss and plenty of time to spare. I took the train, waited at the bus stop, and industriously climbed on the first bus that came along with “814” blazing on the front. Quickly I became nervous – the bus seemed to be going many places, nowhere near the college. Finally I asked the bus driver if this was the correct bus to get the community college.

“You have to read the sign on the front of the bus! I don’t go there!” he admonished. The sign on the front of the bus said clearly: 814. According to the schedule in my hand, the 814 goes right to the college. “There are three different 814 routes,” he explained.

Excuse me, but are you (insert expletive) kidding me?

I had to ride the (wrong) 814 all the way back to the train station, climb off, and wait for the (correct) 814 bus to appear. In my outrage, and with all of my spare time, I composed a short missive:

Dear New Jersey Transit,

You have the habit of labeling each bus route with a three digit number, a move I applaud. This means you have one thousand unique route numbers to give a bus route if you stick with only numbers, or 46,646 unique route numbers if you were to also use letters*. Therefore, unless you run MORE than forty six thousand, six hundred and forty six bus routes (and according to your website, you don’t!), it is possible to give each route a unique number. It’s quite a revolutionary concept that may just catch on.

Signed,

Please Consider It

*When only numbers are used, each digit slot has ten possibilities: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, or 9. So with a three digit route number there would be 1000 possible combinations (10 x 10 x 10 = 1000).

If numbers and letters were used, each digit slot would have 36 possibilities: 0 – 9, and A-Z. So with a three digit route number, there would be 46,646 possible combinations to have a unique route number (36 x 36 x 36 = 46,656).

My husband was (as usual) able to cheer me up. I sent him a text message fretting that I’d be late for math training, and I had so been looking forward to it! He texted back “At least you WANT to be there. If I was going to math training I’d get on the wrong bus on purpose.” And believe me, that wouldn’t be hard to do.

We’ve both gained a few pounds over the last few years (who hasn’t?) and are hoping that running will get us back into shape. We are following Hal Higdon’s training plan, and these are the miles we will be running in preparation for the event:

We’ll be running a total of 208 miles between now and the half-marathon. If weight-loss is our goal, we should be in good shape (pun intended). According to Runners’ World, the calories you burn per miles can be calculated using this formula:

0.63 x your weight (lbs) = calories/mile

So I burn 107 calories per mile (0.63 x 170 = 107)

Therefore, during all of our training, I will burn an extra 22,256 calories!

(208 miles x 107 calories/mile = 22,256 calories)

That sounds like a good deal to me! BUT to lose one pound, you need a deficit of 3,500 calories – by burning extra calories through exercise, eating fewer calories through diet, or some combination of the two.

Since I love eating, I was hoping to create my calorie deficit solely through exercise. So to lose ten pounds, I need to burn 35,000 calories (3,500 calories/pound x 10 pounds = 35,000). I’ll “only” burn 22,256 through training.

Wow, no wonder losing weight is so hard. Pass the steamed vegetables, please – I’ve got to kick some asphalt later!

We are going to Miller’s Ale House near the mall in Langhorne, PA. Since my husband is driving, I completely ignore our surroundings and am in my happy place when we get to the Neshaminy Mall. We look and look but can’t find the ale house. We do drive by a Pizzeria Uno, but no Miller’s Ale House.

Realizing we’re lost, my husband gets on his Blackberry (remember when you needed a computer for the internet?). We discover that we had gone to the wrong mall, the ale house is near the Oxford Valley Mall five minutes up the road.

Driving there, we pass by another Pizzeria Uno. Wright says “They have a lot of Pizzeria Unos around here.” I reply, “They have dos Unos!” This marks my first – and in all likelihood last – bilingual math joke.

Triangle pose is supposed to look like this (photo from Yoga Journal):

It should be noted neither of us have abs like that, though we strongly suspect the yoga instructor does.

Back to the pose: there’s actually two triangles in this pose – the legs and floor, and also the arm, torso, and leg. I’m not sure which one the pose in named for.

In either case, my husband and I ambitiously tried to go into Triangle pose, but we are not very flexible people. Our efforts weren’t captured on film, so let me recreate them in a very high tech fashion:

Me                                              My husband

As our arms dangled miles from the mat and my hips resisted their part in the process, I turned to my husband and said, “We’re obtuse! We’re obtuse triangles!”

An obtuse triangle is a triangle with one angle greater than 90 degrees (which our legs were), but obtuse in a non-math sense also means “dull” and “blunt in form”, which is about how we felt. Very blunt in form.

It’s worth mentioning my husband’s first name is Wright. So he was also a Wright Triangle!

A lot, apparently.

According to my bill we use 82 gallons a day. 82 GALLONS A DAY!! That is 2,542 gallons a month.

This is very hard for me to fathom. I did a two and a half month backpacking trip last year, where any water you needed you collected from a “water source” – a stream or a river. (There are no faucets or, sadly, toilets out there!) Every time you got to a water source, you really thought about how much water you would need to get to the next one, because water is heavy to carry. My water bottle held 32 ounces, I would fill it up at most 8 times a day. This was water that I used to drink, make dinner and wash out my cooking pot. Converting that to gallons, each day I used:

Of course, this doesn’t count the water I used when I got to town – let’s just say those clothes really needed to be run through the washing machine at the local Laundromat! (Come to think of it, so did I!) But still, how does a human go from using 2 gallons a day to 41 gallons a day (assuming my husband and I equally split our 82 daily gallons)?

This water-usage website has good information on how much water each activity uses.

Using their estimates and our habits, I made a pie chart that nicely illustrates which activities take up the most water, and which the least:

So, if I want to save the $0.00412254 that each gallon is costing us, I know to focus our energies on the length of our showers, rather than our dishwashing habits.

Here’s another question: how can water cost less than half a cent a gallon? The water company can access the water, process it, and get it to run out of my faucet for less than half a cent a gallon? Really? Maybe they should take over running the post office.

The cake and pasta I made myself, and we assumed we’d call Local Hoagie Shop to order the hoagie. That’s when we learned there are no 5 foot hoagies – just 4 foot or 6 foot. We were going to order a 6 footer and lob off a foot for lunch the next day, when I noticed the price: $76! That seemed a bit pricey, but truthfully I’m a bit out of touch with the local hoagie market.

To see if my sticker shock was valid, I did a little math. If we ordered that hoagie it would be:

76/6 = $12.67 per foot

Wow!! The foot-long hoagies from the same place were about $6 per foot. So we decided to order 5 foot-longs and line them up on the table. I wonder why the super-long hoagies cost so much more per foot – maybe you’re paying a premium for the extra-long bread?

In any case, the hoagies we got were delicious. Our friends enjoyed our “5” themed food and are now eagerly awaiting our 50^th anniversary party.

I was raised in a math-phobic household. My mother, God rest her soul, never learned percentages. If something she wanted to buy was on sale, she couldn’t even guess what the final price would be. The rest of my family didn’t fare much better – though I didn’t know what algebra was in the 7^th grade, I knew it was evil and made my older sister cry.

You can imagine the fear I had walking into my first high school math class. Due to scoring surprisingly well on a standardized test, in September I was suddenly in class with people ‘good’ at math. This was clearly an error. “I’m going to have to work so hard,” I thought, my stomach sinking.

Luckily I had three things going for me: a very supportive teacher, a good friend in the class, and the patience to wait and see how bad it was going to get. The material the first few weeks was challenging, but I could handle it. Clearly we must not be doing real math yet. But by the end of September, I realized: I wasn’t going to cry. We were doing algebra, and I liked it.

I revealed this to my family, who regarded me the same way people do a baby trying to say her first words. They were just so proud of me, but couldn’t comprehend what I was actually saying. Frankly I didn’t understand the meaning either – great, I liked algebra but how would being excited about x = y + 3 actually help me in the world?

Luckily at 14 I didn’t worry about such weighty matters. I just kept plugging away at algebra, for no other reason than that I enjoyed it.