bunny_hugger had been going out to water the plants, ahead of our amusement parks tour and ahead of what turned out to be six days of the most rain Michigan has ever received, and thought she heard something at the squirrel feeder. When she heard it again and again she got a flashlight and found, yeah, it's a raccoon.
I don't want to sound like I'm afraid of a rival. But we do worry about him deciding peanuts are nice but there's fish in the pond. As there wasn't any time before we'd leave town, we put the net that we normally use to catch leaves in the fall over the pond, and we're looking at things we can do to give the fish somewhere to hide in case a raccoon takes an interest in them. And to how we can prepare a squirrel feeder that squirrels and chipmunks can access but that raccoons will find too much work to deal with. The squirrels wished to point out we could just stop putting capsicum on the bird seed and they'll use the bird feeder.
I've had a bunch of mathematics blog entries since the last time I rounded them up, and it seems to help people to have them all announced like this, so here goes:
- Reading the Comics, May 26, 2014: Definitions Edition, as several of the jokes are based on the ambiguity of knowing just exactly what you mean to speak about.
- Looking At Things Four-Dimensionally, linking to a site that's about figuring how to visualize four-dimensional structures.
- The Math Blog Statistics, May 2014, reporting on how the blog did in May (pretty well, really)
- Reading the Comics, June 4, 2014: Intro Algebra Edition, which gives us the search for ``x'' again.
- Autocorrected Monkeys and Pulled Tea, or, can we hope to do better than the random babblings of monkeys on typewriters?
- Tessellation Using Equilateral Triangles, Isosceles Triangles, Squares, Regular Pentagons, and Equilateral, Non-Convex Octakaitetracontagons, which is really a reblog of some stuff with pretty pictures you'll likely enjoy seeing.
- Reading the Comics, June 11, 2014: Unsound Edition (because I could talk about logically valid or logically sound arguments).
- Reading the Comics, June 16, 2014: Cleaning Out Before Summer, I Guess, Edition as it sure seems like a bunch of cartoonists wanted to get classroom jokes out the door.
- What Are Equivalence Classes? as I know you've been wondering.
I'm not sure I realized just how much of this was mathematics comics stuff, but they're fun writing about.
Trivia: Baylor University introduced, in 1929, the first (American) hospitalization plan, offering up to 21 days of hospital care per year to a group of 1500 schoolteachers in exchange for a premium of $6 per year. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.
Currently Reading: The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era, Craig Nelson.