Math Fact of the Day

A fellow teacher told me this today and it struck me as being interesting. Therefore, I wanted to share it.

Suppose you leave your house and walk a path to some other destination at 8 A.M. on Monday. You can walk at any speed you want, you can even stop your walk and stand still for a while, and you can even backtrack your path and then walk forward again. But, at some point on Monday, you reach your destination and sleep over.

Then, on Tuesday morning, you leave your destination at 8 A.M. and return home again. You walk with your speed being totally random and independent of your speed from Monday. Infact, for the sake of argument, you do something totally different (like, you sprint all the way home on Tuesday when on Monday you crawled, stood still, went back and forth, etc...)

So, here's the fact: There will be a location between your home and the destination that you passed both going to the destination and returning home at the exact same instant on both days.

Weird...

Shakira, Shakira!

As you can clearly read in the article above which recently appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Shakira is an intellectual, a philanthropist, and an admirable human being who just happens to sing catchy pop music.

That is why I am interested in her. It's not for any other reason.

And by the way, click here if you've never seen one of her videos incase you've never seen her. Apparently, her hips don't lie... whatever that means.

P.S. Wyclef Jean is still a fucking douchebag.

BotG Ivey (aka Evan Hellmuth Jr.)

When I first started playing Texas hold ‘em I used to hold Poker Pro’s in the highest regard. I believed that Poker Pro’s could know what everyone’s cards were at the table, based on “reads.” I also thought that based on those “reads” they would be able to inevitably beat everyone who was not a pro. I watched the movie Rounder’s and believed the scene that showed Mike McDermott read the entire professor’s hands blind. So, after watching this year’s World Series of Poker, I realized something, I was wrong about all my beliefs about Poker. The clowns at the final table (minus Phil Ivey) had no idea what the other person had and just basically bet (sometimes) when they have a good hand. If you break down the play at this year’s final table, you see many times when players did the right thing, statically, and lost. Players were going “all in” on great hands versus bad hands and losing, like having hands such as Pocket Queens versus Pocket Threes. The guy, who won, Joe Cada, did so many “wrong” plays and still won. On the other hand, Phil Ivey always did the statically best move and went out in 6th. As a guy who’s played a lot of poker it’s frustrating to think that you no matter how much you play, you can’t really get much better past a certain point. This years World Series made me realize something true about the book Outliers. If you haven’t read it, the book is basically about, with anything, you need to be somewhat gifted, have lots of practice, but what separates the “best” in any field is chance, not being the most gifted. You just have to be good enough and fall into the right circumstance. So, at this point I realize I should either: a) Not play poker anymore, due to the fact that at my skill level it’s basically luck versus other guy’s who play as much as me. b) Play poker all the time, because no one is that much better than me. What to do, what to do…

Happy Holiday's

Apparently we're invited to a "Happy Holiday's" party at our clubhouse.

Jeez... I don't know why this misuse of apostrophes pisses me off so much.

Walt "Clyde" Frazier's Stream of Consciousness...

... will now feature contributions from none other than Walt Clyde's brother, Beer-on-the-Girl. Stay tuned!

Potential

As I've become an adult, I've had this persistent, nagging worry that somehow I'm "not living up to my potential" or "not using my talents". That would be certainly be a shame. A wiser man than myself once said, "The saddest thing in life is wasted talent". (What's that, some kind of Eastern thing? Far from it.) And that certainly would be a reason for concern and re-evaluation of what I'm doing with myself, it is was true.

But I'm starting to re-evaluate the whole thing. How does one objectively measure potential? Maybe I don't have as much "potential" (whatever that means) as I've always thought I had for certain facets of my life. It seems like it's much more complex than just saying that person x has "talent" or "potential" to do whatever it is that they do, and wondering why or how much they're "using it".

I'm wondering: when other people get introspective about their lives and what they're doing and what will make them happy, etc... do they wonder about this whole "using my potential" thing?

Teaneck Represent

From this past Sunday's (11/8/2009) Philadelphia Inquirer...

Check out 59 Across and the solution in the puzzle.

Teaneck, baby!

Beer-on-the-Girl turns 30

Walt Clyde's brother, Beer-on-the-Girl, turned 30 on Halloween. We rocked it out in style for his birthday. Halloween night - NYC. Then, to Atlantic City for debauchery. (Though, I must say, I am vowing NEVER to go to Manhattan on Halloween in the future, especially the next time Halloween falls on a Friday or Saturday. It was absolutely insane.)

Happy 30th, BotG.

joeydiditjoeydiditJoey did it JOEY DID IT JOEY DID IT!!!

Mazel Tov, big guy. Many years of happiness and peace for you and Salem (and the cats).

Vinsanity

Good job, Vince. Keep shrugging, you apathetic hack.



First, to my handful of readers, I apologize for neglecting you for so long. I can't say it won't happen again.

For years now, I've been railing against Vince Carter. I've always pointed out to anybody who will listen that he is a cancer for every team he's been on. When the Nets teamed him up with Jason Kidd, I predicted that it was a sentence of mediocrity until they got rid of him. And now, without him, I predict that the Nets will improve this year (the whole addition by subtraction thing). But I digress.

Now that Vince Carter has been traded to the Magic, I am predicting a decline from relevance for the once-promising young Magic team (and by once, I mean a few months ago before they got Vince Carter).

I'll say things like this often:

"If the Lakers kept their same team and added Vince Carter for free, they would have no chance of repeating."
"I think that he honestly makes every team worse that he's been on."
"Any team that he is on has no chance of contending for a championship."

and state the reasons (no defense, pussy, chemistry killer, subtracts from other players' effectiveness because he holds on to the ball for too long,...) people chuckle and half-heartedly agree or disagree with me. But I don't think I've ever stated it well enough to express how passionately I feel about this joke of a NBA star.

Until now. Bill Simmons has done it for me.

Here is Simmons' take on why Vince is the 4th most intriguing player leading into this NBA season, and I couldn't agree more:

Forget everything you know about him. Forget how he quit on Toronto, forget how Jason Kidd pushed for a trade to Dallas just to get away from him, forget that the most memorable moments of his career were a slam dunk contest and the time he dunked on Fred Weis. Forget that you're disappointed in him, that you don't trust him, that you wouldn't want to go to war with him. Forget that he's played 42 games TOTAL in 11 years, or that he hasn't made an All-NBA team since the first year of Dubya's presidency. Forget that he's the active league leader in "most willing to never drive to the basket again if you knock him down once" and "most times rolling around underneath the rim like he's been shot" categories. Forget all of these things. And ask yourself this question:

Has Vince Carter ever played for a good team?

His two best teams simply in terms of win totals:

2006 Nets (49 wins): Vince, a past-his-prime Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson, Nenad Krstic, Cliff Robinson, Jacque Vaughn, Scott Padgett.

2001 Raptors (47 wins): Vince, Antonio Davis (Vince's only teammate to average 10-plus points or 10-plus rebounds), Alvin Williams, Corliss Williamson, Mo Peterson, Keon Clark, and a just-about-washed-up Charles Oakley/Mark Jackson combo.

Fact: He's never had a teammate make an All-NBA team.

Fact: He's never played with an elite guy in his prime.

Fact: The best coaches he ever had were Lawrence Frank and an almost-done Lenny Wilkens.

Fact: He's teaming up with a former Coach of the Year (Stan Van Jeremy), the league's best center (Dwight Howard), the league's best 3-point shooting forward (Rashard Lewis), an All-Star point guard (Jameer Nelson) and 4-5 solid role players on a team that desperately needs his ability to create his own shot and shoot threes. He's also going to be protected defensively for the first time in his career.

Put it this way: If Vince Carter is a great basketball player, if he has ANY greatness in him, then it's going to surface this season. Or else it wasn't there in the first place. Either way, we will have an answer. Which makes him pretty damned intriguing.