Road Sign Math
- Breakfast at Kerhonkson Diner in Kerhonkson.
- Drive to Bethel, about an hour.
- Woodstock Museum and Historical Site at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
- Drive back to Accord, and found a Road Sign Math winner on the way.
- Dinner at The Egg’s Nest in High Falls.
Road Sign Math Rebooted
As you drive on I-94 East toward the Twin Cities there is a wonderful road sign that always made me smile. I saw it regularly when I would return from visiting family in North Dakota. The sign had this wonderful mathematical significance to it. 3 times 33 equals 99.
After seeing this sign for a while I kept wondering how many other mathematically significant road signs are there? And just like that the idea for Road Sign Math was born.
History
Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine I can see the history. I launched the website in February 2005 with a simple post. Initially it was a blog that I posted my signs on, but people were also welcome to send photos of their own mathematically significant signs as well. Since multiple people were playing, there needed to be some rules on how to play.
We had multiple people playing and I thought it would be fun to have a scoring system and a scoreboard for players as well as states!
I believe we got signs from all 50 states. We had a sign from the Serengeti. We had signs from most continents. In 2011 I moved the site from a blog to a wiki with the idea that folks could submit and maintain their own signs. This was all before the rise of mobile phones. When the iPhone arrived I thought it would be amazing to make an iOS app to capture road signs, but that never happened.
In 2016, after 11 years of running this site and several others, I made the decision to do some technical downsizing and turned off a number of hobby projects I had been running.
Road Sign Math was one of the sites shut down. I let the domain name expire and squatters have had the domain ever since, and still do. But the idea of Road Sign Math has never left completely…
Reboot!
In 2021 I registered the domain roadsignmath.xyz. That is an even better domain name for Road Sign Math!
I’ve had multiple sessions looking through various backups thinking about relaunching Road Sign Math in all its wonder, but I’ve got gaps in my archives. Also, the transition from blog to wiki made the archive hard to track.
On some recent road trips we’ve been grabbing some signs. And earlier this year I captured anew the Genesis (2023) sign.
I decided it was time to reboot it, not relaunch it. Start back as a simple blog with the awesome MathJax library. Just my signs. No scoring system or leaderboards. Just a fun place to share mathematically significant road signs.
Consider it my little contribution to keeping the Web weird. 😎
Vermont Road Trip Log: Day 3, Monday
Weather: Perfect.
Jump to day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 of Vermont Road Trip.
We are on a road trip and are playing Road Sign Math! Today we found a winner outside of Wurtsboro!
✅ Theme on WordPress version of Road Sign Math.
✅ Google Analytics wired up.
✅ RSS endpoints have a redirect so old-timers should see new post.
Just rebooted the Road Sign Math server — it was down for 4 days. Need to move that to WordPress!
First RUM Meeting
I attended my first Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) meeting tonight. I’ve wanted to go for a long time but the meetings seemed to always fall on days when I was typically out of town for business. It all worked out this time so I was excited to go. I’ve been on the mailing list for a long time and it’s a really good group of people.
Of particular note was my friend Dan presented a side-project he did using rex and racc (Ruby versions of lex and yacc) to create a parser and validator for math equations written in LaTeX on Road Sign Math. This was pretty cool. He hacked it up quickly and solved most of the hard problems. He got to the point so he can evaluate that 3 \times \sqrt{4} = 6 is a valid statement. It will be a nice thing to wrap into Road Sign Math 3.0 when the time is right.
I left the RUM meeting feeling a little scared though. I sat next to a kid named Chris who I can only imagine was dropped off by his Dad since I can’t imagine he was old enough to drive. He was obviously brilliant and immersed in all things Internet, Ruby, Mac and whatever else. Why scared? It’s so amazingly hard to stay on top of the things that you need to know in this world of computer geekdom. Anyway, I’m not going to dwell on that but instead continue to be involved in these sorts of activities that expose you to new thinking.
I have about a dozen of URL’s, notes and such to followup on from the meeting and am looking forward to the next one. (OmniGraffle Pro, parse tree, Gruff for Ruby, Nick Sieger, fuzz testing, Rinda)
Funny side note – I did a count of laptops in the room. 11 Mac laptops (mostly MacBook) including me (one of only 2 black ones) and a whopping 2 Wintel laptops. 🙂
Getting There
We drove yesterday for just under 14 hours to get to Denver. We had driven this route before and we both swore we did in in just over 12 hours but there seems to be no way that that could be the case. We arrived in Denver around 9pm and made our way to the Cherry Creek North area. We discovered this area when we were here on our honeymoon and really liked it. Right now we are just on a quick rest stop though, spending the night and then heading this morning to our farthest destination in New Mexico at the Star Hill Inn. Another five hours of driving, plus or minus, in for us today.
We are heading shortly to the Eggshell restaurant for breakfast and then head out of town. Yesterday’s massive bout of driving had the positive side of giving plenty of opportunity to play Road Sign Math. Amazingly, we only grabbed two valid winners, I’ll post them later. Road Sign Math is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. I hope to find a winner in each state we visit.
Road Sign Math Launched!
I’ve been dreaming up this driving game for a long time and I finally decided to launch the website! This is pure geek joy. :-) Check out Road Sign Math! It will soon be sweeping the country from coast-to-coast…