I'd hoped he'd been a geek friend of Sydney's from college who ended up working with her

Nah. Then he'd be dead. Or in Wisconsin.

The Adirondack chairs at Cost Plus were expenisve.

Dead or in Wisoncsin.... Must mean we are referring to Will Tippen.

Any of the Buffista actuaries around? (Or other financial professionals?)

Any of the Buffista actuaries around? (Or other financial professionals?)

I don't suppose a girl who likes the cha-ching sound Quicken makes when you enter a transaction counts, does it?

I'm an almost-actuary, quasi-financial professional. So I'll give you an answer, until someone else produces a better one.

in NYT: Finding a More Authentic Jamaica

Well, not for the purposes I was thinking, I'm afraid. (ETA that I was actually replying to Kristin's question.)

Basically, I need to design an Exhibition assignment for a high school math class, and I was looking for ideas. I've been kicking around a couple of ideas -- pick two social issues you can quantify (women entering medical school and incidences of gun violence, for a wild example) and check to see if there's a statistical correlation, discuss your answer and its implications and the margin of error, etc; pick from a list of mathematical treatises I provide, and, doing as much research and asking for help as you need, translate it into understandable language and talk about what was going on in mathematics at the time it was written (and, if relevant -- and it probably is -- larger cultural issues). But I was wondering if there'd be something the people who do math for a living could suggest. I was looking to see if there'd be any way to have kids try to do a radically simplified bit of forensic accounting, but I know too little about it to even find out.

Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions, is what I'm saying, and actually anyone's welcome to try.

That sounds interesting - and challenging, for a high school class.

Important point! No actual high school students will be harmed in this experiment! This is for my Culture of High School class -- design an exhibition guide (which is to say, an assignment which is meant to make students really use knowledge they've gained) and then submit a sample exhibition (which is to say, now pose as a student and do the assignment).

The challenging thing is kind of a balancing problem. I mean, I want it to be challenging, and also stretch boundaries of what they'd expect a math assignment to be, but I also don't want it to be a flight of fancy (i.e., I don't want them to say, uh, no way high school students could do this).

Okay, also? Internet is evil. In searching for information on Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, I found a listing for a first edition, 1801. 38,000 pounds.