Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Probability, Permutations, and Danica McKellar


I've noticed something interesting. I did the math, and without a doubt the most popular post on my blog is the one I did about Danica McKellar's book about math, Math Doesn't Suck.

While I'd love to believe this popularity is due to my wonderful way with words and the overwhelming popularity of binomials, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that McKellar remains an attractive young woman whose legions of fans still think of her as the nice, cute "girl next door" she played in The Wonder Years all those years ago. That the image of her in front of the blackboard, which I borrowed for my blog, pops up on the second Google-images page doesn't hurt my page counts either. But again, that has more to do with her fans looking for her than my using the image; my goal in this particular matter is to promote reading and math.

So I posted a comment on my own blog posting in which I invite people to leave a comment that I'll pass along.

I don't know McKellar, but I'm willing to pass along any messages -- correction, any tactful messages (i.e., I refuse to relay anything sexual or anything else that I suspect she'd consider rude) -- that come to me through this blog. The rude garbage I'll ignore and not post. What do I get out of it? Nothing. But I'd like to see my traffic flow increase, and from what I can tell, Danica McKellar is bloggable gold. And I suspect she can calculate the various probability statements and permutations for why that is true. My kingdom for non-Euclidean geometry!

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