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Faithful readers, and likely anyone with more insight than the average sunflower ( Helianthus annuus - the official flower of the State of Kansas in addition to the Legions of the Light) will object that (1) making one number (the geometry score) stand for a whole school and all the students in it is absurd, even for a statistician (2) closing schools and firing teachers will have a terrible impact on Butte County's economy (3) as it turns out, Butte County is not atypical of American counties so this strategy, if scaled up, will crater a goodly number of the not very united States of America. As it happens, ALL sunflowers are quite a bit more intelligent than one might assume at first glance. Sunflowers already understand how to convert solar energy (and water and soil and air) into more sunflowers and look good while they are doing it. No wilting violets they, sunflowers extract toxic ingredients like lead and arsenic from soil - there has been a massive program to plant sunflowers throughout areas impacted by Chernobyl. In geometry there is a general class of curves known as Archimedean spirals. In particular, the Fermat or parabolic spiral is given by the polar equation r² = a² θ where r is a radius and theta is an angle. Often sunflowers are made up of two sets of spirals: 34 in one direction and 55 in the other. This provides a very efficient packing of the sunflower seeds. With tongue firmly in cheek, we hypothesize that the ultimate collapse of Mayan civilization was not due to inter-urban wars or Spanish tourists or even allowing a plant once native to Central America to spread north and south to competing empires. Rather, it was the apparent failure of Mayan mathematicians to realize the intrinsic complexities of sunflowers. |
