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Barkley says Kobe is no Jordan

Charles Barkley joined the show to talk about the big stories in the NBA.

Barkley has been very impressed with the Dallas Mavericks.

“They’re in the conversation with the Denver Nuggets against the Lakers,” Barkley said. “Clearly the Lakers are the favorite. But Denver and Dallas are right there.”

In the East, Barkley said that the Orlando Magic are very dangerous and Dwight Howard keeps getting better.

Barkley had interesting comments on Kobe Bryant’s penchant for last-second shots. He said that some of Kobe Bryant’s game-winners are lucky. What are you going to do when he hits a 20-foot fade-away jumper? Barkley said that the Raptors played good defense against Bryant earlier this week but he hit the game-winner any way.

Barkley says Kobe is no Jordan


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Be the first to comment - What do you think?  Posted by - March 11, 2010 at 11:00 am

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Algebra in Wonderland

SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”).

But Alice’s adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. just fantastical tales for children — and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opened on Friday.

Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.

In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.

Early in the story, for instance, Alice’s exchange with the Caterpillar parodies the first purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the mid-19th century by Augustus de Morgan, a London math professor. de Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number, which even de Morgan himself called “unintelligible” and “absurd” (because all numbers when squared give positive results).

The word “algebra,” de Morgan said in one of his footnotes, comes from an Arabic phrase he transliterated as “al jebr e al mokabala,” meaning restoration and reduction. He explained that even though algebra had been reduced to a seemingly absurd but logical set of operations, eventually some sort of meaning would be restored.

Such loose mathematical reasoning would have riled a punctilious logician like Dodgson. And so, the Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah — suggesting that something has mushroomed up from nowhere, and is dulling the thoughts of its followers — and Alice is subjected to a monstrous form of “al jebr e al mokabala.” she first tries to “restore” herself to her original (larger) size, but ends up “reducing” so rapidly that her chin hits her foot.

Alice has slid down from a world governed by the logic of universal arithmetic to one where her size can vary from nine feet to three inches. she thinks this is the root of her problem: “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra. He advises Alice to “Keep your temper.”

In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed — as in “tempered steel” — so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she can’t “keep the same size for 10 minutes together!” Proportion, rather than absolute length, was what mattered in Alice’s above-ground world of Euclidean geometry.

In an algebraic world, of course, this isn’t easy. Alice eats a bit of mushroom and her neck elongates like a serpent, annoying a nesting pigeon. Eventually, though, she finds a way to nibble herself down to nine inches, and enters a little house where she finds the Duchess, her baby, the Cook and the Cheshire Cat.

Melanie Bayley is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford.

Algebra in Wonderland


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Be the first to comment - What do you think?  Posted by - March 6, 2010 at 11:00 pm

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How does the ISAGENIX associate program work and how much does it cost?

I want to try Isagenix sounds like a good product. It is expensive and I’ve read that by being an associate you can get a discount. I’m just wondering if being an associate you pay monthly dues or agree to buy a certain amount of Isagenix.

Thanks for you help.

How does the ISAGENIX associate program work and how much does it cost?


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Be the first to comment - What do you think?  Posted by admin - March 3, 2010 at 2:00 pm

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Evan Lysacek and Nastia Liukin: Dating! | FaB cLiPs

Evan Lysacek and Nastia Liukin: Dating!

As celebrity couples go, Evan Lysacek and Nastia Liukin are a gold-medal pair. Seriously, they’ve both won Olympic gold medals in their respective sports. on his way to becoming the first U.S

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Evan Lysacek and Nastia Liukin: Dating!

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Evan Lysacek and Nastia Liukin: Dating! | FaB cLiPs

Be the first to comment - What do you think?  Posted by - February 22, 2010 at 5:00 pm

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Will this happen if I do this to my plants?

I just planted a perennial garden about 2 weeks ago. I feed them Miracle Grow every Sunday.
If I continusouly cut the flowers off will the plant grow faster? I am more interested in getting the garden bigger first before enjoying the flowers.
Wont the plant put its energy into growing bigger faster if you take the flowers off before they bloom?

Will this happen if I do this to my plants?

Be the first to comment - What do you think?  Posted by - at 12:00 am

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