A fairly uneventful day. Dale and I went to Tumaini to teach. The kids and Carrie to the "zoo". You will have to read Annica's blog on the zoo over on Stiles Sabbatical Blog. All I can say is that Annica has a story behind her cool sunglasses that few people can claim.
My faith in the University was reborn when I discovered my second year students diligently working on their Discrete Math homework and having a class meeting. The cohort of 2nd and 3rd year students meet often to iron out questions and insure that they all understand the courses (and the professors, I suspect). I was able to tell the 2nd years that I would be on campus all day on Thursday to give them whatever help they needed in Problem Set 1.
One of the problems is to put into math terms the following challenge: You have 12 coins of which 11 are identical and 1 is a counterfeit. The counterfeit weighs less than the others. With a balance scale (the one that justice is holding in her hand on currencies, etc) and three weighings, determine which is the bogus coin. Here is a hint: the second weighing is the tricky one.
OK so I met with my Bachelors Thesis group and the numbers have swelled to at least 40 in a tiny little lab (I will get pictures soon). We discussed a host of problems that are caused by, could be solved by or might be solved by Information Technology. I told them there would be a prize for the best idea and the funniest idea. One student talked about access to on-line government, health care and services -- he won the Snickers. Another student suggested using the computer to keep track of his dates with girls. He won the Mars bar. The produced many good ideas (some of which amazed me, like traffic reporting -- in Iringa?) and I am going over their suggestions now. Their next task will be to take three of their suggestions and flush out the idea with a paragraph or two describing the problem.
Dinner and a game of Jinga was uneventful and very satisfying. When the Stiles went back to their apartment, the power was off. They had run out of kilowatt-hours on their meter. So back they trekked with their head-lights a blazing to watch a movie and work on e-mails here. Good thing we have two apartments so that we can use one as a lifeboat when the other sinks. Someone will have to go to the power company on Wednesday and deposit more money for the meter. We will have to learn how to read the meter and determine when the power will be going out!
Just about ready to turn in, but we have an interesting meteorological phenomenon here this evening (OK it took me a couple tries to get those words spelled correctly). We have a mass of warm air over the top of us and the smoke and haze from the wind is staying close to the ground. This is a classic inversion where the air near the ground cannot mix with the air above. The visibility is under 2 miles (guessing from the hills we can no longer see) and the air smells of smoke. Smoke is generated from many cooking fires around the city. Once the wind let up (about 10 PM) the smoke just sort of hangs over us. Forecast is for 40% chance of thundershowers for Thursday and Friday. We still have had only one rain shower since arriving on September 18.
Time for my beauty sleep so enjoy Tuesday (we already have and it was fun). Good night.
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