Tomato Nation/Donors Choose Challenge

Seriously, this contest restores my faith in humanity every year. I’m a little late in plugging it this year—it began all the way back on October 1. As of this writing, donors have already donated over $90,000 to help students in high poverty schools get badly-needed supplies and other resources. Like, y’know, DESKS.

As amazing as that is, we still have quite a ways to go before we hit the primary goal of $150,000, and we’re not even halfway to the final goal of $210,000. We have until Halloween to buy a truckload of books and other supplies for high-need children.

For details on how to participate in the challenge, visit the contest info page at Tomato Nation. If you don’t really care about getting a prize for participating, you can just head over to the Donors Choose project page and fork over some cash.

The widget below should keep updating with this year’s total.

Tags: donors choose, tomato nation

Yvonne posted this on October 20th, 2009 @ 11:26pm in Charity, Education | Permalink to "Tomato Nation/Donors Choose Challenge"

The View from the Other Side

For the first time in approximately 25 years, I am not a student.

I have no homework, no assigned reading, no exams. No teachers, no professors, no academic advisor. I am not enrolled in any kind of degree program.

That’s Dr. I-am-not-enrolled-in-any-kind-of-degree-program to you, by the way.

It is kind of amazing how much dead tree you can accumulate through years of schooling. In the course of cleaning out my grad office I discovered:

• The coursepack for CS 525, Linear Programming. That was undergrad. I’d forgotten that I even took that class.
• The binder of reference papers for one of my undergraduate theses (yes, I wrote two).
• The binder of papers I had put together to read for interview weekend in Pittsburgh (I think I read two of them; still got into grad school).

The grad school adventure, she is finished. In the administrative lingo of my department, my status as a student is “terminated”. Have PhD, will travel. On with life!

Yvonne posted this on September 10th, 2009 @ 1:13pm in Graduate School, Life | Permalink to "The View from the Other Side"

Tesseract

I am a Wrinkle in Time devotee. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read each book since childhood. On some level, I wanted to live them—instead of paying attention to my titrations in chem lab, I pondered the logistics of making stew over a Bunsen burner. And to this day I cannot read the opening scene without craving a tuna salad sandwich with pickles.

And I wanted to build a model of a tesseract.

In the books, the tesseract is described as the fifth dimension, which enables you to bend space-time and teleport.

“What is the first dimension?”

“Well—a line.”

“Okay. And the second?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat any more. It would have a bottom, sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you wanted to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the [cube]. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time.”

“That’s right,” Charles said. “Good girl. Okay then, for the fifth dimension you’d square the fourth, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around.”

I remember covering notebook pages with scribbles of cubes connected to other cubes trying, somehow, to make a sensible representation of the fourth dimension that I could square to make a tesseract. Eventually I gave up, cursing my limited human brain for only being able to deal with 3D space. Tesseracts were displaced by more pressing topics, like catching up on a decade of pop culture after my parents finally abandoned their rigid control of the TV and radio.

Last night my husband and I sat down to watch Cube over dinner. We learned quickly that this is not a film you should watch over dinner. At any rate, I wound up reading about the movie on Wikipedia and got caught in a period of fascinated clicking. Then it was as if Mrs. Whatsit herself appeared, “…by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

That square of a cube I was trying to draw all those years ago? A tesseract!

Carl Sagan explains (see also Notes on the Fourth Dimension):

Tags: fourth dimension, hypercube, madeleine l'engle, space-time continuum, spacetime, tesseract, time, wrinkle in time

Yvonne posted this on August 25th, 2009 @ 1:45pm in Life, Mathematics, Science | Permalink to "Tesseract"