Replacement Parts
About the most noteworthy thing around our house this month – something that some of you might be able to relate to - was John’s hip replacement surgery on May 10. Conveniently for us, the procedure was performed right here at Randolph’s Gifford Hospital. He was home the next day, spent about a week on crutches before progressing to a cane, and was mowing the lawn with his riding mower within ten days of the surgery. All is going well as of this writing.
This wasn’t John’s first hip rodeo; he had his other hip done nine years ago and notes the changes in the process – more refined anesthesia (alert soon after waking); no stitches to be removed; visiting nurse visits replaced by a simple one-week follow up out-patient P/T appointment; and no need to wear compression socks for a month following the surgery.
When that first hip started to give him trouble back ten years ago, he procrastinated the decision for the surgery for as long as he could. Older and wiser this time, he scheduled it almost as soon as he started to experience discomfort.
If you’ve been faced with the same decision, John would be the first to tell you to just GET IT DONE!
Math Games
Here’s a parlor game that we’ve all encountered in one form or another:
1. Pick any number x from 1 to 10.
2. Multiply x by 2.
3. Add 10.
4. Divide by 2.
5. Subtract x.
Let me guess your answer….. 5! *
Every month or so, I’ve been getting flyers in the mail advertising “The Great Courses” – streamed or DVR’d lectures on a variety of topics that generally go for a few hundred dollars each. When a special $25 offer came to my attention, I took a closer look at the course offerings – what did I have to lose for that price?
In recent years, I’ve taken a number of free online history classes from other sources, but this time, I decided to go back to what was my “first love” in academics which became my college major. So, I signed up for “The Joy of Mathematics”, a series of 24 half hour lectures with titles such as “The Joy of Primes”, “The Joy of Fibonacci Numbers”, and “The Joy of Infinity”. The lectures are just that – no exams. They’re taught by a Professor Arthur Benjamin (Harvey Mudd College in California) whose enthusiasm for the subject is infectious.
I’m about a quarter of the way through the course and have learned things like how to mentally multiply two-digit numbers or how to square any two-digit number that ends in “5” (still working on both of those).
It’ll be interesting to see how I do with Lecture # 14 (“The Joy of the Imaginary Number i”) or Lecture #18 (“The Joy of Differential Calculus”). I’ve always maintained that that my love of math started to derail when I was first introduced to imaginary numbers. (I don’t care what they say - there IS no square root of minus 1 – “i” is not a number!). And, truth be told, higher level college math – especially a Differential Equations class - almost led me to change my major.
Still, the course is a fun mind exercise and refresher if you like to play games with numbers, or have forgotten the Quadratic Formula from your high school Algebra class.
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* P.S. As to that parlor game, as Professor Benjamin of Harvey Mudd College would say, it’s simple Algebra:
(2x + 10)/2 – x
= (x + 5) – x
= 5
