Copernicium and Nutrium... I read with great excitement on Yahoo News about the official naming of the heaviest element known to humankind. The Yahoo article, dated February 24, 2010, proclaimed that Copernicium was named after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and is 277 times as heavy as the lightest known element, hydrogen. I called my Polish friends from my college’s mathematics department and asked them to meet for breakfast at MiMi’s, a nice local Polish Cafe near the school, to discuss this wonderful event. I made a short video to capture our joy. In the video, 1. Jim Vilchuck...

Don T’s Range of Motion... A guy I know, Don Thomas (known to his family as Donut Head), told me that just recently he hurt his wrist and that its range of movement was only about 20% its normal range of movement. He went on to say that he thought his wrist function was improving at a rate of 1% a day. So how long, Don T asked me, will it take until my range is back to 100%? Assuming that he, that would be Don T, was down to 20% his full range of motion, we calculated as follows. We let represent Don’s full range of motion. Then, 20% of full range can be represented by . Its true. Think about...

I’ll Follow the Graph... Way back in time on March 8, 2009, I posted the blog article Note Frequencies in Jimmy Buffet’s Come Monday. In that article I computed and determined the average note frequency in Jimmy’s song Come Monday. By average note frequency I mean the average frequency in string vibrations measured in Hertz (Hz). One string vibration per second equals 1 Hz. Higher pitched notes have high Hertz values and lower pitched notes have low Hertz values. I noted in that article that the average (mean) note frequency of Come Monday was 319.78 Hz and used a frequency generator to produce...

Sari Dates... My daughter Sandy’s friend, Sari, noted on December 16, 2009, that on that particular day, when the date was expressed as 12/16/09, the square of the month equaled the product of the day of the month and the year. That is, December squared = (the 16th) times (09), or better yet, I think this is a fun relationship and will give such dates the name Sari Dates. So, of course, we need to know how many Sari Dates there are. I counted 40 of them. I listed each month and just counted. Here is how. In general we want to count the number of occurrences of the event Let’s...

SJ to Irvine = Newport Beach to SJ... I just returned home from a two-week visit to Irvine, California, a compact little town about 50 south of Los Angeles. I was visiting friends and family. Before starting the drive from San Jose to Irvine, I queried with MapQuest to check the mileage from my house, Point A, to the destination house, Point B. Although I have made the drive too many times to count and know very well the mileage, I wanted to be sure nothing had changed. After all, the Sun is in a low sunspot cycle and perhaps a small number of sunspots lowered the temperature of the Earth’s core which in turn...

Non Linear Gauges and Exploding Jeeps... On Friday, November 13, I drove back home to San Jose from Las Vegas. The drive is a long one, and requires a lot of energy. In the last year, I have made it several times. It takes me just about nine hours and 20 gallons of gasoline to supply the motive force that compels my Jeep to travel the 515 miles from the middle of the Las Vegas strip to my house. The drive takes me through about 300 miles of the Mojave Desert and 140 miles of California’s Central Valley. See Figure 1. Figure 1 Las Vegas to San Jose In the last few months I have had a few problems (about 8K bucks...

The Harmonic Series in Music and Mathema... For years I have wondered if there is a connection between the harmonic series in music theory and the harmonic series in mathematics. Here is what I know so far, music first, mathematics second. The Harmonic Series in Music Much of what I know about harmonic series in music comes from the many guitar lesson books I have read as well as from the information provided by Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music) Here is how I understand it. Strings on a guitar are fastened to two nodes, one called the nut, which is located at one end of the fretboard, and...

The Regifting Game... My sister Connie sent this clever mathematical magic puzzle to me. Our cousin Judie, sent it to her. The puzzle is called Regifting Robin. You can find it at http://www.regiftable.com/regiftingrobinpopup.html Try it now. Try it a few times. Then we’ll break it apart and see how it works. The game starts by asking you to pick a two-digit number. Each two-digit number is composed of a digit in the one’s place and a digit in the 10’s place. The digit in the 10’s place is ten times the value of the ten’s digit. For example, the two-digit number 47 is composed of two...

Fly’s Flat Faces... A fly has been buzzing around my office room for the last couple of days. It navigates its way from corner to corner, lamp to telephone, computer monitor to my nose, and from window to mirror. It astutely steers its way around chairs and speakers and bedposts and guitars. It often descends quickly and appears to instantaneously land on some object. Watching it for a while, the fly seems pretty smart. But then, without warning, it will, with great speed, crash head-first into the window or the mirror. Two things are odd about this behavior. 1. Why, when advancing directly into...

The Chocolate Calculator... In the last few weeks, an interesting “chocolate calculator” has been traveling around the internet. The concept is that you choose a number of times a week you would like to have chocolate, do some arithmetic, and the chocolate calculator pops out your age. As long the number of times you want chocolate each week is a number between 1 and 10 (specifically, ), the calculator computes your correct age. Compute once with a number between 1 and 10, and the calculator computes your correct age. Choose a different number between 1 and 10 and the calculator still computes your...