Wednesday, August 29, 2007
14:49
2*7:7*7
3*3*7*23
Today they had the big white tent set up with all the campus organizations. I spent a couple of hours helping hand out stuff at the Crossroads Christian Fellowship table, then taking boxes back to the church office. I looked for the math club table and didn't see it if it was there.
I broke my 4x4x4 Rubic's Cube. One of the face pieces snapped, and without it the rest won't hold together. I'm fairly sure it wasn't built as well as the smaller one, or maybe the larger size is harder to make sturdy, because I definitely didn't use it as much.
Lots of things going on Friday. There's a math department get-together, followed by a movie and game night with the Crossroads crowd. I probably won't make it to Randy's, but it's fantasy football draft night there anyway.
3*3*7*23
Today they had the big white tent set up with all the campus organizations. I spent a couple of hours helping hand out stuff at the Crossroads Christian Fellowship table, then taking boxes back to the church office. I looked for the math club table and didn't see it if it was there.
I broke my 4x4x4 Rubic's Cube. One of the face pieces snapped, and without it the rest won't hold together. I'm fairly sure it wasn't built as well as the smaller one, or maybe the larger size is harder to make sturdy, because I definitely didn't use it as much.
Lots of things going on Friday. There's a math department get-together, followed by a movie and game night with the Crossroads crowd. I probably won't make it to Randy's, but it's fantasy football draft night there anyway.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
10:57
7*151
The reports of my abduction by illegal aliens were slightly exaggerated.
There have been some changes to the sidebar; mostly I've removed inactive blogs and added some new comics. Making my own comic strip has increased my interest in looking at other people's.
I find it entertaining the way one can cause a math professor to break stride in his lecture simply by pointing out some real-world condition that relates to the problem. Today in differential equations we were looking at a simple population growth model. At some point we had the equation ax(x-1) = 0, and came to the conclusion that x = 0 or x = 1. The professor asked what we were assuming for this conclusion, and the answer was that a <> 0. I pointed out that this would imply a static population, which doesn't happen. It took him a minute to figure out what I was saying, then he replied with something like, "Oh, that's true for populations in real life, but we're considering an ideal situation." These ideal creatures, which can sometimes have constant populations, are presumably identical and spherical.
The reports of my abduction by illegal aliens were slightly exaggerated.
There have been some changes to the sidebar; mostly I've removed inactive blogs and added some new comics. Making my own comic strip has increased my interest in looking at other people's.
I find it entertaining the way one can cause a math professor to break stride in his lecture simply by pointing out some real-world condition that relates to the problem. Today in differential equations we were looking at a simple population growth model. At some point we had the equation ax(x-1) = 0, and came to the conclusion that x = 0 or x = 1. The professor asked what we were assuming for this conclusion, and the answer was that a <> 0. I pointed out that this would imply a static population, which doesn't happen. It took him a minute to figure out what I was saying, then he replied with something like, "Oh, that's true for populations in real life, but we're considering an ideal situation." These ideal creatures, which can sometimes have constant populations, are presumably identical and spherical.
