Mar 12, 2019
Groundwater Recharge in Old Cemeteries
I have a delightfully ghoulish topic of what happens to groundwater recharge in old cemeteries. As I have talked about before, groundwater recharge is important. First, the water table needs to be…
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Archive page 18 of 73
Mar 9, 2019
Stokes' Theorem and Green's Theorem
I took a look at Green's theorem last week and its relationship to the planimeter. Green's theorem is a remarkable work that tells us much about the structure of two-dimensional shapes. As…
Mar 5, 2019
Howard County Charter Review
On Monday night, the Howard County Council adopted CR18-2019, establishing the octennial Charter Review Commission and its membership. I am fortunate to be appointed and I look forward to continuing good work…
Mar 4, 2019
Green's Theorem and the Planimeter
I am going to start by saying I do not find Green's theorem very intuitive. It is a magnificently powerful theorem. It has been proven, so it must be true, but unlike…
Mar 2, 2019
Context of Japanese Syncretism
For those of us brought up in a traditional Western society, religion is well-defined. It is a core belief system that includes some sort of god or gods and some sort of…
Feb 24, 2019
Gradient Fields Forever
The gradient of a scalar field is one of the most powerful topics I've ever seen in mathematics. It is the, quite simply, the multidimensional generalization of the derivative. We can interpret…
Feb 13, 2019
New Chapter on Mathematical Literacy
I am quite happy to see that Shifting Contexts, Stable Core: Advancing Quantitative Literacy in Higher Education, a new volume from MAA Press edited by Luke Tunstall, Gizem Karaali, and Victor Piercey.…
Feb 9, 2019
Howard County Should Free the Zoning Board
The time has come for Howard County to do the easy thing and separate the Zoning Board from the County Council. The business of local government, other than policing, is basically land…
Feb 7, 2019
A Note on Kanji and Hànzì
This is a really fun little narrow bit of amusement I got out of this, but it is worth sharing. I was watching a video from LangFocus about kanji. I really like…
Jan 27, 2019
Howard County Land Use Rules of Procedure
We have a local organization called the Howard County Citizens Association. I have never been quite sure what it is they stand for, but recently, they proposed a set of changes to…
Jan 22, 2019
This is a Test Post
I am kind of curious about how posts without images will look on this page. I mean, let's be honest, finding unencumbered images to use with each post can be quite time…