Seen on a dessert menu at a fancy restaurant I crashed this weekend:
“Well you guys said you wanted to know when you’d ever use this stuff.”
I’ll be dedicating this blog to a certain line of inquiry for the next few days or weeks or for however long it takes me to come to some kind of internal consensus. I’d appreciate your help with that.
14 Comments
Kevin Hall
November 11, 2013 - 6:38 pm -Cool!
Xavier
November 12, 2013 - 3:36 am -What’s the next? Perhaps represent the line which passes at (10,10) and (20, 13) and calculate the f(30).
After, that a system of equation could be solve if we combine prices, like: http://map.mathshell.org/materials/download.php?fileid=1114
Dan Meyer
November 12, 2013 - 4:46 am -I mean, of course the answer is $18.
Rod Bennett
November 12, 2013 - 5:32 am -Not sure it’s going to be linear, the makers are all different. Dome people also prefer the 20 year old. Fun problem but not sure my administration would love it. Either way, I’ll drink to that.
Chris Robinson
November 12, 2013 - 6:31 am -$25 for 40 year?
David Patterson
November 12, 2013 - 7:15 am -I found it fun to peek at the answer, graph all three points on Desmos, and then start with y=x^2 and tweak it until it crossed all three dots.
Dan Meyer
November 12, 2013 - 10:19 am -Turns out that curve flattens out real fast as the port distills into what basically tastes (I’m told) like cough syrup. So kind of a fun graph. Really calls into question the definition of “real,” though.
Chris Robinson
November 12, 2013 - 2:08 pm -I wonder what their definitions of improve and many are here.
Sue Hellman
November 13, 2013 - 4:13 am -Here’s another for your collection. It was taken by Arvind Grover (2009) & posted in Flickr Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0) –> http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3577/3401554766_967132f563.jpg.
Shaun
November 13, 2013 - 2:30 pm -Seems to me that the price of the aged stuff is “negotiable”. ;)
Xavier
November 14, 2013 - 2:08 am -If it’s 18 $, they are cheating ;-) It should be 16 $ (linear), supposing the same quality of wines… You could ask a discount ;-)
Jay
November 14, 2013 - 11:22 am -Why should it be linear? Maybe the number of wines aged t years decays exponentially in t.
Sue Hellman
November 21, 2013 - 5:34 am -I’ve been thinking about the title of this post and wondering how this problem fits. I wonder if it to kids, despite the fact that the problem might come from a real context, it would seem contrived rather than authentic. I’m not sure that working on this question would either excite their natural curiosity enough to make them want to pursue a solution or go some distance to settling the question ‘how will does this math connect to my real life?’. There’s a difference between math people seeing math questions in ‘real’ situations and moving kids towards thinking of math as a tool or set of processes they can easily & naturally engage to make their lives better or better understand what’s going on in the world.