pg 161 meme

Snagged from mom; here's the fifth sentence on page 161 of the book nearest to me:

"Evaluate the determinants of the following matrices (i) using the first row (ii) using the "diagonals" method."

Hmm, not very interesting. Ah well. Would that linear algebra was that easy these days.

This week was kinda unpleasant academically, but really good otherwise. Had tests/quizzes in all my classes except philosophy, and had a writing assignment thing on Aristotle's De Anima due in that. Today was an exam in stats and a quiz in partials; both of which I think went well, but it's hard to tell until I get them back Monday. I'm quite sure I didn't butcher either of them, though, so that's nice.

There was a test in my Geography of Disasters class that just doesn't bear mentioning; if the sort of stuff on the test was really what he considers important about the material we've covered, then I absolutely don't feel bad about working on other homework through those class periods. It was just...wow. He had had us all (as an assignment) email him five possible test questions, and their answers. He then compiled the test using almost entirely these questions, and believe me when I tell you it showed. That was on Tuesday, and I was absurdly glad that that class was furloughed Thursday. Gah. What's incredibly depressing about whole thing is it's such an awesome idea for a class, and I really want to know about it. Grr...

Oh, and I (along with everyone else I know) failed our second linear algebra quiz. So there's that.

Soooo, it wasn't a great week as far as school went. But! All was not lost. The bf and I were able to hang out a lot, which was marvelous. Thursday was particularly fun, since I had 2/3 classes furloughed. I know on an intellectual level that furloughs are bad things that are stunting an important time in my education, but seriously? It's really hard to be disdainful of extra time to get some done. But yeah. Hanging out this week was fun, and we're headed to Spaghetti Factory tomorrow for a bit of a break. Exciting! So it's been a happy week there :)

That's pretty much all that's going on here. The AC is broken in the big room where we have our step class, which is...unfortunate. I've been spending a lot of time up in the math tutor lab, doing work, killing time, and helping out when they're busy. I got to teach a CE major IBP the other day- that was really rewarding. It's supposed to be 100F again this week up here, which, like the room's AC being broken, seems to be lacking in a certain amount of good fortune. I like grocery shopping with company. We had the first math club pizza night of the semester on Monday, and it went really well (I may mainly think so because I got to cuddle a baby during it). I made tortilla chips this evening, and had them for dinner. I'm looking forward to House starting on Monday.

Aaaand, I'm quite tired (long week!) so off to bed with me. Everyone have a good weekend!

Cooking, card games. and quizzes (and the immortality and pre-existence of the human soul) Oh My!

Have been making food the last couple of days. It was starting to get necessary- I really don't feel like cooking, most of the time when I get home from classes, and it's easy to just be able to yank something out of the fridge or freezer and shove it in the microwave. That said, I'm not yet ready to utilize Spencer's method, which is to just buy hot pockets en masse and live off those for weeks at a time. So! Chilli beans and rice it is.


I actually already had a bit of leftover rice, so I made the beans last night and ate them to today after step with the last of that rice. Then made new rice while I ate my dinner!





Food! So now I have about half of each in the fridge and freezer, respectively. That should keep me going for a while. Also, I'm almost halfway done with my 25 lb bag of rice. (I typed bog rice there first. That's not what I meant.)

So there's that. Other than cooking, it's mostly just been classes and homework out here, with some fun game nights with friends in between to break it up. Beer pong ftw! Munchkin, Settlers of Catan, and San Juan have all been introduced to me in the last couple of weeks, and there is the possibility of D&D this weekend. We will see. As I wrote to a friend of mine earlier, "I think when peoples' four-day-weekend plans involve a Risk marathon, there's really no j/k needed when referring to them no lives." And it's true.

We had a linear quiz on Tuesday that I thought went better than it actually did. That said, I did better than the four people that sit around me, and there are only 11 of us in the class. And while that's nice and all, it doesn't really do much for my 13/20. Sigh. Well, I think he drops our lowest quiz grade, so this'll just have to be my one fail!grade for the semester, y/y?

And at any rate, he only assigned us 13 more proofs to do over the long weekend. Le sigh. Also, while I'm complaining about him, he let us out ten minutes late today. So there.

As for soul statuses, ( I always think that 'status' should have a better plural form. Stati?) medieval philosophy was really cool today. Not that it isn't usually, because it is. Pretty much made of awesome. And there's no one thing about it that makes it great, just the overall effect- enthusiastic professor, challenging subject matter, educated/intelligent classmates that care about this stuff and really want to understand everything about it, an atmosphere where questions and comments are encouraged.

And the fact that the material is cool is just icing. We spent our 75 minutes today studying a brief bit out of Plato's dialogue Phaedo. I'd read the assigned bit beforehand, so I was able to follow along without having to scramble for notes. So. Much. Fun. As we went through the arguments presented, we got to pick at them and discuss them, and argue about their soundness and which conclusions Plato might have been assuming. (Bad!Plato!)

Aaaaanyway. Take home message? Linear algebra bad, philosophy good, food good, college furloughs technically bad but really? Good. Non-slanty bathtubs bad, geeky world domination games good.

Sleep, good.

Almost done with week one...

I really love muscle memory. I haven't taken step in almost a year now, but I didn't even have to think today before my body fell back into the patterns we were doing. Which, okay yeah, were the most basic intro patterns. But! It required very little attention and went well. Unlike the abs part of the class, which was a sharp reminder of just how little ab work I've done in the last six months.

But anyway. Muscle memory is fun. Math classes not so much. No, I lie. The classes are kinda fun. Even abstract linear algebra, which is a TTR long class, is interesting and fun to be in. It's just, you know, the mass quantities of homework (Proofs! Many of them!) and the frighteningly impending tests/quizzes that aren't cool. For example, here are some of my recent notes:


Linear notes. It should be taken into account that we're all learning the really weird notation as he's scrawling it across the board.


Diff notes. Partial differentials this semester! More difficult than I was anticipating, to be honest.


Stats notes. Very easy class, conceptually. And the math isn't
tricky either. Just a lot of homework on with which to be getting.

Why my life has to be consumed with things like that, rather than things like like this:





It's beyond my understanding. Truly.

But mostly, I'm just complaining. After all, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it (Fred). I asked a girlfriend to day, as we sat pounding our heads against a linear proof, whay we chose to be math majors, again? After all, there are apparently majors where you can graduate in four years with your bachelors, and still go out and like, party every night. I have heard stories of such things. It makes me think I'm doing something wrong here. (Not the not partying, which I'm happy with. But I bet these drunken, hypothetical (business!) students have time for adequate sleep too. Jerks.)

At any rate, she told me we were math majors because we're crazy. So at least there's (an explicitly defined) madness to the madness.

My 'I Don't Have to Run' Day

Stew came out fantastic. Meat just fell apart, which was what I was hoping for but not expecting. I'd cut the potatoes into smaller hunks next time, though; they cooked through fine, but they were too big to eat without breaking them up with the spoon. Also, I'm hoping if I make a few of them quite small, they'll cook down and thicken it a bit; it was a little thinner than ideal.



Still, it tasted wonderful, the carrots cooked perfectly, and the meat turned out much better than I'd expected, having read about tough the cut it. Definitely something I'll make again. It made enough for me to have two bowls last night, plus a tupperware full for today. It was a little oily, but I was able to skim the leftovers this morning, after they'd been in the fridge overnight. Overall, though? Success!





Spence was napping when I went to take the pics, though, so these ones are from my phone. They're...a little sad, comparatively. Ah well.

Meanwhile, back in Chico, it's raining again. Still. More. I walked to campus to meet up with a friend to study for tomorrow's linear algebra test (which? not going to be fun) but she gave me a lift back (after we hit taco bell. starving mathematicians in training gotta eat). I have to run over to the student admin building tomorrow to get some transcripts ordered to send to the REU campuses that require official transcripts. And... it's supposed to rain all of tomorrow, too. Sigh.

On a lighter note, it's that time again. Yes, time for New Words Teddy Has Learned In College (the parent-friendly edition). Up today we have:

Peripatetic

Philippic

and

Rebarbative

I was going to try to go with all words that started with P, but rebarbative was too good.

Right. Words delivered, my work here is done. *Teddy wanders off to eat stew*

Day is done, gone the sun...

Right, first day of the semester finished. It was fun, if somewhat overwhelming; five straight classes didn't leave a whole lot of time to digest information. Still, everything went smoothly.

Human Geography was first. The teacher was very upset with people who mispronounced their French surnames. ("No, are you sure that's the way you say it? I'm pretty sure that's wrong...") As he went through the roster, he asked everyone where they were from (I said San Jose, just to make things easier on everyone) and put markers up on a google map he had pulled up on the screen. One of the girls was from Hemet; when asked "What you got down there in Hemet?" she immediately, unhesitatingly replied, "Old people. Lots of old people." After everyone had a little marker for there point of origin up on the map, he gave us our first hw assignment (answer some questions from GG&S and some about ourselves) and sent us on our merry way. Very friendly bloke. Kinda stoned-seeming. Never mind.

Next was macro (conveniently, just down the hall). He went over the syllabus, explained to us that textbooks are very expensive (thanks dude), and that we could actually buy used off the internet either of the two previous editions of the text instead of the $143 new one from the student bookstore, since apparently all they'd changed was the cover and the order of two of the chapters. To which I said, "Okay!" and bought off amazon for 20 bucks once I got home. I still have the new one from the bookstore, but as soon as the old one arrives in the post, I'll just return it for the full refund.

Prof then carried on to explain why the economy had tanked. That was fun. He drew really good line graphs up on the board. I think that math profs could take lessons in accurate-graph-drawing-theory-and-practice from this guy. Crowded classroom, but that'll work it self out in the next couple of weeks.

Then there was back-to-back math classes. Things had been changed since I'd last printed out my schedule, so instead of changing rooms, I got to stay in the same room with the same prof for DFQs and algebra. Prof seems like a nice guy. Quite funny. Accent, though very notably Russian, is comprehensible. No homework collected for either class, though it will be assigned; in fact, he handed out a algebra/trig review sheet so that we could all dredge ln and exponent rules out of the far corners of our brains. All of his tests (though not his quizzes) are entirely open book/notes/calculator. Which worries me a little, about how hard the problems will be, but I think (hope) it's more set up that way so as to not stress memorization, which was a problem I had in calc (stupid formulas for stupid shell/washer/disk methods...).

The DFQs class was totally full (about 40 people), with 2 people waiting to get in. However, later talking to a friend of mine in a different prof's section of DFQs, I learned that there are twenty-two people on the waiting list for that section. Dunno why. Pretty nuts, though.

Algebra is a smaller class, mainly because it's not required by as many (if any at all, I'm a little confused on this point) of the engineering majors; I think there are about 26-28 people in there. The male to female ratio in there is a lot more skewed than in DFQs too, at about 4/1 (this is not, it should be noted at least, as bad as physics last semester). There was no homework at all assigned for this class, mainly because very few people have the book yet; apparently the bookstore only ordered 25 copies for two sections of at least 25 each. So yeah, I'm glad I bought mine online, and even more glad that it came today. I was very excited. It's a very pretty book. Especially when I got it for $50 dollars instead of $114. *Teddy grins*

Last up was micro. Another full classroom, another syllabus. He spent most of the time talking about how useful the class/economics in general would be. As Dad pointed out later, we were already in the class; he didn't really need to keep trying to sell us on it. Ah well; he at least had a really nice calendar in the syllabus, with all of readings and tests/quizzes lined up. I approve.

A free hour followed micro, during which I started copying all the important dates into my planner, and then dance. Or really, the first-day-calling-of-the-roll, and then she let us go with instructions to read the syllabus online. So, that was that. I tihnk it'll be a good time.

But now, bed for me. First (only!) class tomorrow is History of American Music at 9:30, but I'm headed to the library afterwards to get the DFQ and geography homework done. Mmm, library...

It's the (hopefully not) final countdown...

And...we're back. Finals did end, Christmas break was had and enjoyed by all, and now it's just about back to the old grind. But with all new classes for our (whereby I mean my) tagging pleasure!

Right. So. Two more days. I'm really hoping my linear algebra book comes today, though at this point, it's not looking good. Dang it. That's the only one I ordered online (saving 60 dollars!) and it would be depressing to have to start out the semester a book short. Worse case scenario, I go buy a copy from the bookstore, and then return it when mine comes. Hopefully it doesn't come to that. Fortunately, I know people in the class who'll (probably) be willing to share until mine arrives, for homework purposes.

In addition to linear algebra, I'm also taking Elementary Differential Equations (shortened to Mom's favorite acronym, DFQs, pronounced diffy-cues), History of American Music, Human Geography (for which we're reading the book Guns, Germs, and Steel), intro microeconomics, intro macroeconomics, and aerobic dance. Six classes (plus dance, which doesn't really count), 20 units, and...no more GE! After this semester, I mean. Except my required upper division theme, but that's only three classes, and I think I can meld most of it into requirements for either the math or econ major.

Hey, you like the new colourscheme? I decided the pink was getting just a bit...pink. I quite like this blue, and the new header is cool.

In other news. Spencer's computer decided to stop making sounds for him this afternoon. Headphones still work, so he's determined it's the speakers that are built into the monitor. As such, he's wandered off to K Mart to buy some external (and hopefully cheap) speakers. I offered to unhook my speaker to let him test his hypothesis, but he declined. Ah well: his time and money, I suppose.

Ack, and now Mom's distracted me into playing on myreads. Dang it. Well, that's all from me, then.