twins game

Will and I got to go to a Twins game last night. We saw the LG Twins beat the Kia Tigers at Jamsil Stadium. It rained on us for most of the game, but Will was a good sport and we made it nine innings. A bit different from an American baseball game, but not importantly. We sat in center field, it was a good game with a lively crowd. Mostly I just enjoyed seeing baseball. We got to see some of the fun bits, like a couple of double plays, a guy stealing two bases on an overthrow, an attempt at stealing first on a dropped third strike. While I momentarily attempted to explain some of these events, Will's questions showed that he was still sorting out how many teams there were, what the black team (the umpires) was up to, and how to predict the next exciting hit to our local center fielder.






This last picture is my favorite, I think:

I was appreciating that baseball really has such a fantastic point of interest more specifically than other sports. Everyone in the game and watching the game is a chaos of attentions until the windup and the pitch, and we share a moment of intense expectation and focus. The evening is punctuated by dozens of these moments, and while many of them pass without remark, a big play means that we all share it, and I can look around and know that I saw exactly what the people around me saw. The fact that the experience is about a ball thrown around by people we do not know is immaterial - what matters is perhaps that we see something, anything, that so many other people see with us, we share a thrill, and I wonder if that is part of what makes sports enjoyable.

I remember Coach Vogel showing me that I didn't have to fear the ball, I didn't have to stand out there hoping they didn't hit to me. He taught me to creep in with the windup, to anticipate and to be chomping at the bit, to hope to be the lucky guy that gets to play that ball. I miss it. I miss the wild concentration and that asymptotic excitement of the pitch, when everyone commits at once to their carefully weighed decision. I forgot how much I missed baseball until a couple weeks ago when I got to play catch with a few of the teachers here.

escher waterfall illusion

This is admirably done.

kajsa is here!

Our daughter Kajsa was born on February 18. She is very cute.






She is more than a week old, which is why my paternity leave is almost finished. I have been grateful to have someone covering my classes while I have been able to sort out the paperwork and various details surrounding a new baby. Finding Kajsa's birth certificate was not nearly as exciting as it was for Annie, which is good.

Joie's mom was here for a visit and we really appreciated all of her help. She watched our kids, washed our dishes, let us sleep in, made us bullar, and generally took care of us. She walked around Seoul a bit with us as we saw a few more parts of our big city.

a post!

There is a swelling volume of blog posts out there apologizing for neglected blogs. These insincere notes, when conjured to our screens from the recesses of the internet where they lie etched in indelible patterns of electrical charges that will outlive some of our most intentional achievements, tell of excuses and good intentions. These posts do provide some philosophical substance... to ponder how many such posts occupy space and energy in this internet... to consider how many such posts punctuate our unobserved efforts as we, like Father Mckenzie from Eleanor Rigby, are writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear... But I do not intend to apologize and I have no very good reason for abandoning the blog or for coming back to it. I guess it ends up as such a post anyway.

But I wanted to shout out from South Korea, as I have not yet posted since I moved here several months ago. After a busy summer and a busier semester, I still feel like I have just arrived in Seoul.

leaving

Well, our last days at Woodstock have been full of packing what we need and getting rid of what we don't. The very real constraints of space and weight and their costs have made us sharpen our ideas of what is important among the piles of our papers and clothes and other junk which has become such a burden in the light of our impending move. It is refreshing and liberating, and a bit melancholy. I feel like Ma Joad sitting next to her wood stove, taking one last look and pushing into the flames those papers that need to not make the trip. Quite literally, as this process has included some actual pushing letters into the wood stove.

That is something special about traveling, is a more frequent need to let go, to evaluate. Sometimes I just want a big attic or a garage with the potential to hold on to any box of papers I simply do not want to decide about. And other times I enjoy the healthy feeling of being rid.

And the leaving is very anticlimactic as we say goodbyes and then see people a few more times, or don't say goodbye because we didn't realize we wouldn't run into somebody during these last few frantic days. C'est la vie.

5-star challenge: hailstone numbers

Luke asked why I stopped with the math contest questions. As he forms a strong percentage of recent commenters on this blog, I suppose I ought to humour him. The fact is, these questions are tricky to find. I don't want something that just amounts to boring computations, and I don't want something that can be artlessly mined from Google or WolframAlpha.

This is one of the recent 5* challenge problems I ran. It's tied to a set of sequences that could keep me (has kept me) busy for hours. It's not like useful math, it's more the sort that could be warmly amusing and deeply intriguing, the kind of thing I would be thankful for on a desert island.

A hailstone sequence is defined recursively by this equation:

a_n = { 3*(a_n-1)+1 if a_n-1 is odd; (a_n-1)/2 if a_n-1 is even}

For example, if we start with 10, the next term (because 10 is even) is 5, the next term (because 5 is odd) is 16, then 8, then 4, then 2, then 1, then 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1… for ever and ever. The shortest hailstone sequence starting with 10 and concluding with 1 is 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 and its length is seven.

Find the sum of all positive integers N such that the length of the shortest hailstone sequence starting with N and concluding with 1 is thirteen.

brainy legos

Two Lego projects for your consideration:
A Lego printer
A Lego Rubik's Cube solver
Oh, the people on that internet. My own obsession with Legos was so much more primitive. The internet brings us all so frighteningly close to some properly obscure endeavors.