Probability Primavera

I can’t believe that’s the title I’m going with, but it’s got alliteration, and it’s an accurate description of what I’m thinking on, so, here we are.

Spring is a great time to get in touch with how terribly-evolved we are as far as relating our own experience of variability to an accurate picture of reality. A few days of high or low temps, whatever that means, a very short memory about what last year was like, maybe a few snowflakes, a sptting-rain / 36 degree combo and we start saying things like, “WHAT THE HECK IS THIS I THOUGHT IT WAS SPRING??!?!”, or “OH THANK GOODNESS WINTER IS OVER AND IT WILL ONLY BE NICE FROM NOW ON!” I mean, maybe. My money’s on your simian brain having a limited ability to generalize from your own experience to larger weather trends, but that’s just me: proud and cognizant of my monkey heritage.

When I worked in retail analytics, one of the topics that I always wanted to dig into but never got up the energy for was a model of single-day events on perceptions of weather during Spring and Fall. What everyone’s going to tell you is, “When it’s warm, people shop for swimsuits,” and while that’s obviously true to some extent, what I was really interested in was “By observing shopping behavior, can I determine how people decide that ‘It’s warm’?” Because I think it’s possible that one 65 degree day in March might do the trick, as opposed to climbing slowly through the 50’s in April.

Point is, I got the SuperCub out of the basement today, so it is fully spring.

M.U.L.E.

Everything I know about economics, I learned when I was 10 from a video game called M.U.L.E.

M.U.L.E. is about mining on an alien planet, and there’s a phase where your plots of land generate goods, after which there’s an auction phase:

Sellers are at the top, buyers at the bottom. Here, brown is selling and blue is bidding by walking up the screen toward them (green and red aren’t interested). Their current bid of 75 is represented by a dotted line that moves with them.

When brown likes the price that blue is offering, they walk down the screen. This will create a dotted line for their offer price, and if his sell line meets blue’s buy line, there’s a transation. Simple! But as soon as you introduce two buyers or sellers, well, let’s just say no one in the computer lab at Bloomfield Middle School had any idea what they were unleashing.

Green and purple are both selling, but purple hesitates, because they want a higher price — and as a result, green makes the sale. Blue, buying, also hesitates — and if green runs out of stock, they’re in trouble because they’re going to have to pay purple’s higher price.

Two keyboard keys, four humans, one Apple IIe — all resulting in a shared, visceral experience with supply and demand, and how complex interactions around value and transactions happen.

M.U.L.E. is my north star of trying to help people understand math: if I can make a topic this concrete, you will learn it, you will never forget it, and you will feel a new organizing idea all around you. Your entire world will simply make more sense.

Real learning is moving from “When am I going to use this?”, to, “How did I not see this before?”

Feeding your soul, and your face

There is nothing about baking that is not math-adjacent. You got your areas, your volumes, your word problems, unit conversion, scaling, measurement, timing, fractions, and a whole bunch of other activities that would make for an engaging, all-ages action and communication math extravaganza.

Plus, you get cookies when you’re done. Sooooo, maybe get on this?