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There have been four recent overprintings on Philippine banknotes that involve anniversaries of universities: three on the 100-peso bill (University of the Philippines Centennial, U.P. College of Law Centennnial, and Ateneo Law School 75th anniversary) and one on the 200-peso bill (University of Santo Tomas Quadricentennial). I do not know why De La Salle University, which celebrated its centennial last year, does not have a commemorative bill. 
Siku Art. 1828 is a new release for 2012 which caught me by surprise. This pulling tractor looks like it came from a Hot Wheels designer's desk.  If you collect diecast scale models, you need to look at Siku. I got a Siku Super Item No. 1854 as a gift a few years ago. It's at a scale of 1:87 (H0 scale) and has a lot of play value. The truck's tipper tilts and its tailgate opens; the flatbed trailer is articulated and its ramp is movable; the compact excavator's rubber caterpillar tracks work and its blade and ripper are height-adjustable.
Rustan's department store used to carry the Siku brand, but now it seems that it no longer does.   
Doug Zongker, a software engineer from Google, published a paper in the Annals of Improbable Research (vol. 12, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2006), presented it during the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, and presented it again at the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremonies. A video of his talk is available here. (The PowerPoint slides are available here.) (Warning: If you've never presented a scientific paper in a conference before, you're most likely not going to appreciate Zongker's talk.) Yesterday I gave two talks to the faculty of the Department of Mathematics as well as some interested students. The first was about Dijkstra's Generalization of the Pythagorean Theorem. The second was about Mediants, Farey Sequences, Stern-Brocot Sequences, and Simpson's Paradox. I've attached to this blog entry slides for both talks. In 2002, Paul Lockhart wrote a 25-page critique of current mathematics education (a pdf version of which can be found here) that was published as a 140-page book in 2009. Keith Devlin talked about it in 2008 here and here. 
Click here to read the media release.  
The auction house Christie's has recently sold Roy Lichtenstein's 1961 I Can See the Whole Room and There's Nobody in it... for $43,202,500 (including buyer's premium). (I got the picture on the left from here.) Last November 2010, it sold his 1964 Ohhh...Alright... for $42,642,500 (including buyer's premium). (I got the picture on the right from here.) It seems that these are currently the highest prices paid at auction for his work. In a paper that was published in the December 2006 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Steven J. Brams, Michael A. Jones, and Christian Klamler present a 2-person cake-cutting procedure that they call the surplus procedure. They claim that their procedure is better than the well-known cut-and-choose procedure because it satisfies proportional equitability, that is, it gives each person at least half of the cake as he or she values it, and generally more. (In the cut-and-choose procedure, the cutter gets only exactly half of the cake.) I recently learned that the paper was found to contain some errors. An account of it can be found in this Scribd document, which refers to this Letter to the Editor, which refers to this arXiv paper, which refers to this arXiv paper.  A few weeks ago, we found an Atlas moth in our pond. It was the largest moth I had ever seen. (The soccer ball behind it is around 8 inches in diameter.)
The photo shows that part of its wing (at the lower left of the photo) is damaged. Some time after the photo was taken, we found that both wings had been damaged. (We suspect a chicken had attacked it.) We put the moth high on the branches of a tree. When we got back to it some time later it was gone. I was looking through youtube a few weeks ago and came across this, a version of The B-52's song Queen of Las Vegas that I had never heard before. It's currently one of my favorites. While some of the lyrics are the same, the melody is quite different. What really struck me is that this version, unlike the version that I am familiar with, doesn't have the words "queen" or "Las Vegas" in the lyrics. It turns out that this version is called the Queen of Las Vegas Mesopotamia Outtake Version, and was first released in the Nude on the Moon: The B-52's Anthology album released in 2002 by the label Rhino.  The "Juan Time" campaign of the Department of Science and Technology aims to promote the nationwide use of the Philippine Standard Time (PST). (Click on the picture shown at the left to find where I got it.)
The PST can be found at http://kidlat.pagasa.dost.gov.ph/ourtime.shtml.  The Wikipedia page on Piet Mondrian provides the following quote from him:
I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true. The painting shown on the left is his Composition with Blue, 1926. (I got the image from this Philadelphia Museum of Art website.) Note that the painting has to be hung at a 45 degree angle so that the painted lines appear horizontal and vertical. This painting has an interesting history; it was confiscated from the Hanover Museum by the Nazi government in 1937 because it was considered degenerate art. There are a lot of magazines that aim to popularize science---American Scientist, Discover, Discovery Channel Magazine, New Scientist, Popular Science, Science News, Scientific American, Seed, The Sciences, and so on. My personal favorites are the issues of Scientific American from the 1970s and 1980s, the early 1990s issues of Discover, and Seed. (American Scientist and New Scientist are also quite good.) Scientific American was first published in 1845, Discover was first published in 1980, and Seed was first published in 2001 (but, sadly, its last print issue was published in 2009). Note that two of the magazines in the above list don't have any links. The Sciences and Discovery Channel Magazine are defunct. This is a real pity as both were quite good. The Sciences was published by the New York Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 2001. Discovery Channel Magazine was launched in February 2008 and ended publication in January 2011.  
 My mother-in-law gave me a very nice abacus before she passed away. Shown above left, it has the text "3-15-58," "FIDEL B. MAPA WOODWORKING & CABINETMAKING" and "GUINOBATAN, ALBAY" etched on its front. My father gave me the abacus shown above right, but it doesn't have any markings on it. (It was probably made in the 1960s or earlier.) Both are chinese abacuses (suanpan) made of wood with one or two metal rods.
Today my wife bought me three japanese abacuses (soroban); two have 27 columns (with wooden beads) while the third has 23 columns (with plastic beads). The two abacuses with covers cost 120 pesos each and the one without a cover cost 100 pesos. The small bead sizes of the japanese abacuses bother me; the beads are easy to move unintentionally. Another reason I prefer the chinese abacuses is because I feel the explicit "five ones and two fives" are easier to understand (for someone who isn't too familiar with abacuses). Five abacuses probably isn't enough to be called a collection. I'm interested in the ones made in the Philippines. Please leave a comment if you know of any.  | Guestbook | |
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