| Have you met our friend 'e'? |
[Oct. 8th, 2010|11:32 pm] |
This one may come across sounding "elitist" to some people, but it's a Rant, and this is RanTom Thoughts (mini), so there! *PBTHHH*
The following came across my IM last night (names to remain anonymous):
friend: my brother ran into the following equation to solve: e^5
friend: he had no clue what e equalled. it was not directly mentioned in the lecture or elsewhere. finally, after some discussion with the instructor, the instructor explained that they figured out what e equalled about half way into another equation that they worked on in class
friend: not the best instructor for my brother. he's had more issues with math than I have
*facepalm*
Reading that again: "not directly mentioned in the lecture or elsewhere"
*bangs head against desk*
Someone obviously didn't Google it. Or Wiki it. Or look it up on Wolfram-Alpha. Or look it up in the frickin' dictionary. Heck, you could even Google e^5 itself! (Wikipedia has a whole series of articles on e, actually.)
*tries not to hyperventilate*
Really, how does one come out of high school not even knowing that 'e' is a standard constant of some sort. You may not know the value, but you should have at least heard about it. It's one of the most basic constants in mathematics
If you're a mathematician you don't even have to use a calculator because you know ex can be defined as a series expansion that can be manipulated algebraically (Again, see Wolfram Alpha) i.e. ex=sum(xn/n!) (n=0,1,...) ex even has it's own name, it's so important! It's called the 'exponential function'. Most computer languages will have an exp() expressly to calculate it. Then there's loge (logarithm in base e), which is called the 'natural logarithm' which also gets its own special notation: 'ln', e.g. ln(e) = 1. It's used so commonly that equations that use "log" without a base explicitly indicated can often be assumed to be loge. (However, you should always check to make sure it's not log10.)
Look up "beautiful equation" on Google and you'll see at the top of the list one of the coolest equations ever: eiπ + 1 = 0 . That has all of the cool math constants there, e, π, i, 1, 0, all hanging out together like the cool kids making out behind the gym. (OK, so maybe it's more like the chess club.) (Speaking of which, I used that equation in my design for the logo for the Engineering, Physics, Math and Computer Club (Ep = mc2) at La Sierra University when I was the treasurer -- see the image above. D'Oh! I screwed up a negative sign!!! I wanted to include negative numbers somehow, so I wrote it as eiπ + 0 = -1, then went and forgot the negative sign!)
(Hrmn, I'm a little disappointed that the font LiveJournal uses to show pi, π, is different in the Rich Text editor than the final page. I had to go in and manually change the font family to something more appropriate: π vs π.)
I use e in some form almost every day at work on almost every project. Yesterday I was using it to rotate a figure in the complex plane: Rotated=eiθ*Original. A few days ago I used it while looking at the frequency components of some data. (Fourier transform? All about the e.) The day before that? We were talking about the half-life of a radioactive source -- look, there's the "exponential decay", with our friend e!
Maybe if you're not curious enough about the world to just try Google (or pay attention in class), then maybe you shouldn't really be blaming the teacher. We have such an amazing wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, and what do we use it for? Hooking up and playing WoW. I mourn for our species sometimes. |
|
|
| A story about a surprise |
[Apr. 19th, 2010|09:35 am] |
I had been telling mom that I wouldn't be able to take any paid days off since I just started my new position last week, so none of my vacation, holiday, etc benefits would kick in for 90 days. (which is true). However, I decided to take some unpaid days, but didn't tell her. So, after work Fri I went home, grabbed some clothes and left Chicago about 8PM. I did stop to sleep about 1. I was able to get to Colorado Springs before the end of visiting hours. As I'm walking down the hall I call her from my cel. I asked her what room she was in because I thought I'd give her something. I asked what she would rather have, flowers, a Teddy bear, or what was behind door #3. When she asked what was behind door #3, I walked in the room. The look on her face was completely worth it!
Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com |
|
|
| Robotics project extension? |
[Sep. 23rd, 2009|12:15 am] |
Well, they asked me tonight to continue working on the robotic vision project for 3 more months. (We apparently still have money in the account, so they decided they might as well use it to extend my contract.) Don't get me wrong, I like having more money, but I was looking forward to getting back to a "normal" work-week after next week. Although I'm excited that this gives me more time to work on the stereo camera algorithms.
Also, this gives me more money to put on taxes (ok, it makes me pay more taxes too). That's what bites about doing contract work, having to pay your own taxes.
Hopefully we have enough data/results to start writing a paper now.
|
|
|
| I've read this story before.... |
[May. 6th, 2009|10:11 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | humor | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  anxious | ] |
It's funny, security at Argonne has stopped touching our badges, a security measure that was implemented after 9/11. Due to the Swine Flue (H1N1) they now don't touch the badge, but ask you to turn it over for them. At the time, I thought that was a bit of overreaction, but now I'm not so sure.
I read a report tonight that a man was gunned down at a gas station after a robbery spree
If I hear about a fuel depot blowing up, I'm going to seriously start freaking out. I've read this story It doesn't turn out well for the fat nerd with the unrequited love... |
|
|
| Discover Card is evil... |
[Feb. 11th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
So, Discover sends out a message about change of services effective in May.
* If you pay late or otherwise fail to comply with any other terms of the “Default Rate” section of your Cardmember Agreement, the rate that will apply will now be a variable rate. We are also making other changes to the “Default Rate” section.
* We are changing the day of the month your payment is due. Your Payment Due Date will be earlier, but it will still continue to be at least 25 days from the Closing Date shown on your statement.
So, basically, "We're changing everyone's interest rate if they make one late payment... and oh yeah, we're making everyone's due date earlier at the same time so that we can catch everyone who pays automatically at a certain date and slam them with new larger rates."
"Oh, and by the way, we're now calculating interest daily, so no more 'free' transactions." |
|
|
| Thoughts on Black Friday |
[Nov. 30th, 2008|02:40 pm] |
In general I don't like shopping. Oh, it's fun to get stuff you want and all, but it's so much easier to do it online, where you get the fun without the hassle.
So, with that in mind, I've never been big on the whole Black Friday thing. Sure, I'll go out because I happen to have the day off and all (which is how the whole mess started in the first place), but I never went because there were sales. Until this year. This year I went out to try to pick up a Lego set that was on sale at Target. (Side note: I went to 3 stores in the area and none of them had the set, so it was a wasted attempt.)
When you sit back and just watch the people around you, you notice that all sense of common civility is out the door during the "doorbuster" sales. I started to wonder, "Does the word 'sale' bring out the moron in people or the jerk?" Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Is the person who parks their SUV diagonally so that no one can use the neighboring parking spot a parking moron, or are they being a jerk? Is the person who stops their cart beside another cart, when there's clearly only room for two carts wide in an aisle, being rude or ignorant? So, I posed this question to some of my US friends. The general concensus seems to be "jerk" over "moron". I now pose the question to the rest of you. I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt that they're not doing it with intent (i.e. "moron gene" being expressed), but the whole notion of the day seems to be about greed, which would argue for the "jerk gene".
So who's fault is it? Granted, there is responsibility with the customers for (not) controlling their own actions, but it seems that the stores want this type of behavior. They intentionally make "doorbuster" sales to try to drag everyone to their store instead of the others. If you want a certain deal, you are forced to go to their store during certain hours to get it. They don't even allow you an entire day anymore! This leads to more stress on the consumer, increasing the fight or flight reflexes. If they had this deal, say, for the whole weekend or the whole shopping season, I'll still go to their store, but they force this mad rush to try to force people to buy everything in their store rather than shopping around.
So, they intentionally use mass psychology to rouse this frenzy just to line their bank accounts.
Is it any wonder then when people die as a result? I agree that the specific mob should be accountable, but that just doesn't go far enough IMO. I'm all for capitalism, but greed corrupts. The only way to prevent something like this is to make it economically unviable for the stores. Sure, people can look down their noses at the WalMart shoppers of the world and say it wouldn't happen with people from their circles, blablabla, but the fact still remains that the executives intentionally caused this frenzy. Every one of those other stores would have been thrilled to have the WalMart crowds busting their doors. So how do we make the 'frenzy' unviable? I say hold every store that used the "doorbuster sale" paradigm accountable for this death and fine them all! Maybe we can use the money to pay back some of the economic bailout.
(Maybe then I can get up after 10AM and still get my discount ;) )
But we're doomed anyways. |
|
|
| Back-story |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|11:17 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | humor | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  silly | ] |
A friend is creating a recipe blog and was asking for names. This is the back-story for one of the names I suggested. Everyone else can ignore it.
Jane Austen has fallen on hard times ever since her books went public domain. (Alas, she no longer receives royalties.) She tried to write a sequel to Sense and Sensibility called Ostentatious, but, regretfully, the publishers have all rejected it, saying they do not believe it will sell due to the economic downturn. So, Austen now works as the official food tester for Obama, and since a good name shouldn't go to waste, she now brings us the food blog: AustenTasteThis!. In it she reviews the dishes she tests, all in her Austenesque style, of course. Over the years, we find out the, um, politics of the White House kitchen.
The White House's Head Chef is an aging man, whose four daughters assume most of the actual chefly duties these days while he regales the staff with stories of past dignitaries he's served. He's mostly harmless and can safely be ignored for the rest of the blog except when he occasionally offers advice to one of the daughters to follow her heart or some-such.
The eldest daughter usually only serves bland vegan dishes. Once in a while the dish will surprise you with the marvelous taste, but only if you close your eyes first.
The youngest daughter is a bit impetuous and refuses to make anything but desserts.
The third daughter once received an award for a dish she made, and ever since only makes that one dish. When people hazard to ask her for something new, she haughtily points at her award and stomps off, complaining that everyone is out to get poor little her. It is quite a pity, really, since she was indeed a marvelous chef at one time.
The final daughter, let's call her E, is the only one that makes the dishes that the President actually requests. However, being a dutiful middle child, she lets the entire family take the credit. Her one quirk is that she only ever creates American dishes. (It is, after all, the American White House.) All is going smoothly for her in the daily routine of the kitchens ...
... until one day a French Chef arrives on the staff. At first E despises him, but his supreme manliness and his admittedly delicious meals eventually win her over in year 4 of the blog.
|
|
|
| On Academic 'Freedom' |
[Oct. 22nd, 2008|01:34 pm] |
 I just watched the "documentary" Expelled: No intelligence Allowed now that it's out on DVD, etc. We'll ignore the ad hominem attacks and the blatant emotional rather than logical arguments used. We'll also ignore the plain ignorant logic used*. I just want to discuss the notion of Academic Freedom.
The movie seems to make the claim that Academic Freedom should mean that you can say anything you want to say in a classroom and the university should just smile and move on. This is an absurd notion. One doesn't have the 'freedom' to say "Class, Jeremy on the front row is made out of cheddar cheese. Let's all go get some crackers and wine and eat Jeremy for lunch!"
If you were the dean of an Oil Painting department (not to be confused with the Water Color department, which has a fine program!), you would hire people to teach oil painting classes. If a person applied for a temporary job to teach "Painting Chiaroscuro in Oils" and they spent much of the time telling students not to paint in oils, but to paint in water colors instead, you would be well within your rights to not hire them again! Similarly, if you hire someone to teach an evolution class, and they teach about Intelligent Design, you are well within your rights to let them go. Academic freedom has its limits. One can't teach about frog dissection in a comparative religion class either. (Or maybe one can, religions are a little vague that way. One could possibly get away with making a sheep bleed to death on an altar or killing everyone in the next university down the road when discussing the Judeo-Christian tradition, but many Christians tend to stick their fingers in their ears and go 'lalala' when reading parts of the Old Testament.)
Anyways, this is a mini-Rant, so I'll cut it short there. I just had to get that off my chest.
*"Darwinism wasn't a sufficient cause, but was a necessary cause for the Holocaust"? How do they explain the Inquisition? Slavery? The Crusades? All before Darwin even lived. Basically any time in human history where there has been an "Us" and a "Them", people have latched onto any argument that made "Them" inferior to "Us". "Darwinism" was not necessary at all! Perhaps convenient, but by no means necessary.
|
|
|
| Elections Redux |
[Sep. 26th, 2008|10:35 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | politics | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | enthralled | ] |
OK, let me correct some misconceptions about my previous post re. McCain. I should have used the word 'shrewd' instead of 'smart' in the title. Smart does seem to imply that I agree with him, which is not the message I was trying to get across. I was trying to say that the two things he did that day were incredibly smart for his campaign.
I still stand by that assessment. Think about it for a moment. Obama's acceptance speech could have been one of the most memorable convention speeches in history, but 24 hours later, no one was talking about it. In mentioning one name, McCain brought all of the national attention onto himself. (Coupled with the relative weakness of Obama's speech compared to earlier ones -- if you wanted something for posterity, switching to go on the attack against McCain in the convention speech was poor timing IMO.) Saying that, I don't think McCain's choice was a wise choice for the nation, but again, it gave him a fighting chance in the public opinion polls. Weeks later, we're still talking about Palin/McCain and not 'whoever-it-was-that-Obama-picked' or about 'whatever-it-was-that-Obama-mentioned-in-his-speech'.
In the responses since the announcement, many women have complained about McCain's audacity in thinking they would vote a certain way because a candidate had similar plumbing. (This critique has been brought against my previous post as well.) The question I have for them is, is there anything McCain could have done to make them vote for him? In most cases, I bet, the answer is 'no', ergo, the move wasn't targeted at them, but at the women who would vote with their chromosomes. I'm not denigrating women here. I'm saying that a large percentage of the population, regardless of sex, votes emotionally rather than intellectually. (I'm not saying here that women are more emotional than men either, so don't go there.)
This is something that Democrats haven't seemed to grasp, but which the Republicans have used to win the past two elections. Most academics are Democrats, so, conversely, a large percentage of the (vocal) Democrats are academics. I bring this up because we (academics) seem to have forgotten that the largest parts of this country are not academics. Emotional thinking plays a larger part in most people than critical thinking. I posit that this is evolution's handiwork. The person who thinks with their loins is spreading more offspring than the one who spends time weighing the relative values of Potential Mate X vs Potential Mate Y. In the terms of candidates, the Guy You Can Have a Beer With gets more votes than the Elitist Intellectual Who Drinks Tea Instead of Coffee... (Yes, I know it should be 'with whom', etc.) ... and the democrats sit back and are dumbfounded about why they lost the election. I'm not saying that the Democratic intelligentsia should start looking for their own Beer Guzzlers instead of Tea Drinkers, I'm just saying that they should stop assuming that others think the same way they do. Insulting (or ignoring) someone for voting with their emotions is not going to win the election for you.
A couple of people have read into my post that I was voting for Obama because he was black and some thought I was going to vote for McCain just because Palin was a woman. Wow. I'm not sure where those came from, but no. The issues of privacy, torture, and foreign relations are big ones for me. If the Bush administration hadn't taken us so far from what I think is 'sane', I might be more inclined to give the Republican candidate a chance. The religion aspect, yes, that does affect me emotionally as an atheist, but I can overlook that as I would hope a Christian could overlook it in an atheist candidate, namely, Church and State are (supposed to be) separate in the US. (However, that said, Palin is on the record as wanting to take a sledge-hammer to the wall of separation on many issues. She's a little scary IMO. Obama's pro-evolution stance is much more heartening to me.) The whole race/gender thing was largely mentioned because no matter who wins, there will be someone in office who isn't a White Male for once, which will be something students of the future will have to memorize in their history classes. It will be cool to say "I was there!")
Speaking of elections and history, people often look back at Nixon with a degree of loathing today, but it's interesting to note that he arguably won with the largest landslide in history. (If you look at it by fraction of votes needed to switch the outcome, he was in 3rd after Roosevelt and Harding.) One can argue that the Watergate shenanigans were responsible for a portion of that. However, I think it's interesting that he probably would have still won quite handsomely without the whole Watergate thing. It's a pity that his insecurities led him to ruining his reputation and career, and put such a black mark on American politics.
|
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
tometheus's journal
optimistic
annoyed