What is your quest?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. This one pairs nicely with the previous question "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

What is your quest?

Not the college-polished liberal arts answers I expected:

• i'm still waiting for the call to action tbh
• still figuring that out
• I don't know

Short-term thinkers and those with pretty feasible goals:

• sleep
• eat 2015's chocolate award winners
• not puke after watching a romcom
• to finish the current problem set
• to make it through the day
• over to the left a bit
• sort things
• to finally get to October break

Long-term and big picture thinkers:

• to find a nice farm to settle down in
• to find the meaning of my one and only life
• to sell vacuum cleaners in n cities, driving as few miles as possible
• find my quest
• to make myself and others happy
• to be the best there ever was
• seek ultimate fun in life
• join moon
• to get vim commands to work in google docs

I'm not sure that "join moon" should be interpreted literally. Maybe it's a cult thing?

There were some context-free superlatives:

• be the best
• to be the very best
• to be the best there ever was

This last one, it turns out, was a frequent verbatim response, sometimes extending for several more lines. I had to do an internet search to find my missing cultural context, because I am an old person and not hip or cool.

The obvious answers (I can hear it, with accent and cadence, in my head):

• to find the Holy Grail
• I don't know thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-----
  [ed. note: the line trailed off and upwards into the margin]

The "playing for brownie points" award goes to my favorite: "to reach node v of graph G".

This post's theme word is manumit, "to free from slavery." A valuable life's work is to maximally manumit.

What is the largest number you have counted to out loud?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. (This question was student-generated, too!)

What is the largest number you have counted to out loud?

Usual answers: 100, 101, 125, 200, 400, 999. "I don't remember."

Unusual answers: 7, 20, 42, 54, 117, 267, 723. Why stop at (1) such a small number, and (2) a non-round number?

Impressive answers: ∞, 5000, "1000 (My parents wanted to keep me distracted and I was 8.)" (note: it worked, and this student is now a math major!).

Answers I, personally, found confusing: i, -1, √115, 0, "2 grillion", 17 1/2. I'm not sure what increments you are counting in to get to -1, or i, or square roots, or fractions. Actual theoretical issues of countability (in the technical sense) come into play here.


This post's theme word is plangent, "loud and resounding," or "sad or mournful." The plangent dirge counted onwards, never ceasing, its rolling tones reverberating down the valley, but I had come to suspect that the Plinker Monks would never reach "square root of 115 bottles of beer on the wall"... (-excerpt from My Life Amongst Mathematical Entities from Thought Experiments)