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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.

Comments:
Who's teaching DiffEq this year? And how many aliens can dance on the edge of a sword? And how is a navy pound different from an army pound? (Word verification nvylb)
 
Yu Chen.

I can't type it all out; it's a transcendental number. But I will tell you it has some 4's in it.

Navy pounds float.
 
Awww... it doesn't have a standardized representation? Is it Pi^e by any chance?

And British pounds?
 
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