Victor Khaze.com

You know, sometimes I just LOVE taking the usual understanding of things and turning them on their heads. When my sister read it, she wouldn’t speak to me for at least a few days. Here is my analysis on the classic children’s tale, “Hanzel and Gretel.”

Prelude:

In spring of 2010, I took Math 131, called “Math Ideas”. The class was aimed at students working towards majors in the arts program; for me, it was my BS in Journalism (insert joke here). In this class, we never really did any math. The focus of the class was aimed more at the history and cultural implications of mathematics. I did NOT like doing math, so I loved this class. The final project was to write an essay, make a poster board, and give an oral presentation on a real world application of math. I was nervous at first, but as soon as I figured out what I was going to discuss, I was as excited as a virgin in a brothel.

“Math and Video Games” was my attempt at bridging the gap between the familiar and the unknown for an audience where mathematics was definitely unknown, if not scary.

Read More

Prelude:
Back in… I think it was the fall of 2008 or spring of 2009, my English class was given the assignment of writing a critical response to “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”. I happen to be good at writing essays quickly and I can usually knock out a five or six page essay in a few hours without remembering what I wrote a week later. But, after reading this article, I was so pissed off by what this guy was saying that I decided to take my time and tear him apart paragraph by paragraph. It took a week to write and ended up being too long to submit. I pared it down to the maximum of ten pages (double spaced), and now I’m posting it here, two years later.

I haven’t re-read it in a while, but once I do, I’m sure I’ll make a revision or two, at which point I’ll either update this post, or make a new post with the update version. Until then, here is the original. Enjoy.

Read More