Penn & Teller collecting signatures on a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide - at WorldFest.

Really, do people think before they sign these things?

DiffEQ has now moved on to something that I know and understand from last term, matrix solutions to systems of differential equations. And the professor has the most amazing ability to turn sense into nonsense ( Read more... )

So, I spent about 2/3 of Saturday asleep (not continuously). In doing this "listening to my body" thing, I wish I knew why it asks for some of the stuff that it does. Is it just that Th/F is an exhausting couple of days? (Although full of cool stuff, like making it rain chloroform inside a container.) Or is it also that I'm starting to get sick? Or ( Read more... )

..was that I've been misreading this professor's notation since the very beginning of class.

Now, I've always seen derivatives indicated with one of the forms:
* f', f'', etc.
* df/dt, d2f/dt2
* d(expression)/dt, d2(expression)/dt2

The professor writes it as:
* (d/dt)f & (d/dt)2f ( Read more... )

The past several days of my life were eaten by a take-home test from this semester's DiffEQ class. It turns out that the professor used more than one equation that's simple to handle with integration by parts, and completely horrible with any other method. Guess which math technique is rarely taught well enough for the student to use it on their ( Read more... )

My life according to $music_player:

1. Load all of your music into a single playlist and set it to shuffle
2. Use it to answer the question
3. Hit “next”
4. Try not to cheat
5. Tag if you do that sort of thing. I don't.

( Meme cut to spare the apathetic. )

Today, I applied for the Arizona state healthcare program. This involved twisting my brain through paperworkish contortions to the extent that doing my taxes afterwards was actually a relief. Among other issues, the income and cost of living tests are unable to cope with intervals longer than a month, which doesn't exactly work out well with my ( Read more... )

A crude representation of tone/shape synesthesia, to a few seconds from this rendition of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 ( Read more... )

So, the universities' state funding for the rest of the 08/09 fiscal year was cut by roughly 1/3 this past weekend. 09/10 budget has yet to be finalized. (In AZ, that usually happens at the last possible moment. It would take longer if the legislators' own pay weren't contingent on having the budget signed into law.) The current proposal kicking ( Read more... )

GM humans? Already here.