I had a delightful time helping the Form 4 (last year of secondary school, before the A-levels) students with questions from their „Mock“ National Exam in Mathematics, which will soon decide about whether they can go on to the A-levels. One of these questions surprised me with the amount of creative thinking it involved. That is, I am wondering if there is a standard way to solve this that I overlooked. So here it is, any inputs are welcome (train your brain!):

In a geometric progression, the sum of the second and third term is 6, and the sum of the third and fourth term is –12. Find the first term and common ratio of the progression.

I will post my solution after some comments come in, or I get bored waiting

Ziemlich genau zwei Wochen nach meinem ersten aufwühlenden Schultag fühlt es sich schon ein bisschen an, als wäre ich immer hier gewesen. Dabei strömt immer noch eine konstante Flut von Eindrücken auf mich ein, selbst (vielleicht gerade) hier im unglaublich ruhigen Dorfleben.

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I fear this is the longest title in the history of my blog, which in a way suits its topic well. I just finished the biggest book I have ever read, actually a collection of books under the title „The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, by Douglas Adams. It comprises the original Guide and the other four books in the trilogy.

I bought it in Palo Alto before my real traveling started, and it has lasted me well into the second quarter of this year, of course as frequent visitors of my blog know with another big and some small readings in between.

Once again, my generally high esteem of artists‘ late work was reinforced — while the original book is funny, the later books are far better. I laughed my hardest reading the second last one, „So Long and Thanks for All the Fish“, and the last one, „Mostly Harmless“, apart from still being very funny, I found most insightful. That despite how I just read on Wikipedia the author himself describing this book as „bleak“, and saying he had a very bad year when he wrote it. I suppose that tells us something about the relationship between art and happiness…

Anyway, here are just some examples of important topics of life made understandable with the help of absurdity, Science-Fiction at its best.

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Happy Belated 300th Birthday, David Hume! And thanks to Crooked Timber for a pointer to both this anniversary date and his neglected influence on social sciences. I’ll re-quote two parts of a re-quote from there (happy internet copy-paste days). They do a very good job at explaining what happens in the Arab world and our own homes.

The first one deals with power of the masses, and why they so often don’t use it:

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Thanks to Matze, I finally ended up reading an article which I’m sure I had opened before but couldn’t remember anything from, I suppose it was a victim to one of my old laptop’s many out-of-battery shutdowns. It’s „Golden Oldies (Wonkish)“ by Paul Krugman, who I usually enjoy reading but find slightly too absorbed in contemporary economic policies. Not so this time, where he deals a blow to contemporary Economic Science that in most part applies to other social sciences as well, especially Psychology.

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Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has an accessible article in Vanity Fair talking about rising inequality (of income, wealth, all sorts of things associated with these like education and health, and lastly, opportunity) in the US. He then comes to a brutal description of the association of wealth and power, one of the cornerstones of my „NeuerPlan“ (NewPlan) criticism of capitalist society. Which happens both on a personal level and on that abstract level of „corporations“, that is, businesses:

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A fascinating article which I found through the Valuscience Blog of my friends at Magic in Stanford is titled „Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?“. The authors, Timothy Mousseau, a US-based evolutionary biologist, and Anders Møller, a Danish biologist, basically debunk the myth that already after a relatively (for standards of nuclear waste and pollution) short period of time, the „Chernobyl Exclusion Zone“ has become almost a national park’s worth of happy wildlife. The article is very long and narrative in tone, though, so here are some remarkable findings of my skimming.

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Hatte heute schon meinen ersten Tag als Physiklehrer in Form 1 und 3 (entsprechend Klasse 8 und 11) der Sekundarschule in Kagondo nahe Bukoba, wo auch Justus mit Familie wohnt. Und bin so bewegt, dass ich gleich was dazu schreiben muss.

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I was so happy to see the familiar face of the Action 5-friend Justus in the crowd in Bukoba and put an end to the aggressive offers from several taxi drivers. From then on I was in a constant flow of events attending a bunch of official occasions with him, who has recently taken a political office next to his work and his activities for Action 5, and reminds me of my good friend Johannes not only in that he seems to be able to do with very little sleep.

The first was the anniversary of a Catholic hospital in Kagondo, appropriately with a lot of church Honorables who held long speeches, and good choir music (with percussion).

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After recently meeting a bunch of people who have to go without meals frequently, I was naturally very interested to read an article on reasons and solutions for world hunger, by two researchers from the „Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL“ at the MIT, which is an excerpt from a recent book they wrote.

After some more illustrative than enlightening back an forth on the „hunger-based poverty trap“ (poor people cannot eat enough to be strong enough to earn enough to eat enough) and examples of how poor people make choices that cause malnutrition themselves (spending money on tasty but little nutritious food or on non-food luxuries, mostly entertainment and drugs) they get to the point, and a quite interesting one. Here are some of the central ideas.

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