(no subject)

I have a new favourite behaviour: nobody let me forget to do this...

I'm going to start proving things "by the converse error". This came up when Corey suggested that next time Marty and myself go running, I take him along by carrying him on my back. Marty suggested that this might make it harder to run with me, because things that are heavier (or at least cars that are heavier, apparently) go faster. I validated his suggestion by the following argument.

Things approaching the speed of light also approach infinite mass, which implies that the faster something's going, the heavier it gets. Therefore, By The Converse Error, the closer something gets to infinite mass, the closer its velocity must be to c.

There's a 5K coming up next week -- I'll have to bring Corey with me. Maybe I can eat some doughnuts between now and then...

Hrm... and before I sleep tonight (if I sleep tonight) I need to get that combinatorics test fixed up... so I might go hang out in the CoC. The sunrise coming up over East Campus from the deck between the CoC and the microelectronics building is lovely.

(no subject)

... so I get to do corrections on this combinatorics test to try to salvage something from the burning wreckage of my grade, and I would really very much like to get all the points I can get, because I have a feeling that each and every one of them is going to be helpful.

Only a lot of the notation on the test (on the questions I didn't even manage to get to on the first go-round) ... isn't making much sense. Because it doesn't seem to be in the book. And it's not googling very well. And nobody seems to know quite what they mean... and the book doesn't have any examples that act like the test questions.

So essentially, I'm somewhat frustrated. I don't want to go to sleep if I can correct more of this crap, but these questions aren't making a whole lot of sense, and there's a whole lot of other stuff that needs to get done this week, and it might not be a good idea, considering the outlook for the rest of the week, to stay up all night again. It's like a wall of notation...

I think I see how 2130 students who don't think of themselves as C hackers feel... if you're just trying to get through a class about complex, unintuitive sorts of problem-solving without ... really identifying with it ... then that makes it really hard. I have trouble understanding this, considering how long I've been speaking C -- 2130 was mostly intuitive for me, just a matter of doing it. If I haven't thought of myself as a mathematician, or even just a student particularly good at math, since HS... and I didn't get much of a grasp on this stuff the first time around, how am I going to get it now, at 3AM when I'm supposed to be correcting a freaking test that ...

*growls* ... it's not even the concepts in combinatorics that are so hard, really ... it's just... not always obvious what's getting asked, and the examples in the freaking book don't do anything simple, so you can just see the One Concept they're trying to get across... "well, here, let me illustrate this simple idea by... breaking out the Taylor polynomials and doing things with ten variables at once! Ha ha ha!"

Failing combinatorics would be very upsetting.

Ah, but I found out that I can do an Eastern European accent like Dr. Rucinski's (he's the professor for this class) without too much trouble... not in order to make fun of him at all -- he's clearly brilliant. I was just trying to reproduce something he said, and it seemed natural for it to come out with his accent.

... maybe I should sleep for a bit. Maybe I should make coffee. Maybe I should sleep and then drink coffee. The only problem being that sleep or coffee might not help with this particular issue that I'm having right now. Ah well.