On May 26, 2021, I hypocritically posed the following:
Family Math: The positives and negatives of formula feeding vis-à-vis breastfeeding. How to get millions of fathers involved in parenting, while giving the mother a break if formula feeding isn’t an option.
Below are three tweets, two of which are more than a decade old.
Got 🥛 : 🐄 or 🐐?
Lactose intolerant? Allergic to cow milk? Nature “next best thing to mother’s milk”: Singapore’s Goat Milk vine.co/v/i7OiHuQW62K (@MathPlus on 12/6/15)
Zero Fat≠ No Fat
Beware of labels: Zero fat, no-fat (skim milk) contains 0.4 grams of fat per cup (or 86 calories per cup). A “zero lie”! #zero (@Zero_Math on 1/7/11)
Meeting & Milking the Cow!
You don’t get milk from a cow by sending a letter, or by calling on the phone. You get milk from a cow by sitting by its side & milking it. (@MathPlus on 12/2/12)
You may also be interested in Crime Watch and Crime Math, which is related to infant formula or powder milk.
I’ve been discreetly and randomly working on thetentative The Little Toilet Math Book in the bathroom, where my best thinking often takes place. I suppose a number of you too get your aha’s or eureka’s there, albeit understandably you wouldn’t admit it.
Yesterday, as I was passing by a community center, I happily saw a toilet rolls collection box. I immediately took a photo shot of its front and side views. And my mind started rolling in some real-world questions that could match the pictures.
Below are a sample of these toilet math (🧻🔢) questions:
If residents in the “fine” city of Singapore were to recycle their toilet rolls, guesstimate how many trees could be saved every year.
How much more space could be used if donors were considerate enough to flatten their toilet rolls before dumping them into the collection or recycle box?
If citizens and residents decided using water rather than toilet rolls to clean themselves up, how many millions of liters of water they would need per day after visiting a public toilet (excluding those hundreds of thousands of men who hardly ever wash their hands after relieving themselves or doing their dirty business)?
For a household, would using a bidet or water at home be dearer or cheaper than relying on toilet rolls in the long run (including medical bills for piles and other related health issues that are directly or indirectly due to paper uncleanliness or poor hygiene)?
Imagine that Singapore could no longer import toilet paper from its neighbors. Wouldn’t switching to NEWater—Singapore’s homemade drinkable water, which comes from polluted sea water and “toilet water” mixed with bacteria-killing agents, and which disputably smacks of or smells like sewage—cost for for the population than using toilet paper for doing their business?
Often times, for a community project to succeed, not only do we need that little extra effort but also an iota of thought to ensure that all stakeholders mindfully (or inconveniently) play their part.
Let’s all do the right thing and the thing right, because success often lies not so much in the doing but rather in the caring.
Remember: There is no Planet B (for Generations 𝛼, 𝛽, and 𝛾).
Pi recently took a page from Singapore’s only ruling party’s decades-long successful template how to stay in power perpetually, with quasi-zero public protests, strikes, and riots.
Will Pi win her viral legal case against the World Health Organization (WHO)? Millions of math teachers worldwide are unspokenly hoping that the WHO won’t alienate or betray Pi, just as it did for the marginalized and unrecognized variant Xi.
Would Pi be vindicated for unfairly being discriminated by those who’re playing politics to prevent her from being admitted as a bona-fide corona variant worthy of WHO’s recognition?
Imagine how excited math educators globally would be if Pi won her legal case against the WHO.
Come Pi Day or Pi Approximation Day, if the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet were officially declared a WHO-approved variant by then, schools and universities would be electrified in conducting an eclectic mix of pi talks and lectures to promote Pi’s ambivalent “murderous” new status.
I, for one, have started to work on Murderous Pi—the title of a math e-book to celebrate Pi’s evolution from a humble mathematical constant to a proud corona variant, which would be plagued with devilish or wicked problems on mathematics’s most beloved irrational number.
Are you looking forward for Pi’s long-overdue recognition by WHO’s health professionals in the Lunar New Year of the Rabbit?
Until she’s virally credited for her fatally mixed impact on earthlings before she’d rest in peace to make way for Rho and Sigma, who’re lining up to be WHO-recognized, Pi’s rejection would be perceived as an irrational [mathematical & viral] injustice or betrayal, whose aftermath paranoiac behaviors among math educators and virologists worldwide could potentially be unpeaceful, to say the least.
Like the “infidel” Zero, who’s ostracized by the Church Fathers of yesteryear, may the “agnostic” or “devilish” Pi be vindicated as she longs to gain formal approval to be in the company of fellow corona variants.
