An expected blog reader type is a teacher, looking for was to pass on the culture. Yesterday and today are a bit of a bonanza for me in that regard, in that we're shifting to Daylight Savings Time, and today is Pi Day.
We had a Zoom meetup last night. The segue from Daylight Savings Time to a world map is a great way to slip in time zones in the Pythonic sense e.g. jump to the date, datetime and time documentation and remind students of the intricacies of calendars. Our proleptic Gregorian is no joke, in turns of curve ball twists and turns. Imagine if imperial presidents raided the months for more days the way those Roman guys did.
However, the World Time Zones map, picked at random, was of course a Mercator. A great interim next map has been floating around Facebook as a meme for some time now, and shows the true size of countries, inside of countries as outlined on a Mercator. Tiny Greenland set within monster Greenland, and so on. Russia is really not that big, compared to some other big ones. Nor is it small. Africa looks about the size it is. Antarctica was all together missing from the time zone Mercator.
This is an Algorithms and Data Structures class remember, and there's nothing more algorithmic than a mapping, nor a data structure more familiar than a globe. From a quasi-spherical globe (a tad oblate) we map to a screen on a flat surface, to create a kind of dashboard. We call the resulting instrument a "world map" and it's easy to search up a bunch of them, which is what we did. This was all by way of intro, reminding students we're in the age of GIS / GPS.
On the Pi Day front, I mentioned Vihart, the Youtubist, and had I not got into a mouse fight with Replit, I might have again demonstrated the technique for embedding Youtubes inside of Jupyter Notebooks. As I explained once again, this is a "school of the future" where I'm pretending "this is how it is" for a lot of us, whereas really we're just an elite few. Not many underprivileged have even heard of a Juypter Notebook. We're considered an elite school for a reason. But that just means prototypical, ahead of the pack, experimental without being iconoclastic.
Diverging from established orthodoxy sounds risky until the new orthodoxy we're converging to comes over the horizon. One's impulse is to not jump ship, even if it's going down, until there's at least one other ship in the picture. Pick one and swim towards it? In my case, I'm pretty much right back where I started at the International School of Manila and/or the Overseas School of Rome. The tools have improved immensely however. I'm able to take advantage of much more engineering.
The Vihart Youtubes I'm thinking about have to do with Pi versus Tau and a kind of mock political battle that's like a model UN, a sandbox for later, when you enter center ring. Check 'em out, we're talking about a whole genre.
For example, with a computing surface in the picture, say a Replit in the cloud, you're able to casually dialog with an implementation of Permutations, which form a type, a math object. The Group Theory ideas come through loud and clear, to the extent one skates through the concepts without getting bogged down in too much tedium. But there's enough concreteness to keep it real. A P-type object maps letters to letters as shown by its ability to encrypt and decrypt. Yes, just a simple Caesar code. The point is not to encrypt securely at this point, but to understand something about Algorithms and Data Structures.
