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.
I can’t recall what prompted me to coin “mathemachicken” three-odd years ago. Was it the aftermath of setting or solving an unhealthy number of word problems on chickens or eggs, or both?
Not too long ago, in Organic Chicken Rice for the Rich, I hatched up a meme and offered some math questions on organic and kampong chickens. https://bit.ly/3y1fXvL
Early this month, the world read about Malaysia’s decision to ban the export of chickens (but not eggs) to its frenemy neighbor Singapore. In fact, even before the ban, the prices of chicken eggs were already skyrocketing in supermarkets, which sounds more like a case of synchronized profiteering strategies among exporters, distributors, and supermarkets than anything else, but after some Opposition members had denounced the unjustified inflated prices, things have since stabilized more or less.
Organic Chicken for the Rich & Wealthy
Ukrainian Eggs 4 Singapore
During Singapore’s “circuit breaker”—a PC term for “lockdown”—we’re blessed with white eggs flown from Ukraine. I recall that some supermarkets had promotions like “Buy One, Get One Free” or “Buy Two, Get One Free” to lure locals to try Ukrainian eggs. Since the war, the import of these bigger and cheaper eggs seems to have come to a halt.
Probably no animal is more popular than the chicken in math word problems—even the beloved bunny comes a distant second. Be it the use of their heads, eyes, legs, or eggs, the chicken remains the animal of choice among mathematical problem posers.
Tens of thousands of brain-friendly and unfriendly math questions on chickens and eggs around the world make their way into canned and creative math textbooks every year, which makes millions of math-anxious students worldwide to “chicken out” to avoid being given all kinds of labels by peers and parents for their oft-irrational fear or failure to solving them.
Philosophically Speaking
If you were a chicken, would you feel privileged or pissed off by the way your name is being used, abused, or misused in school textbooks and workbooks?
Do you think it’s long overdue that you and your feathery friends and foes sue the publishers and the Ministries of Education around the world for showing disrespect or even disdain towards the chicken community?
On a lighter note, if it looks like a chicken and clucks and counts like a chicken, you never know: it might be a mathemachicken.
The day before, we read that a female Burmese python weighting 98 kg and nearly 5 m was caught in Florida. She’s the largest snake ever found in that state before her death, pregnant with an amazing 122 eggs; if stretched vertically, she’d be as tall as a giraffe.
In Florida, where now lives the Viper in Chief after being ousted from the White House, who’s since preoccupied himself with terrorizing those who refuse to propagate his lasagna of lies, pythons have become pests due to irresponsible pet owners of yesteryears releasing or allowing pet pythons to escape in the wild.
With no major predators, Florida’s subtropical climate has provided serpents and snakes a conducive breeding ground for them to multiply, often outcompeting native species. Who knows? Alien vipers might eventually outnumber local pythons, if left on their own to populate the land.
Recently, some human vipers mounted a “mathematical insurrection” against textbook publishers for allegedly promoting “woke math” to K–12 students. And a rising number of foreign pythons are set to keep Florida’s annual “Python Challenge” alive—this year, the event runs from August 5–14 and is expected to lure around 500+ python hunters from 25 different states.
🐍🔢: Math with Pythons & Pithons
Like math questions on vampires and zombies, those on pythons (and pithons) are no less frightening or exciting to problem solvers. Below are two examples:
It is estimated that the female Burmese python, which was caught after Floridian researchers used a male “scout” to find her, was up to 20 years old. In human years, would she be as old as the Viper in Chief?
Python Pies or Pizzas: In 2021, the winner of the “Python Challenge” captured 223 pythons, while the longest snake was 15 feet long. Imagine if this year’s captured foreign pythons were ethically killed and exotically used to make pies or pizzas, how many pieces of either one could be made by the chefs at Mar-a-Lago for the “Florida Python Food Festival”?
If you were given a chance to redefine a square, what would your new definition be other than it being another word for a geek, nerd, or bore? Or, a figure who refuses to do any of those immoral, illegal, or unethical things when pressured by peers: drug, booze, sex, porn, gang, scheme, graft, ….
Geometric Stereotype à la Singapour
In Chan Li Shan’s Searching for Lee Wen (2022), the author wrote:
“A well-known actress, Nancy Kwan once gave a talk at a conference of British-born Chinese. Having started in the film The World of Suzie Wong, she was talking about what it was like to be a Chinese actress working in Hollywood. Noticing Lee Wen [a deceased Singaporean artist who received the Cultural Medallion in 2005, Singapore’s highest award for the arts] at the back of the room, she said,
“Who’s that young man sitting behind? How come you’re so quiet? Where are you from?” “I’m Lee Wen from Singapore.” “Oh! Singapore… people there are all very square, right?”
Don’t you agree that there’s an iota of truth that people in the “fine” city don’t so much look like a square but do often behave like one? By this, I mean that they’re generally conservative, conformist, or compliant, or all three. Few would wish to be seen as an odd one in a sea of evens, because an oddball often creates waves, positively or negatively.
At work, few would step out of their invisible square to question, much less challenge, the oft-dated rules and regulations. Most hate their job, waiting for Fridays and dreading Mondays. They’ve subconsciously squared to live an uneventful or fearful life, because switching to an alternative career path looks pretty disruptive, not to say, (initially) painful.
Your choice of a meaningful life lies squarely on you. If you’re a math educator, are the math things you’re presently doing square with what you desire in future? For instance, are you waiting until you retire to write that book? Or until the kids go to college to start working on that manuscript? Whatever it is, just make sure that you don’t die with a book still inside you!
If you’ve been dubbed a square, or secretly see yourself as one, remember that squares are circles with corners, and over time, most of them do turn into a beautiful (imperfect) circle.
On April 26, 2022, after reading in the local papers that almost 5,500 dengue cases were reported in high-GDP Singapore, exceeding last year’s total, I posed and posted the following quiz:
“Covid-🇸🇬: A True or False Quiz: “In living-with-Covid Singapore, people are more afraid of contracting the dengue virus (dubbed the ‘rich man’s threat’) than the coronavirus (coined the ‘poor man’s dread’).”
A Tale of Two Vectors
Last November, I’d somewhat asked a similar question: “What are the odds that in Singapore the wealthy are more likely to go to hospital due to a mosquito bite rather than due to a viral infection? The delta goes for the poor; the dengue targets the rich.”
A month earlier, I’d postulated the following scenario: “In the Singapore 2021 infection contest, the dengue is no match to the delta. Even with more biting opportunities to target potential work-from-home victims, the 🦟 blamed the 🦠 for failing to meet its target.” https://lnkd.in/d5TeNdUA
In fact, way back in 2020, I’d pondered about “Singapore’s double whammy: The dengue (9,261 cases) is catching up fast to give the coronavirus (36,405 cases) some fight. Which one will win the 🇸🇬 infection contest: the mosquito 🦟 or the virus 🦠?” bit.ly/36YIzbh
Fight for Your Life
Today, in a number of war-stricken or terrorism-sponsored countries, the battle cry is: “Be a peace fighter.” In SE Asia, the rallying cry is: “Be a dengue fighter.”
On Monday, Singapore’s Health Minister Ong Ye Kung reported that 80,000 seniors aged 60 and above have yet to take their Covid-19 booster shots, urging them to do so as the city-state is expecting a new wave of Omicron infections in the next few months.
The minister added that the first batch of Covid-19 vaccines were engineered more for the “wild-type” virus, and now that the coronavirus has mutated into the Delta and Omicron variants, we need at least three doses of vaccines for “effective” protection—and a fourth jab (or a second booster shot) is recommended for those who’ve so far lived on this planet for at least three scores and two tens (or four scores)—aged 80 and above.
Like thousands of my fellow skeptics, when we read or hear this kind of corona update from a local politician on a Monday, our skepticism index goes up at least twenty points. It sounds more like an indecent number of WHO-approved vaccines are nearing their expiry dates, so they need to come up with some creative eleventh-hour strategies not to waste away those tens of thousands of doses.
These days, even developing countries with low vaccination rates are likely to turn down any donated near-expiry vaccines from those high-GDP hoarders. They’d reply, “Thank you very much for your [“insincere”] donation!” followed by some PC excuses not to offend the donors.
One subtle way to salvage a fraction of these surplus doses is to use some mortality statistics to scare off those who’ve yet to be jabbed or boosted.
For instance, we’re statistically being told that the probability of unvaccinated seniors aged 60 and above ending in the intensive care unit (ICU) or dying from Covid-19 is 1/25, but the figure drops to 1/100 if they’ve been doubly jabbed, or nosedives to a mere 3/1000 if they’ve been boosted.
Minister Ong emphasized that “It makes a difference whether you have taken 0, 1, 2 or 3 shots.” So, the unvaxxed would better pay heed to his life-and-death warning unless they plan to journey to the other side sooner than later.
The sombre message is: Wake up to your minister’s advice if you don’t want to have a minister at your premature wake conducting nightly services to your loved ones and friends and colleagues. The decision is yours to act if you want to prolong your stay on this planet by an extra few years or decades.
Let’s pray that the unvaccinated or unboosted lot would fear Covid-19 more than Covid-🇸🇬, while not letting themselves be paralyzed by either one.
Last week, I read on Facebook that one glass of iced lemon tea at some coffeeshops is now selling at $1.80, up from $1.20. An obscene 50% rise (or ruse?). Or an outrageous 66.67% increase if they charge us $2.00 for takeaway (even before the GST or VAT kicks in next year).
For those of us who’ve already used up our S$100 government voucher in less than a week, which is meant to help us in our daily expenses as part of the Household Support Package, it looks like we won’t enjoy the next iced lemon tea until the next voucher. I wonder when the next one is coming. In late 2022 or early 2023?
Looks or feels like those in the “write” business might have chosen the “wrong” profession, including moonlighters in academia, especially if their royalties since the pandemic—and now the Ukraine-Russia war—have headed south.
For the majority of us who’re not born with a silver spoon in our mouth, I suppose it’s probably not too late to seriously consider selling or distributing slightly dearer home-made iced lemon tea, barley drink, honey tea, and chrysanthemum tea to health-conscious customers.
Pandemic or Putin? Or Both?
A FB netizen commented: “Tea 1% + 1% Lemon + 1% Sugar + ALL 97% Water imply hardly anything to do with FOOD Shortage so please don’t divert the blame to Pandemic, UN or what have you NOT.”
The profit margins for selling beverages are a hundred times better than the returns or royalties earned from posing and solving math questions in school textbooks or assessment (or supplementary) titles.
Not IQ Nor EQ, But FQ
Talking about being street-smart rather than exam- or book-smart! When financial quotient (FQ) is worth more than (IQ + EQ).
Inflation provides an oft-unseized opportunity (disguised as a problem) for mathepreneurs to generate unexpected sources of income to make up for any (potential) loss in royalty or consultancy.
The advent of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether has provided math educators worldwide with fertile resources to indulge themselves in creative mathematical posing and solving.
Unfortunately, the negative perception that cryptocurrency or crypto is a vector for serious organized crime and money laundering has led millions of half-informed or risk-averse folks to adopt a wait-and-see attitude vis-à-vis Bitcoin transactions.
Who/What Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Nobody knows the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. If the name isn’t a he or she or it, could the name be a covert group of cryptographers and mathematicians?
Like the modern-day equivalent of the Bourbaki group—the collective pseudonym of a group of predominantly French mathematicians in the 1930s, who tried to axiomatize mathematics to make it more rigorous?
So far, the few suspects—digital-currency addict Nick Szabo, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, and Co.—all have denied being the founder of Bitcoin, except for Australian computer scientist who loudly but unprovenly claimed that he is Nakamoto.
Crypto Math
Posing fertile crypto math questions is only limited by our imagination. Thanks to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the Metaverse, I’ve toyed around with a number of crypto math questions.
Below are a sample of Bitcoin-related questions that I hope would make their way into a math booklet fit for publication in a-not-too-distant future.
Bitcoins are divided into Satoshis: one hundred million Satoshis in each Bitcoin. At the current Bitcoin price, what fraction of a U.S. cent is worth the smallest fraction of a Bitcoin?
In 2010, a pizza restaurant agreed to accept ten thousand Bitcoins in exchange for two large pizzas. At today’s exchange rate, how much would each pizza be worth?
In September 2021, El Salvador approved Bitcoin as a secondary currency; in April 2022, Central African Republic followed suit. Which rogue or war-torn nation in Asia or the Middle East would be the first one to make Bitcoin its official currency? Or would it be “fine” city Singapore that would lead the way in becoming SE Asia’s crypto hub?
Crypto Apocalypse: What are the odds that due to hyperinflation (or a possible WW3 in the aftermath of the senseless Ukraine-Russia war) people would start losing faith in Bitcoin to the point that it suffered the same fate as the Zimbabwean dollar bills?
A golf resort is rumored to have been gifted with 13.257 ETH and 12.5 bitcoin from a Middle Eastern prince. How much did the shady resort receive in cash donation from their criminal donor?
Crypto Winter Is Coming!
With news of a crypto winter in the horizon, let’s hope that the mathematics of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency wouldn’t deter math educators globally from getting involved in creative mathematical thinking and problem solving.
I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting for Bitcoin to drop under $10,000 as my next buy alert. The future lies in Bitcoin—or in blockchain.
Moons ago, long before Trump’s MAGA slogan resonated among blue-collar workers and white evangelicals, I was surprised to read a parent’s guide mentioning that some American homeschoolers had mixed feelings about using foreign editions of Singapore math textbooks because of the lack of political freedom in the island-state.
No matter how value-for-money Singapore math titles are, or how impressive the “fine” city’s top ranking in both PISA and TIMSS is, some American parents and teachers would have nothing to do with a country that stifles freedom of speech, restricts political freedom, or cracks down on alternative views that often portray the government in a negative light.
Singapore is a partly free country.
This week, we read that in the new normal Singapore has fared worse than the previous year as far as political rights and civil liberties are concerned. If 50 were the passing mark, then the island-state fell short, by scoring a disappointing 48 out of 100 on political freedom.
Singapore’s Freedom in the World https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore
Selective Internet Accessibility
Less well-known is Singapore’s average performance or ranking in terms of the public’s internet access, especially when both locals and aliens thought they could easily access the internet (except for some banned websites on politics, religion, and sex, or most political blogs that don’t depict the country’s political leaders positively), compared to their counterparts in China, where Google, Facebook, and Twitter are banned.
Singapore’s Freedom on the Net https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-net/2020
Political Freedom: Singapore vs. Others
Although we may not agree on the methodology used to compute the scores, which are calculated on a weighted scale, however, the global freedom ranking of most countries appears pretty accurate.
Let’s look at some freedom scores, by comparing how Singapore fares vis-à-vis some rich or rogue countries.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in the aftermath of more pseudo-free nations going rogue, or more institutions paying lip service to democratic processes, I remember less than three years ago coining tongue-in-cheek “Make Singapore Free Again.”
The Fear Factor in Singapore
The Fear Factor as a Common Denominator
What are some long-term consequences for math educators living in a politically semi-free milieu? Teachers who need to seek permission from their HODs or principals to start a blog or a Facebook page; or writers who need to consult editors or publishers before they start working on a politically incorrect or irreverent math title.
When I started blogging, I still recall that those who had a say in my pay wanted me to choose a different name that doesn’t include “Singapore Math” as part of the blog’s identity. Apparently, every time they Googled “Singapore math,” they landed on my site, and they’re uncomfortable with that. I refused to compromise because I thought then (and now) that the idea of censoring or threatening me for raising some unethical practices in educational publishing is laughably ridiculous, not to say, mathematically or educationally anti-democratic.
It’s not an accident or coincidence that high-GDP Singapore has probably the lowest number of math bloggers, or the least number of math teachers on Twitter, in the developed world.
For some of us, who look like an odd in a sea of evens, the “fear factor” of speaking up and speaking out is real, even if our audience is outside Singapore. As long as we are a “mathematical or political nobody,” it’s probably safe to say that we’re at quasi-zero risk of being banned or censored, while being aware that a small army of vigilantes are watching us 24/7/365 just in case we go “politically astray.”
POFMA Math
During the lockdown, when a few Opposition candidates appeared to be unfairly targeted for their “fake” comments, I entertained the possibility that soon the authorities would be targeting math bloggers or textbook authors, who poked fun at some MOE directives or policies, by irreverently christening POFMA Math.
What are the odds that Singapore math authors would be the next to be POFMA-ed?
Poverty or Democracy
For decades, the unspoken or unchallenged political message in Singapore for Singaporeans and foreigners is: High GDP or Low Political Liberty. You can’t have both!
Why can’t your say and your pay go hand in hand? The lie that a country’s economic prosperity and political freedom are inversely proportional needs to be debunked at all costs, because failure to do so would only perpetuate mediocrity, economic stagnancy, political apathy, and uncreativity among the citizenry.
