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Quiz

24 March 2010

Here’s a little quiz for my readers to test their knowledge:

  1. When was the Declaration of Independence signed? (Give the year, month and day.)
  2. What is the colour of pure water?
  3. Which weighs more—a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?
  4. What does Ich bin ein Berliner really mean?
  5. How many scholars in Columbus’ time knew the earth was round?
  6. What man-made structure is visible from the moon?
  7. Is glass a solid?
  8. Why is it easier to balance an egg on the first day of spring?
  9. Which part of the tongue tastes sweet things?
  10. What is the most venomous spider?

I have given detailed answers in another post.

‘163 Innocent Old Men’

15 March 2010

Where I live, we adjust our clocks for daylight-saving time—although personally I think the government has no place nannying everyone into getting up an hour earlier. (In my case, I guess it works out fine, since it just makes all my appointments an hour earlier, and I don’t have any so very early in the morning.)

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So easy with online

11 March 2010

Many people seem to use Mac or Linux because those operating systems are ‘more secure’ or ‘don’t get viruses’. And I have nothing against that—I want my next computer to be a Mac. But that’s not the problem.

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Words of the decade

22 February 2010

I’m just reading the paper by the American Dialect Society (PDF) about the word of the year (2009) and the word of the decade (2000–2009).

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0·999…

20 February 2010

When many maths students encounter the expression 0·999… = 1·000…, they are a bit uneasy. It challenges their preconceived notion that each number can be represented in one and only one decimal way. One stumbling-block might be that they think of 0·999… as a large but finite string of digits—even if they accept an infinite string of nines, they may still think in terms of there being a last digit ‘at infinity’. Also, some students imagine 0·999… as more of a ‘process’ than a representation of a number.

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Propitiation

17 February 2010

Here’s a quotation from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

. . . whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood . . .
Romans 3:25a KJV

What does the word propitiation mean? That’s a question many would be hard pressed to answer.

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