Why Negative Coffee Times Negative Coffee Equals Positive Evil

The end of the semester is winding down here at the college. I didn't have a lot of students Monday, and when afternoon rolled around, I was fading fast. I'd only slept a few hours on Sunday night, and not well. My  coffee addiction tried to send me to the coffee stand downstairs, but my logical mind prevailed, reminding me that if I had coffee in the middle of the afternoon, I'd face another sleepless night. Oh, bother.

So, Kris, who was in the lab with me and studying for a Calculus final, began sketching my babbling on the board, in the form of a graph with a cracked coffee mug. The mug was slowly dripping coffee into the negative quadrant of the graph (any value here will be negative). We all know that, in algebra, a negative multiplied with another negative will give you a positive; in physics, we'd need to determine how fast we'd have to drink the coffee. (A linear function -- f(x) = x -- was drawn through the graph, bisecting the coffee mug and giving us an arbitrary line from which to determine how much coffee we had available to drink. Once it dripped below the line, we'd be * outta luck.)

So, by extrapolation, here are the parameters of the graph:

coffee = good
-coffee = bad
(-coffee)(-coffee) = +evil.

Makes sense, right? (Yes, and I agree, we should have had more work to do that afternoon!)

Goals? Oh, right, let's talk about that.

Pages: Met, thanks to Nano.

Exercise: Nope. I've been tutoring or dealing with pre-Christmas stuff whenever I've not been working.

Planning: Yes. So much so that around 4:30 this morning I woke up, realizing that I needed to find out the age of the "death" of Akhenaten so I could reasonably determine whether he had grey hair or not. Nothing like obsessing, right?

Food: Managed to stay away from the fried chicken still. Pizza, though, I ordered some because the guys asked me to. And since there was a new pizza on the menu, I tried it. I didn't like it. Yay! I did order a vegetarian pizza with light cheese, just so I could feel a bit better about my bad behavior.

How's everyone else doing?

Calculus and Cookies...

For all of us mathematically-inclined (or crazy) people out there, I was thinking about a new exercise today for my students. It was an exercise in junk food. Specifically -- cookies.

Now, everyone has a favorite cookie. It could be chocolate chip, Oreos, oatmeal, or those delightfully addictive mint cookies that the Girl Scouts tempt us with every year. (Mint cookies and I are very familiarly acquainted.)

What if each student, choosing their favorite cookie from a predetermined list, took the dimensions and tried to find out how many cookies could fit into a specific area. How much area was taken up by the cookies? How many cookies were used? And how much of the original area was left? Here's where the calculus bit comes in. Integrals are used to find the area under a curve. (We knew calculus had to show up eventually.)

Get the answer right for your type of cookie, and you get to eat said cookies.

How's that for incentive?

Personally, I can't try the cookie thing, because I'm still trying to lose weight. And it's going slowly, I'm afraid. So is the exercise. But some of my other goals are going well.

For instance, my planning is still going forward, as is my writing. My Nano word count is just over 20,000. I have no idea what my page count is, but I'm sure it's inching toward my 80 pages for this quarter.

Not so good on the fried chicken front. I bought some last night on my way home from work. Once I got there, I went to bed. I was utterly exhausted, and I let the guys figure out whatever they wanted for dinner.

I haven't ordered any pizza though, so that's still good.

Fighting the junk food craving is a day to day adventure. But I sure wish the cravings would go away.

See you on Sunday!