(Untitled)

[platinumdragon0]

For people in Math 215 who have done the math lab (or at least the beginning), HOW THE HECK DO YOU FIND ANOTHER PARAMETRIC CURVE TO EVALUATE ON THAT WON'T CAUSE MAPLE TO GO INTO A COMA?!?!? Honestly, I've tried unions of lines, parabolas, creative kind-of-parabolas, all in an attempt to give Maple something it can swallow. But I can't even know

Comments

[kanoc]

Well, I already talked to you about this before chem lecture, so responding is rather irrelevant now, but at least it gives me an opportunity to complain about Maple and make it look to posterity like I actually answered your question...

Originally, I tried a parameterized half-circle, and not only did Maple go into a coma, but after trying to calculate the line integral for 16 minutes, Maple actually crashed and I got a message that the program had run out of memory. Eventually, we just did a union of two line segments and it sort of worked. I say it sort of worked because when we found the line integral and then did simplify(%);, the line integral function produced an error, but the simplify function produced the right answer. I have no idea how the simplify function could have found the right answer if the original line integral function wouldn't evaluate, but we just deleted the error message and typed in the answer ourselves. Very devious, I know. In summary, Maple really sucks.

[platinumdragon0]

Dude, not only was that devious, but that thing that you came up with after the error message was just the simplification from your first answer, since you used "%." Gasp, what a cheater... ;)

[kanoc]

Heh heh... I never even thought of that... Oh well. At least it looks like we got the right answer, and even if we do get points off, we've only lost a total of 3 points on the labs so far, and the labs are only 10% of our grade, so I'm not terribly concerned.

[kanoc]

This goes underneath your last comment, by the way.

[platinumdragon0]

(glares) Whatever grade the report is given is proportionally related to the number of smiley faces Hester puts on our lab, and inversely related to the hours of sleep she has lost grading the labs. The correlation between the quality of the lab report and the grade is weak at best.

[kanoc]

That rather sucks. Of course, it's good if there is a surplus of smiley faces and Hester has had plenty of sleep. On the other hand, it's bad if there is a deficit of smileys or sleep, especially if you actually did the lab correctly. Oy.