Carnival Month! (past, current, and upcoming)

In celebration of the month of October Wait, you mean it’s October already? When did that happen? , here’s some belated Carnival News:

[picapp src=”0227/fda6d0ae-1865-438f-bdfe-747988e65087.jpg?adImageId=7027209&imageId=230872″ width=”234″ height=”350″ /]

[Hey, it’s the new PicApps!  I’m trying to decide if I like it — more pictures versus the less control thing.  And that little film strip.  Hmmm.]

Math Teachers at Play #16 appeared on October 3 over at  I Want to Teach Forever.  One of my favorite submissions was the Brain Games from mental_floss  Blog, but there’s plenty of other good stuff.    Then, two weeks later, there was Math Teachers at Play #17 over at mathrecrecreation. (who has a post on origami today!) with yet more interesting posts.  And now we jump ahead to Math Teachers at Play #19, over at Math Mama Writes [What happened to #18, you ask?  You’ll have to check it out and see!].  It’s got some cool stuff, including a post about using math to solve a murder case [but can they really neglect air resistance?  Wouldn’t that make a difference, and maybe make it possible to travel further in the x-direction?  HEY — it’s a project question for when I teach Diff Eq in the Spring!]

So there’s the way too late update!  Stay tuned for the Carnival of Mathematics next week over at The Number Warrior (who also has a cool problem-solving/communication  post currently up on the game Slitherlink).  The Carnival of Mathematics will now be appearing the first Friday of each month, with Math Teachers at Play moving to the third Friday of the month.  More details can be found here at Walking Randomly, who has taken over organzing the CoM.

Stay tuned for tomorrow:  the Mystery of the Fibonacci Pumpkin!

Carnival of Mathematics #53 is up!

As promised earlier, the Carnival of Mathematics #53 is up at The Math Less Traveled.    It has a healthy number of posts on topics from brain exercises to hyperbolic models to Sangaku and GeoGebra.    The Carnival may be  a bit unpredictable these days, but it’s good to see that it’s just as fun to read!

Speaking of Carnivals, we went to one tonight — a real live one.  And we did the Cake Walk (and won some vivid cupcakes that might be interesting to view under a black light to see if they would glow), but before doing it I did a quick estimate as to whether it was better for four of us to play in a single 10-person game, or to spread it out over more than one game [two going in one round and two going in another].  This is similar to the Box Top problem, but has a different answer because the number of people per round is fixed:  the expected number of wins is the same whether or not we all go in the same round, but we’re more likely to win at least once if we all go at the same time.   In particular, although we lose the possibility of winning more than once by going in the same round, that’s offset by an increase in the probability that we’ll win at least once.  (I find it interesting that it has a different answer than the Box Top problem, which I still don’t feel 100% settled about.)