The value of collegiate sports

By: | April 7, 2014

CUnatChampsAs I’ve followed the NCAA basketball tournament (join me and some folks from Radiolab tonight, as we live tweet the final game), I’ve been thinking about the value of collegiate sports. My first experience with sports in college came as an NCAA division I cross-country runner. I lettered in cross-country at the University of Colorado my freshman year, but a freak knee injury cut short my collegiate running career. Though I had no experience in the sport, I started training with my school’s Nordic ski team, and I also bought a bike and joined the cycling team.

Cross-country and skiing were both division I, NCAA sports, but cycling was governed by its own body, outside of the NCAA system, and was overseen by club sports, rather than CU’s varsity athletic program. The difference was immediately noticeable. As a varsity NCAA athlete, I received special treatment — advance, preferential registration for classes, private tutoring if I needed it, and excused time from class to attend practice and meets, not to mention free tickets to all sporting events. This special treatment fostered a sense of privilege. We were part of the student body, but we were treated as if we were somehow above it.

My teammates and I were good students, and we were there to get a degree, we didn’t expect to make a profession out of sport. Nevertheless, as varsity athletes, we understood that performance was expected of us. Our sport was no hobby — we were there to win.

Things were different on the cycling team. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 5, 2014

640px-SoursobMarch 31 – April 4, 2104

Richard:  “But in a way, Kepler had beat him to it. By imagining the universe from the point of view of someone on the Moon, he’d discovered a new planet: Earth.”

Guest Stephen Ornes:  “The theorems, proofs, and equations of mathematics are Big Ideas distilled to their naked cores. And what’s a poem, if not the pure distillation of an experience, emotion or idea?”

Cameron:  “So perhaps instead you’ll find us no longer weeding, our yard bright yellow, our bodies fighting free radicals. Or maybe we’ll just be enjoying the spring, leaning against the tree trunks, stems with bright flowers falling from our mouths.”

Cassandra “Why not just put them back in the park? Anyone who has visited Yellowstone knows that it’s prime habitat. You can’t drive a mile without seeing their shaggy hulking forms. Or better yet, let the bison roam free. After all, isn’t that the definition of a wild animal?”

Abstruse Goose:  “Holy shit.”

Abstruse Goose: NUM63R5

By: | April 4, 2014

NUM63R5As a literate but functionally innumerate person, I hate AG’s title.  I think it’s dumb and silly.  But I thoroughly get why he feels the way he does about that equation.  Really.  What an odd pattern.  Why would it happen?  Would figuring out why it happened  help you understand anything else?  No?  You couldn’t even figure out why it happened?  In fact, is “why” almost always a dumb question?  That last one I can answer:  yes.

_______

http://abstrusegoose.com/63

 

Montana’s Buffalo Conundrum

By: | April 3, 2014

bison

Yellowstone National Park spans three states and nearly 3,500 square miles, making it one of the largest parks in the US. So when I read that Montana officials are searching for a home for 135 Yellowstone bison living on Ted Turner’s sprawling private ranch, I was bewildered. Why not just put them back in the park? Anyone who has visited Yellowstone knows that it’s prime habitat. You can’t drive a mile without seeing their shaggy hulking forms. Or better yet, let the bison roam free. After all, isn’t that the definition of a wild animal?

It didn’t take much research for me to realize that the issue is far more complex than I first imagined. Yellowstone already has more bison than officials would like. According to an agreement signed in 2000, the park is supposed to keep the population around 3,000 animals, far less than the 4,600 bison that currently reside there. To curb the population, park officials trap some of the animals and ship them to slaughterhouses, a move that has sparked outrage among environmental groups.  Continue reading →

Sour Grass

By: | April 2, 2014

640px-SoursobOh, but I was proud of myself yesterday. The rain was coming, at last, at last, and I had an hour and a willing assistant and with these two things I removed nearly all of the oxalis flowers from my front yard. Without flowers, the seeds would not fall, the rain would not sow them, and our yard, for seasons to come, would have far fewer of these yellow flowers that seem to pop up like those whack-a-moles at pizza arcades.

Only: no. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Can an Equation be a Poem?

By: | April 1, 2014

“The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.” —Henry David Thoreau

Sator Square in Luberon, FranceApril is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is also National Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like to propose that we—you and I, at least until the end of this blog post—merge the two and celebrate the first-ever Mathematical Poetry Month. No fooling.

Connecting math to poetry isn’t a new idea. Archimedes did it, committing the mother of all word problems—a Diophantine beast—to verse. The Sator Square, a mysterious Latin palindrome written in a square that can be read in multiple directions, is a pattern poem with mathematical underpinnings. (The oldest-known Sator Square was recovered from Pompeii. The one pictured here contains the same words, but was found in France.)

In a letter to his brother dated March 31, 1791, Samuel Taylor Coleridge called math the “quintessence of truth.” As a demonstration of his enthusiasm for said quintessence, he declared his intention to refashion Euclid’s Elements, which contained most of those propositions and proofs we met in school, as a series of Pindaric odes. The letter even included his first stab at versifying the first of Euclid’s propositions. As far as anyone knows, that’s as far as he got. (Read Coleridge’s letter here. Did he improve on Euclid?) One of the most famous pieces by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, similarly besotted by the great Greek, is “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”

Continue reading →

Kepler on the Moon, Part (Who Knew?) 3

By: | March 31, 2014

bide for keplerKepler strikes again! A couple of weeks ago, in a two–part essay, I wrote about a 1608 book by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler that scholars consider the first work of science fiction: Somnium—Latin for The Dream. This past week, I got to thinking about Kepler’s book again, after the discovery of dwarf planet 2012 VP113 (which the discoverers have nicknamed VP, as well as Biden, because of all the stars in the background of his official portrait) (or maybe not), an object that redefines the edge of the solar system.

In Kepler’s book, a narrator recounts a dream in which he reads a book about a boy who hears a story from an alien who often travels to the Moon. Kepler had good reason to keep his distance, authorially speaking. To imagine the universe from a perspective other than Earth’s was a radical notion—so radical that The Dream wasn’t published until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death.

I don’t think the discovery of  a dwarf planet—or the idea of there even being such a thing as a dwarf planet—would have surprised Kepler. In The Dream, he’s open to exotic possibilities. The alien describes enormous creatures with spongy skin that turns brittle in the sun. Instead, I think if you told Kepler that a planet-like object would be discovered at the edge of the solar system, his response would have been pleasure at the use of the term “solar system”: The system really is solar, as in, you know, revolving around the Sun? (Okay, the “you know” might be anachronistic.)

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 29, 2014

CORiverDelta1_pmcb-500x332March 24 – 28, 2014

Richard’s redux post:  he went to the real true South Pole, had a chance to stand on it and didn’t but it changed his perspective anyway.

Erik went to Tulsa, met a bookseller who had gone to the third world and done the best thing he ever did, better than most anyone has ever done.

Cassie found out that when we can put someone who’s noncompliant with his meds for TB in prison, and she got mad.

Jessa went to a floating neighborhood in Yellowknife and considers the hazards of rusted-out, seagull-pooped cities.

Guest Adam Hinterthuer found out the Colorado River stops flowing at the Mexican border, except for when they open the dam and change the landscape.