Getting Back Into (Mathematical) Shape

I've recently been reading a fascinating article entitled, The Mathematician's Lament. By coincidence, I also had an article about solving Boltzman's equation up in another tab. Both of them have started me thinking: back in grad school, I had to do a reasonable amount of math on a regular basis. Calculus, algebra, geometry. Nothing really difficult, but it kept me in practice.

Now, though, I don't use much of it. A lot of statistics and some discrete math, but not much else. I'd like to keep in practice, but it's tough to find a place to get interesting puzzles to play at. Googling mostly turns up stuff aimed at kids: the "make math fun!" dreck that the Lament laments. I have all my old math textbooks (especially discrete math)  Anyone have any suggestions? (feel free to pass along the link to this post to anyone who might)

Open Tabs 3

Hello again, just a quick summary of some of my more interesting open tabs:

A blog post on the economics of Star Trek. There are a lot of interesting questions, there. What is the effect on society of a near total lack of scarcity? You want something, you replicate it. In the Star Trek universe the writers had good incentives to try to find ways in which this breaks down: the need for exotic materials, large sized objects, energy budgets, etc. One of the commenters points out that Charlie Stross has not only looked into the subject as well, but came up with a very clever way of showing how different societies might treat the issue differently.

Michael Weingrad asks why there isn't a Jewish Narnia (and why there is otherwise a relative dearth of Jewish fantasy writers), and why that might be changing.

Looks like I might get to fiddle with a Pixel Qi display this fall, that's exciting. I suspect that swapping it into my Mac would be a pain, but I have a netbook with about the right size screen that I might be willing to sacrifice.

Wil Shipley's recollections from this year's TED conference. Still open because I haven't quite finished reading it, but the bit about Stephen Wolfram is what makes it stick in my head: I had occasion briefly to meet Wolfram when he gave a talk here some years back on cellular automata shortly after A New Kind of Science came out. The talk itself I remember as being somewhat... meh... but I was deeply impressed that he stayed for a good hour afterward to answer questions.

The latest entry in Steven Strogatz's New York Time math blogging series, this one on geometry.

A discussion of the Information Commons that I'm still trying to wrap my head around

... and finally, my sentence of the day, courtesy of the always-interesting Chuck Wendig:

When you’re attempting to pleasure your partner, the partner can offer feedback. “To the left.” “Faster!” “Less teeth.” “More wombat!”