[Today’s run: 4 miles along the Yazoo river in Greenwood, MS]
I don’t have time to run in the morning tomorrow, and I will be driving home in the evening. So I did my run this afternoon, after work.
I had a good day. I met some interesting people and they said I was being useful. Mostly I stood and wrote down the numbers in the right box on the paper as someone called them out to me. I think we are doing the same tomorrow. They tell me we are ahead of schedule.
I learned that tall cotton is not a good thing because the plant is spending too much energy building structure and not enough to make the “lint” which becomes processed cotton.
I didn’t sleep particularly well last night. For a quite a while, starting around 3 am, I tossed and turned. Also I was trying to figure out in my mind what the higher order elements of a polynomial equation do to the graph of that polynomial. I never did come to a conclusion. I could probably do a google search and find some sort of answer.
I think I got to that topic in my thinking because my host here at the BnB told me he is a middle school math teacher. And I was trying to remember what kind of math we studied in 7th and 8th grade. In 8th grade we had Mrs. Wall for math and she was in a car crash so we had Miss Nettleton for quite a bit of the year while Mrs. Wall recuperated. I particularly remember doing “cross multiplication” and linear interpolation in 8th grade. I think the concept of “x” is involved in cross multiplication… so that must have been the start of algebra.
Math in 9th grade was Algebra 2 and it was a mess. Then I think 10th and maybe 11th were mostly a bust. 12th grade it started to get interesting again, some form of trigonometry with Miss Martens.
So, I probably was introduced to polynomials in late 8th grade or early 9th grade. I remember we were attempting to simplify them in 9th grade and people weren’t getting it and they rebelled and drove the teacher from the room in tears.
I usually don’t remember my dreams. But I do remember this polynomial thing. I guess I wasn’t dreaming.
I had mentioned awhile back about some of the stuff I watch on Youtube. I ran into something on twitter, some person or group who posts robbers getting confronted, and usually beat up or shot. So, even though they get treatment that may arguably be appropriate for their situation, I wrestle with whether that is something I should be watching.
On the one hand, it frequently has the appearance of a just outcome when, for example, a robber in a store gets shot. On the other hand, I’m not sure it is healthy for me to watch video of the event. It would be different if I were called on, in jury duty for example, to examine such a video as evidence. I don’t think it should be “entertainment”.
(adding later)
I came back to this topic because some guy on Facebook was reacting to the book “banning” that some parents want at school libraries. And his retort was that the parent didn’t even read the book, just looked at the pictures. So I responded (probably a mistake) that pictures are also a problem. There are things that kids shouldn’t have, for example, in an elementary school library, and probably some things that adults shouldn’t stick in their eye if they can avoid it. And I gave the example of snuff films… And of course then I remembered this guy on twitter who does post robbers getting shot, run over, etc. not for sexual purposes (to me, anyway). So probably I shouldn’t be watching that stuff just for curiosity.
And finally, I’m going to have to figure out how to make pizza crust. We were buying pre-made crusts at the store. And those are OK but hard to manage because they come in a pack of 2 and we only use one and have to figure out how to enclose the spare for later use… it’s a hassle.
I made some using a dry mix from the store. I don’t think that turned out very well. And my from-scratch efforts also have not been very good. I have problems mixing in the water. It seems like it gets all soaked up before it wets all of the flour.
What I think I’m going to try is to use like a spray bottle, but in the 1/2 cup of warm water. And do a bit of spritzing, then stirring, then spritzing, then stirring and see if that method gets the water distributed better.
I have the same problem with pie crusts. I always end up using a lot more water than the recipe says is necessary.