2021 Website Update

Hey everyone — it’s been a while!

Just wanted to let everyone know that 2021 has been a pretty crazy year for me thus far. My running every street in Salt Lake City project got picked it by a lot of news outlets and it’s been a wild ride with interviews, on-camera filming, and articles. Additionally, I’ve also done a handful of other running projects that have garnered a lot of press as well (one particularly involving the Utah Jazz and their NBA Playoff run). Finally, I started an Instagram Account that has become semi-popular where I post about some of my zany runs as well as unique things I see in and around Salt Lake City. It’s [at]slsees on Instagram, if you are interested.

As a result, I’ve had to put a lot of plans on the back-burner but things seem to be subsiding now so I’m ready to get back into the swing of things.

Here are some of my near-term plans:

  1. I’ll make a mega-post about all the articles, maps, news stories, etc… from my recent running exploits.
  2. I’ve bought some sound equipment to better record my Youtube Videos with respect to detailing Number Sense Tricks. I posted a few and it generated a healthy response so I want to continue it.
  3. I plan on updating the database of questions for my Auto-Generating Number Sense Exams (both High School and Middle School) with the 2020-2021 problems. If you have any other practice exams from the past few years, feel free to e-mail me at:
  4. As always, if you ever run into any questions with how to solve a problem or are trying to figure out a trick, you can e-mail me at the above address as well.

Looking forward to the remainder of this year! Yay for 2021!

Hi There, It’s Been A While…

Hey y’all – just wanted to write up a quick post as it’s been a while since the last status update (you know, the whole pandemic thing…).

First off, I absolutely feel for all the high school students out there — especially the Class of 2020. My heart breaks for you guys that all the hard work and hours-and-hours of practice you put into being the best math/science competitor came to such a nondescript ending. I can’t even imagine having to go through that and the range of emotions you must have felt: disappointment, sadness, anger, regret — just to name a few, I’m sure. This past spring was not the way to end one’s high school experience and this fall is definitely no way to start college. I just wanted to personally say that I’m so sorry!

As for current high school students, from what I gathered from the UIL website is that, barring some COVID-related precautions, it’s business as usual for the 2020/2021 school year and that competitions are on schedule. However, if I’m reaching an incorrect conclusion, please leave a comment as to what exactly the plans are (I’m not a Texas school teacher or affiliated with UIL, so I’m not too aware of what the actual plans are). Similarly, it looks like there will also be TMSCA events scheduled as normally planned according to their posted calendar.

Since the competitions are resuming, I figured I’d give you an update on the status of the website. As always, I will be uploading my automated generated Middle School and High School Number Sense exams on a weekly basis. Additionally, I have received a slew of corrections from a handful of e-mailers about already-generated tests that I plan on correcting in the next month. Finally, I believe I have found a good technique to start recording individual number sense tricks videos which I will post to Youtube and cross-link them on this site.

As always, if you have any questions on how to approach problems or whether or not a trick exists for some more recent questions, you can send me an e-mail at:

Lastly, a few things that are going on in my life since my last posting:

      • Celebrated my 10-year work anniversary with Boeing
      • Received a “Meritorious Award” for a new invention that I’m currently working on getting patented
      • Spent a stint frantically trying to figure out how to work-from-home and juggle daycare closures for my 3 year-old
      • Had a second child (!!)
      • Set a goal for 2020 to run every street in Salt Lake City. After 700+ miles, I’m about 80% done — you can follow my progress on Strava here (taking a little breather the past few weeks due to the prior bullet point)
      • Started-up tutoring Algebra II and Pre-Calculus online for local area students. (I have been considering maybe offering short 30-minute Number Sense tutoring sessions using the same online approach — let me know via e-mail if that might be something worthwhile to do)

That’s about it for me! Expect a little more frequent posting now that things seem to have settled down a bit.

Number Sense Updates / February 2020

I know that all you Number Sense competitors are in the thick of your qualifying and are hungry for more practice tests! As a result, I just updated a fresh batch of four exams that you can find in the Middle School and High School practice test sections. I’ll also be a lot more regular with uploading tests on a weekly basis.

Additionally, I have recently added ~1500 questions into the High School problem database and ~800 questions into the Middle School problem database. As a result, the auto-generated practice exams should be a little bit more reflective of current exams.

Finally, thank you to EVERYONE who has sent me an e-mail! I’ve enjoyed helping a number of students with how to solve a wide variety of questions (some of which aren’t mentioned in the manual). I’ve also received several e-mails outlining errors in the exams that I plan on correcting, en masse, at the end of this year’s competition calendar.

Thanks for making this project so wildly successful!

100k Download Milestone!

Didn’t realize it, but we actually surpassed the 100k download mark on April 21, 2019 — only 6 months since we passed the 50k mark! (Above is our current download total…) Amazing!

Thank you to EVERYBODY who has made this website so successful over the past two years — so happy that I could reach a fair share of you all and (hopefully) you’ve gotten good use out of all this practice material! Math is fun!

On a related side-note, I started updating the practice test repository which you find on the sidebar. Happy competing!

Number Sense Tricks // Video Tutorials

Well I know I’ve been talking about it for a while (and at one point settled on not doing them), but I finally decided to do something about providing video tutorials that are meant to accompany the material supplied by my Number Sense Manual. Here is a quick sample video (it was literally a single-take unrehearsed screen capture — the “real-deal” instructional videos will go a lot more smoothly):

My current screen capture set-up is:

If you have any suggestions on how to better screen capture, please leave a comment on this post (note: it will need to be Mac-compatible).

I plan on having the video broken up into two parts: instruction and examples — with a minimal amount of my handwriting as possible. The videos are planned to be less than 5 minutes long each and will follow, sequentially, with the sections in my Number Sense Manual. Eventually when I revise my manual again, at each section I will provide a hyperlink to its corresponding youtube video that will further aid in the trick’s explanation.

I hope to do two to three tricks a week. Also, if you e-mail me with a question on how to do a problem, I’ll either give you .pdf containing the step-by-step instructions or a brief video. So there you go!

2018 Year-End Re-Cap + 2019 Goals

Another year down means another year re-evaluating my goals and coming up with a new list of things that I would like to accomplish this upcoming year.

To wrap up 2018 in a sentence: being a parent is hard! My daughter was one-year old for most of the year which opened up a whole batch of time constraints I never could have planned for. For one, she went from crawling around to running (and dancing!) everywhere. Just keeping up with her led me to get the majority of my 10,000 daily steps in. Pretty much anytime she wasn’t asleep  my time has been 100% devoted to her which is pretty great but not conducive to accomplishing some of the goals I had planned from last year. That’s OK though, as I think I’ve learned to manage my time better around her, so here’s to hoping that 2019 is full of personal milestones!

Professional Achievements

  • Was issued our site’s second patent and have a third one in development that (hopefully) gets written-up this year.
  • Because an IEEE Senior Member, having accumulated 10 years of experience, detailing professional growth over the last 5 years.
  • Led our radiation test team to one of the busiest years (both, in terms of schedule and revenue) since I have joined the site eight years ago.
  • Concluded a sizeable contract that involved a tremendous amount of teamwork and effort in order to get it completed on time.

Personal (+ Family) Achievements

  • Hit over 50,000 downloads of my Number Sense material in October — and just checked it earlier today and have eclipsed the 80,000 download mark (!!)
  • Completed a revision of my widely popular Number Sense manual and added several dozen pages of new material.
  • Although I feel well short of my 1,000 mile goal, I ran for 376 miles across 70 active days (my schedule, both at home and at work, got immensely busy starting in June).
  • Helped throw a successful 2-year old birthday party at our house and had a wonderful year watching my daughter grow up!
  • Had two great vacations with both sides of my family that resulted in some epic family photo sessions.

Where I Fell Short

  • Still haven’t taken the Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam (ugh!) — I’m currently re-evaluating whether I want to even try for it now or not…
  • Did not read as many books as I set out to rad. I wanted to shoot for 2 per month (24 total), but wound up reading 16. As a result, I’ve augmented my reading goals for this year.
  • Feel incredibly flat with my math reading. I did get through some books (like Paul Zeitz’s The Art and Craft of Problem Solving), but overall I was very underwhelming.
  • Although I’ve made incredible leaps with regards to time management, I can always improve (see: this year’s goals).

I took 2018 as a re-calibration of my expectations. Although my goals seem to remain roughly the same for this year, I think I’ve developed a better mindset on how to actually workup and execute them. So without further ado, here is my 2019 list:

  • Run 1,000 miles. I’m off to a good start so far: 3 weeks in and 63.0 miles down! I need to average about 2.75 miles a day which is totally do-able. I’ve signed up for the Salt Lake City marathon and have a stretch goal of completing a 100-miler by the end of the year.
  • Read 20 books. For this year, I’m going to shorten the number and focus more on quality and reading the types of books I personally find enjoyable. I’ve already rolled through Naked Statistics and am half-way through The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, so I’m off to a good start there, too.
  • Keep up better with the website. I’ll admit it, sometimes sitting down on my computer and hashing out a post — regardless of length — is a bit of a slog. For 2019, I want to write-up at least 1 post a month and not just be pigeonholed into discussing what’s happening my life. I want to actually do more projects and report back on those findings. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from my Number Sense material and I want to expand by doing short instructional videos for each of the tricks.
  • Take my scheduling to the next level. Move from effectively planning to actually executing the majority of the tasks I have planned.
  • Do one thing around the house every day. Pretty self-explanatory!

And that’s it! As usual (in order to combat the planning fallacy), I’ve made a small number of goals that I can break into accomplishable sub-pieces rather easily.

Here’s hoping that 2019 turns out to be just as productive as some of my past years!

50k Download Milestone!

Just wanted to let all the Number Sense enthusiasts who frequent this site know that you’ve surpassed the 50,000 download threshold! A year ago I couldn’t even imagine this type of activity on the website. I thought there might be some mild interest and maybe a few teams might like my Number Sense Manual, but WOW, 50,000 cumulative downloads of my material is something else!

Thank you all for making this project a success and I look forward to building off of it in the near-future!

2018 Goals // Update

In an effort to combat the planning fallacy, I went into 2018 with only a handful of goals (which are outlined at the end of my 2017 re-cap) in order to make achieving them much more likely. Now that we are about one-third done with the year, I thought I would give a status update.

Goal 1: Read 2 Books of Month. So far, I’ve kept pace with this goal and have completed 9 books. Here is a short recap with a Siskel and Ebert thumbs up/down review (note: you should be able to find all these books from your local library).

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer: A first-hand re-telling of a mid-nineties Everest disaster that claimed 8 lives when an abrupt change of weather caught several expeditions off-guard. What fascinated me most about this book was the in-depth look at the logistics of climbing Everest (from selecting the gear to navigating the  route to the ins-and-outs of high-altitude acclimation). Additionally, Krakauer approaches the retelling of the disaster in a matter-of-fact, journalistic way that leaves you in awe how any rational person would willingly choose to attempt the climb (in fact, Krakauer mentions that in order to try the climb you probably are a little crazy to begin with…). <Thumbs Up>

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks: Breakout novel of the famed — and recently deceased — neurologist Oliver Sacks. The novel itself is composed of a series of interesting medical cases detailing some of the most extreme behaviors due to brain abnormalities (either through accidents, drugs, or other measures). Each vignette is interesting on its own and most provide some sort of insight into our daily behaviors. Of particular personal interest was the story of “The Twins” who, despite their significant mental deficiencies, could calculate large prime numbers. <Thumbs  Up>

Welcome to the Club by Raquel D’Apice: A humorous look at “100 Parenting Milestones” that every parent can relate to. Ranging from the significant (“First Time You Hold Your Baby”) to the trivial (“First Time You Hold Your Baby Over Your Head and He Vomits All Over You”), each milestone is a hoot to read and, more times than not, is something that, if you are a parent, you have truly experienced. <Thumbs Up for Current Parents>

A Happy Death by Albert Camus: A precursor to Camus’s The Stranger, this book seems more ripped from a sketchbook than a finished project. Although I appreciate the parallels with my quest towards Financial Independence (after all, what could make people more happy than stripping away their dependency on money — albeit, I’d choose a better way than murder!), overall, I found the book lacking in impact. <Thumbs Down>

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris: This was surprisingly the first David Sedaris book I’ve ever read and I found it to be a delight. Similar to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this book is a collect of stories loosely centered around two autobiographical eras: Sedaris’s youth and his move to France during adulthood. Each story seems to be more hilarious than the previous (with my personal favorite being his fascination with finding the French translations of some very specific words about anatomy) and, if you like witty dialog, you’re sure to like this book. <Thumbs Up>

What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynman: I liked famed physicist’s Richard Feynman’s previous book Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman a lot so I figured I’d give this one a try. Let me just say that if you are expecting a sequel you are going to be sorely disappointed. There are some interesting stories but they are few and far between. The majority of the book deals with Feynman’s work on determining the root cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s mid-air explosion which is very long-winded and filled with pointless conversations about minutia that don’t amount to much. (Tl;dr: the O-ring became misshapen due to the low temperature at launch which led to a faulty seal). <Thumbs Down>

The Sebastopol Sketches by Leo Tolstoy: Although the Introduction was a bit of a snooze fest, the actual writings of Tolstoy chronicling the Siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War of the 1850s was surprisingly riveting. Detailing three distinct parts during the siege (December 1854, May 1855, and August 1855), Tolstoy goes from hyper-patriotism regarding the conflict to utter-despondency, questioning the whole point of the war. <Thumbs Up>

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov: Despair is probably one of Nabokov’s most straight-forward, plot-driven novel that he wrote. Centered around a bizarre case of insurance fraud, the novel is a fictional first person retelling (albeit highly biased narration) of a murder-gone-wrong. The book is pretty gripping (the planning and orchestration of the deed leaves you wondering how things could go so wrong!) and has an unusual ending. <Thumbs Up>

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov: Nabokov’s first novel is more like a short story chronicling a coincidental love triangle. What I like most about Nabokov is his inventive and descriptive language — and although his first novel possesses some of these features, it’s certainly better in later works (with my personal favorite being Ada or Ardor). <Thumbs Down -unless you are a Nabokov fanboy like myself>

Goal 2: Run 1000 miles: Definitely have fallen demonstrably short of this goal. The math works out that I should have logged about 295 miles so far, but my Strava shows I’ve only ran a total of 117 miles — a discrepancy of 178 miles! Part of this is due to my re-aggravating my groin injury earlier in the year, but it’s mostly due to my inability to find time to go out for a run. Recently, I’ve picked up the pace a little (running about 41 miles so far in April), but 1000 total miles by the end of the year might be a little out of reach.

Goal 3: Better Time Management: This is definitely not a S.M.A.R.T. Goal as it’s difficult to measure, but I feel like I’ve done a much better job this year. I keep a active note on my phone highlighting my weekly to-do list and recently every Sunday I physically sketch out the week ahead on a printed calendar that gives me a better idea of my available time for each day. I’d give myself a solid “B” grade when it came to improving my time management skills.

Goal 4 (Added): Math Practice: Came to this goal a little late to include in my year-end wrap-up post, but I wanted to become a better math test writer (either through my work with Number Sense or through other, more challenging, competitions). I’ve done a fair amount of work on improving my Number Sense Manual and have begun reviewing some math problem solving books I purchased long ago during my competition days in order to give me guidance (and inspiration!) for my own test writing. Currently, I am engrossed in Paul Zeitz’s The Art and Craft of Problem Solving which is a good book for any aspiring math competitors out there.

Well that about does it! Will check back in over the summer to detail my progress — after all, it has been shown in academic research that making public declarations of your goals (and subsequent progress reports) leads to higher probability that you will achieve them!

Number Sense Manual // Revision A

Happy to announce I’ve finally completed the revision to the Number Sense Tricks Manual I originally made a little over ten years ago. Here is the direct download link (you can also get it from my webpage here).

I cleaned up a lot of the LaTeX programming and split up each section into it’s own .tex file making it a lot easier to compile individual sections. I also made the .pdf a lot more navigable by adding referencing and a few hyperlinks to my free Middle and High School practice exams.  Additionally, I double-checked the question/answer pairing and corrected a fair number of problems. Finally, I added about two dozen more tricks that will help with 3rd and 4th column questions on more recent exams which you can find in Section 4 of the manual.

I wanted to get this version out ASAP to help students with their upcoming UIL regional/state meets. Over the summer, I plan on adding a substantial amount of practice problems to each section and doing another run through to make sure I didn’t miss any commonly tested topics. Hope this material is helpful to you!

Number Sense Manual // Update

Just wanted to let all the avid Number Sense participants know that I am (finally!) in the process of revising and editing my Number Sense Manual. I’m about halfway done with revamping the LaTeX code which, hopefully, makes it more readable (a lot has changed in 10 years!). Once I’m done with that I plan on adding a few more sections detailing the tricks that can be used to solve some of the more recent exam questions. I also want to expand the content to include popular Middle School tricks since there seems to be a lot of demand for that. I’m hoping to have an updated manual by the end of March – so stay tuned!