A Brag, or Two

Back to the "53-week blogging challenge." Today's prompt is "Let Me Brag a Minute."

So I thought about bragging about my nine books (soon to be ten), then decided not to.

When I was in college I was in an advanced calculus class. And the instructor said he was going to give us a problem to work on. He

A capsule

wanted us to design a structure with a cylindrical middle and hemispherical ends. Sort of like a medicine capsule. He wanted us to minimize the cost of the materials and he gave us the cost of the cylindrical material and the hemispherical material. I don't remember the details. About three seconds after he did all that, I said, "The cheapest structure is a sphere."

He said, "What?"

I said, "The cheapest structure is a sphere."

He said, "No, it's more complicated than that."

I said, "No, it's not."

He didn't respond.

But the next day he changed the assignment, making it more complicated and so that the cheapest structure was not just a sphere.

P.S.: Today is the 37th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. That would make an interesting blog post since I lived about 150 miles away from the volcano.