Games: Cranium Family Fun Game and Rack-O

Al asked for a Family Night, and the holiday tomorrow allowed for staying up late this evening playing games. So we gathered around the game table downstairs, and we picked out Cranium Family Fun Game as one mostly likely to work well for all ages and provide lots of fun and laughs.

Like most of Cranium’s games, this one has a number of different kinds of activities. Depending what color you land on, you pick out a card from one of four decks: Creative Cat, Word Worm, Data Head, or Star Performer. We quickly agreed that Data Head was the easiest category, generally depending more on knowledge than ability. Recognizing common objects from photos showing just a small detail is probably the hardest in that category, while the true/false questions and multiple choice were usually easy for all of us.

Word Worm is my favorite category, as I really like words. Spelling words backwards is not very challenging for any of us, but finding six words starting with six different letters (roll the letter dice to get your letters) in six specified categories can be quite a challenge. So much so, in fact, that we never managed before time was up.

Creative Cat and Star Performer require more ability and creativity, and generally are where the laughs come in. How do you pantomime playing musical chairs, or doing instant messaging? My husband had somewhat more luck acting out being a race car driver, and later being a waitress (the latter was quite memorable and will probably continue to generate laughter whenever we remember it).

I had to crab walk around the room with a plastic frog on my belly. There was some question as to whether the frog was still on my belly, as it slid down near my hip, but as I made it around the room, panting with the effort, my husband decided I had accomplished it. On other rounds, we raced around the house collecting items, such as something made only of cotton (a T-shirt), or something with batteries (a remote control). Kyra helped with this category, providing both something alive, and something for a dog to fetch.

An odd day

I feel kind of sorry for math teachers. I mean, what can you do to make math exciting to most kids? You have some students who hate math because they don’t understand it, and other students like me who think it’s boring because it’s easy. And then there are a few who really do think math is a lot of fun, but I think the number of number-lovers is pretty small.

Foreign language teachers get to serve new foods and teach new games. (The high school German club did a German night at my son’s elementary school, and he has now decided he wants to learn German instead of French.) English teachers can teach books that are exciting to read, or have the class put on a play. Social studies classes can reenact historical events or have debates over issues. Science teachers can demonstrate amazing experiments, or set up a science fair.

But what can math teachers do that raises the profile of their subject? On March 14, my older son told me how ridiculous he thought it was that they had a school assembly to recognize Pi Day. In math class (and maybe some others), there were “pie” activities – including pie to eat, which of course he did enjoy. I pointed out that math teachers don’t get a lot of chances to put their subject on center stage, and take advantage of the opportunity when it comes. He did not change his opinion (and he’s a straight A+ math student).

A math teacher in California is doing his best to promote math with Odd Day. Today’s date, 05/07/09, is one of six dates each century that is made up of three consecutive odd numbers. He suggests some ways to celebrate Odd Day:

It’s a great day to do your odds ‘n ends, give a friend a high-five, root for the odds-on-favorite, read the Wizard of Odds, watch the Odd Couple, say aaaahd in the doctor’s office, look for sea odders, find that missing odd sock, and beat the odds.

I made a brief attempt to write an Odd Ode, but it is more odd than ode:

This poem has five
Syllables in line one, then
Seven in the next, nine in the last.

As my younger son is always looking for games to play, I told him about Odd Day. With typical enthusiasm, he suggested we dance in the street, as that would be odd. I agreed it would – but we didn’t. We did give each other nine high fives, hopped seven times on one foot, and tried to spin around nine times (but stopped after five because we were both getting dizzy).

We counted to seven in three languages (English, Spanish, and German), and thought of odd foods to eat. We made up a story about visiting a planet with odd-looking creatures (three heads with five eyes on each head, five arms with three fingers on each hand, and three legs with one toe on each foot). Now we’re going to play Go Fish with only odd cards – but I’m not sure whether we can collect pairs or if we have to collect three of each number…

By the way, had you noticed that “perennial” and “student” each have an odd number of letters? So do these words…
Happy Odd Day!

Statistically speaking

One of the most interesting classes I took in grad school (for my MBA) was statistics, even if it was also one of the more difficult courses. I finally learned how to estimate probabilities rather than trying to tally up all the different possible outcomes. I learned what margin of error meant, and standard deviation, and other terms I had seen in reference to various statistics without knowing what they means.

Unfortunately I have trouble remembering much of it now. Just a few days ago I was arguing with my husband over the probability of getting the large straight in Yahtzee if you got 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 on your first roll. If you re-roll the 1, on the next roll you clearly have a 1 in 6 chance of getting the 3 you need. He argued that since you get two chances, that would mean a 1 in 3 chance of getting the large straight. Since you only use the third roll if the second one failed to yield a 3, and the third roll also gives a 1 in 6 chance of a 3, I say the overall chance of getting the large straight is lower. But I can’t remember how to figure it out.

Of course, it’s not particularly important to be able to calculate the probability exactly. We both know that the probability of his getting the numbers he wants on my handheld Yahtzee is less than for me to get them, because the game likes me better. (Honestly – I’ve had up to four Yahtzees in one game.) But it is just a game, mostly a way to pass the time when there’s not a book handy to read.

There are other areas where understanding statistics is more important. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on misleading numbers in advertisements, “In Ads, 1 Out of 5 Stats is Bogus.” (Personally, I would have guessed that more like 4 out of 5 stats are bogus.) Just this afternoon, I brought in the mail and found a piece from an auto insurance company. Four out of five times, they claimed, their rates beat the competition. Before throwing it out, I puzzled briefly over the possibilities.

Perhaps they didn’t bother giving a quote when it was clear their rates would be higher, and they only calculated the percentages for the cases where they did give a quote. Perhaps they were only referring to a certain category of customers or type of insurance, where they do have lower rates than the competition. Whatever the case, I am fairly certain they manipulated the numbers somehow to give a misleading impression.

Dated Scripture

Today is one of those dates that reminds me of a Bible verse. When I was a teenager I memorized a lot of Bible verses, first in the youth group at church, then in Bible school. And learning the reference was just as important as learning the verse word-perfect. I don’t remember them all now, but there are quite a number that I can still quote word for word (some of them in the King James Version I used at the time), together with the chapter and verse.

Today is 10/17 - which reminds me of this verse: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Romans 10:17

If you never had to learn Bible verses – or if those chapter and verse numbers didn’t stick so well – my association of dates and verses probably seems very strange. Maybe it is. But that’s how my memory works. Refer to the 23rd day of March as 3/23, and it just pops into my head: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

If you do know some of the commonly memorized verses, see if you can guess what verses I associate with these dates:

January 6
January 8
January 9
February 8
March 16
March 20
April 12
May 8
June 4
June 23
August 28 (also my husband’s birthday)
November 25

Keep reading to see my answers

Puppy math

Whether you like math or hate it, you ought to take a look at Jon Scieszka’s Math Curse. I don’t remember who gave it to us, but it is a fun book to read. The word problems are not your typical “if Train A leaves station X at 8:30…” For instance:

I have 1 white shirt, 3 blue shirts, 3 striped shirts,
and that 1 ugly plaid shirt my Uncle Zeno sent me.

1. How many shirts is that all together?
2. How many shirts would I have if I threw away that awful plaid shirt?
3. When will Uncle Zeno stop sending me such ugly shirts?

Another one details the stops the school bus makes and how many children get on at each stop. Then the question is… True or False: What is the bus driver’s name?

If you want a serious math book, don’t get this one. But if you like some humor along with a low key message that math really is all around us, check this out.

Now to the puppy part. In the spirit of Math Curse,

Kyra was 7 weeks old when we got her on September 6, and weighed 11 pounds.
Today she weighs 22 pounds.

1. How many weeks did it take her to double her weight?
2. When should we celebrate her birthday (in dog years)?
3. How long before she weighs too much for me to hold her on the bathroom scale?
4. If I feed her 5 scoops of food a day, why does she want to chew on my socks and my husband’s pay stub?

Here she is, all 22 pounds plus 1 rope bone. (Multiply by 4 paws, add 20 teeth, and how many pieces will she divide the insole from my shoe into?)

Out of digits, but this clock can’t stop

I’ve heard about the national debt since before I was old enough to understand what it was. It’s always (in my lifetime) been huge, an astronomical number that – like the speed of light or the size of the sun – I can use in calculations but not really have a sense for how big it really is. It’s been getting bigger over my lifetime, but it just passed a new milestone – it got too big for the National Debt Clock in Times Square.

The clock was created in 1989 when the national debt totalled $2.7 million, an appalling figure that real estate developer Seymour Durst wanted to bring to the public’s attention. Durst apparently didn’t imagine that his effort would have so little effect that an additional digit would need to be added to the clock’s display in order to show the total, less than twenty years later.

An economics professor in my MBA program helped put the matter in some perspective. Considering the size of the U.S. economy, he pointed out, the debt was less than most of us have in our personal finances. Many households would be thrilled to have total debt that was lower than annual income. Last year GDP (gross domestic product was estimated at $13.8 trillion. National debt over $10 trillion is still a huge number, but relative to GDP it is less now than during WWII and less than or similar to that of other industrialized nations.

So how big a problem is it? Hard to say. And that’s the problem with such huge numbers – when they get this big it’s hard to get any kind of handle on them. And it’s much to easy to add another hundred million or two, or even a few billion – just a few more pebbles on a mountain whose peak rises out of sight. But if you want to take a closer look at the mountain, here’s a good link to get you started.

High gas prices a problem for gas stations, too

Say you live in a little town way out in the middle of nowhere, with only one gas station. No matter how high gas prices go, you’ll buy your gas there – where else can you go? No real competition there – do you think the gas station owners are getting ready to break the $4/gallon barrier?

Not if they have mechanical gas pumps, as some 8,500 gas stations in this country still do. These old pumps max out at $3.9999 per gallon, and many can only ring up a total sale of $99.99 – not enough for some large vehicles to fill up. Upgrading to the new electronic models isn’t profitable – if there were enough sales volume to justify the $10,000+ investment they’d have already done so.

More math humor

While looking for references to binary jokes for yesterday’s post, I came across websites offering a broad range of math-related humor. Some of it is just too good not to share.

A love of numbers seems to run in our family. My father was an actuary, as was his father before him. My older sister majored in math, and still enjoys books on math although she now works as a proofreader. At our uncle’s funeral last year, our cousins spoke of their father’s love of numbers.

Are you triskaidekaphobic?

My 8-year-old asked me the other day why people think 13 is an unlucky number. I had to tell him I really didn’t know. As today is the 13th, it seemed like a good day to find out.

According to Wikipedia, many cultures have long considered 13 unlucky. The Code of Hammurabi, dating to about 1760 BC, skips the number 13 in numbering its laws. People avoid getting married on the 13th, and planners skip number 13 in assigning house numbers on streets or floor numbers in buildings.

Information, please?

As an IT professional, my job revolves around information. (My job title is IT Production Control, which is rather a misnomer as “production control” usually has something to do with manufacturing, whereas the “production” in my title has to do with IT’s distinction between development/testing computer environments, and the “live” or “production” environment that the rest of the company uses on a daily basis.) In spite of that - or perhaps because of that – I am very aware how difficult it is to say exactly what information is.

It is common to distinguish between data and information, though there is apparently no agreement as to what that distinction is. According to wikipedia, “Data refers to a collection of organized information,” which suggests that data is a superset of information. On the other hand – and this is the usage I am more used to – this article cites a definition of information as “collected facts and data” and “computer data that has been organized and presented in a systematic fashion to clarify the underlying meaning.”

In any case, it is difficult to pin down just what information is, and even harder to quantify it. The concept of information and where it comes from has become a big topic lately, particularly with the upcoming release of Ben Stein’s movie Expelled and its claim that “Evolution does not produce new genetic information” although new genetic information is required in order for evolution to occur. Regardless of what you think of evolution or creation, I find the topic of information itself fascinating.