Sterling and Sam's Blog

Subtitle: Math Dorkiness.

So a couple of days ago I was staring at tile and noticed something funny.  If you trace out a square with sides of length L, then the distance traveled from the top left corner to the bottom right corner is 2L (step 1).  Now, if you again start in the top left, go 1/2 L to the right, 1/2 L down, 1/2 L to the right, 1/2 L down, then again the total distance traveled is 2L (step 2). Continue this process as many times as you want and the distance traveled is always 2L.  In the limit of an infinite number of iterations each vertex gets within an epsilon ball of (e.g., can become arbitrarily close to…) a straight line connecting the top left corner with the bottom right.  But we all know that this straight line has a length of sqrt(2)*L.  So how is it that every point can be arbitrarily close to a straight line but the total length be larger than the straight line?

I originally thought that through calculus or some well-known series limit, I could prove that in the limit of infinite iterations of this process, the pythagorean theorem would be recovered.  I failed and felt bad that I couldn’t do calculus anymore.  However, a few days later I was watching a Nova and episode and realized that I had invented a fractal (doubtfully the first one to discover this particular fractal, but google couldn’t find a name for it).

Yay math!

I’ve been podcasting the Radio From Hell show ever since Sam and I left SLC.  Over the past few month’s I’ve listened to Bill spread his liberal propaganda concerning health care reform.  Well, I finally decided to spread some propaganda of my own in response to Bill.  Here’s a copy of a letter I sent him:

DearBill

Here it is, the house we hopefully, probably, have.  4700 SE Woodward St.  About 1 mile from where we live now.  Not branching out much. It’s typical floor plan for a 70s split level, but the inside feels much more modern.

It’s kinda fugly from the front- just like a big white box, but the rest…

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Ok, so Sterling saw the house on NE Wygant today, the one with all the baggage with it- and he likes it.  We’re going to make an offer on Monday.  It turns out that our lovely realtor will get 1% commission if the sale goes through, like the lising realtor. But the drama continues.

The reason the previous buyers walked away is because there are 2 mortgages on the house.  The bigger one was owned by a bank that was bought out by Bank of America.  The smaller one is owned by Green Tree Lending, and they are the ones throwing the wrench in things.  So this our offer won’t need 3rd party approval- it will need 4th party approval.  The other buyers had their offer accepted in February, and never got to the inspection period!  Can you imagine having this go on for 5 months?  No wonder they walked.

So our strategy is this:  Offer them full list price, but add language that says they cannot accept another offer if they accept ours, essentially making it so this can’t turn into a bidding war.  If they can accept that, great.  If not, we get our answer at the beginning and won’t get strung along for 6 months to get dumped in the end.  I feel like I’m talking about dating.

Well, that’s the plan- we’ll see what happens after we make our offer on Monday…

Bleh-  It’s draining.  We found the perfect house, made an offer and were outbid by someone else!

Carol, our realtor, on the porch of the Burrage house in the Overlook neighborhood.

I thought we’d get this one no problem.  Read the rest of this entry »

I Wail!

Nearly every Wednesday night, Sam, my boss, and two of my coworkers and I head down to the Thirsty Lion to play trivia.  There are about 20 teams that show up and we’re frequently in the top 5 and have made it to 2nd and 3rd a few times, which comes with a split of the entrance fees.  So we do pretty well.  Every week there’s a theme and the opportunity to earn bonus points.  This week’s theme was Michael Jackson and bonus points were given to teams who sang at least 5-10 seconds of a Michael Jackson song.  We chose Smooth Criminal, because it has such an easy-to-remember chorus.  Somehow, I ended up with the mic, so I butchered the chorus as loud as I could and had great support from my backup singers.  The full pubquiz blog is here: pubquizusa (our team name is No Clue).

Here’s the shutterfly link. All the pictures taken by the photographer, and some from before, and honeymoon pictures are posted.  Enjoy!

Thanks everyone for coming to our wedding, we had such a fantastic time!  Here’s a few of our favorite wedding/honeymoon pictures.  We’re still waiting for a link from our photographer for a larger collection of photos that can be ordered, but we’ll post the info here when available.

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I don't even know how I'm doing my hair- how are they ever going to get the cake right? The paisley bib & rick-rack are pretty good though.

Ok, now for the real info: Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend, Sam and I went to Little Rock to attend the wedding of one of her friends from high school.  As usual, we had a 1 1/2 hour lay-over in Dallas.  Sam made a comment about how whenever she’s in Dallas it reminds her of the Green Day song, Paranoia, with the lyrics that go something like “… only stupid people are breeding …”.  I didn’t believe it was a Green Day, although I didn’t know who it might have been.  Since we didn’t have the internet available to immediately resolve the dispute, it turned into a bet where the winner would receive a back massage.

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