Death in Vegas - Nuclear

I wanted to write something about Markov chains today but since I'm too sleep-deprived and too lazy to follow through at the moment, I'd like to serenade you with this trippy and exquisitely ultra-violent music video instead:

finals begin tomorrow

Final exams are coming for my third semester. I have a very weird feeling, a kind of knot in my stomach. At the same time, I am very excited. For someone who rarely feels 'good', I have to say that the blend of fear and anticipation is perfect.

There is the obvious cause: that these few short days are going to determine a good chunk of my grades for this semester. They're going to say (well, as best as formal education can) whether I ultimately won or sucked this time around. I think I'll like this challenge, more or less. Ballin'.


So there is that. But there is the broader excitement of seeing my life's locomotive engine slowly chugging into motion. As I'm about to turn 20, nearly all of the 13 through 19 years old bullshit is over. Hell yeah! With age, wisdom is starting to take hold. I'm no longer quite the pretentious piece of shit I used to be. (Still very arrogant, but nowhere near as pretentious.) I'm starting to get fairly elite at math despite years of stalling. My GPA is consistently high, having reached 3.4 at its lowest. I even have a halfway decent job.

AND I have just one more semester here, in the fall. Like I've said before, I will miss a lot of the faculty here, for being my good friends and somehow tolerating my constant weirdness and gaffes. I'll miss a good deal of the students here for the same reasons, but I WILL NOT miss the incredibly loud dormitory rabble, shallow hipsters, perverted otaku and, most of all, the air-headed, expensive clothes-wearing, gum-smacking, cellphone-gabbing, popped collar-sporting Anglo-Saxon prep fucktards that have been the bane of my existence for the past year or so. It kind of sucks that nearly every one of my close brosephs and brosephinas outside of my math and CS classes is or was in the ESL program. Which is not to say that I dislike the foreign students—in general, I don't—but I mean that it sucks that so few of American youths are likable. At any rate, I am quite close to a few of my ESL bros in particular and will, in all likelihood, keep in touch for many a year.

However, I will be very pleased to transfer. Anyone from my school, student or faculty, who would bother to read this entry can rest assured it's not about them. Few of the people I'm knocking here would have the literacy to understand my screed anyway. I'm probably going to transfer to Lehigh. My bro Jerry (who already earned an MS in Electrical Engineering back in Taiwan and came here to speak English better) suggested that I will enjoy the climate of a school like Lehigh more: there will be more self-motivated learners, more people in hardcore fields that I like, and quite possibly more foreigners and first/second-generation immigrants from other countries. All of these factors will contribute greatly to the elitery of the whole experience, in addition to the epic advanced classes I will have to take. I am actually quite enthused over the future.

EDIT - I took the first two finals today and, AFAICT, ran through and promptly slaughtered both of them.

EDIT - Finals are done. FINALS ARE DONE

Sodom - Napalm in the Morning

Humans are really stupid. And that includes the NVA and VC, too.



elite video

lol @ dis

Another blog author in my area recently wrote a post suggesting that global warming doesn't exist because some places are unseasonably cold. I've explained why this argument is faulty on several occasions, but it doesn't seem to be getting through. The average temperature of the Earth is indeed rising. The concept of an average, unlike Baye's formula or the more complex end of combinatorics, is really intuitive and easy to understand. So I don't see what the problem is. Unless there's some blinding political bias here. Nah, that'd be stupid.

Incidentally, the same author also wrote this opinion piece for the Morning Crawl which, among other lulzworthy bits, contains

The next thing we do is scrap all those stupid ".... studies" majors in college. Again, look at what the Asian countries do and follow that example. Of course, many Asians come here to pursue the math and science degrees. You can bet they don't come here for courses in Family Studies.

It's nice how he sticks 'Asians' into one amorphous category. Some East Asian societies tend to put a very high value on scientific matters, others less so. He's probably thinking of China, Korea and Japan in particular. Ok, fair enough. But even then, I know a bunch of Asians who are studying some humanity or another, including one English major named Jiseong who told me she sucks at math. What the fuck?! Also, a lot of Asian schools are adopting successful Western reforms, which is cool because it shows that either side can learn from the other.



But that's kind of besides the main point: the irony of complaining about how much America's youth suck because they're whiny and innumerate while being whiny and innumerate oneself. It is true that most American youths are boring and shitty, as with our adult population, but that's not strictly the fault of liberals or conservatives, because a lot of people on either side are also boring and shitty. There is one undigested nugget of wisdom in that steaming pile of horse manure: that we in the US, and in fact other Anglo countries, don't value education as much as we should. Specifically, hard sciences and math. (On average, heh.)

But the solution to that is not to scapegoat problems on "the liberals" (á la "the Jews"). That's weak. Especially given that there is a strong anti-intellectual current in the Right ... why study probability anyway? I don't trust anything that was made by a bunch of pointy-headed, pantyhose-wearing French academiacos with names like 'Laplace'.

Hey, I'm not sure about the way out of this one myself, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve emulation of a lazy stereotype or blaming every single problem on "thuh lib'ruls". (And by this, I mean a general solution. For me, I know it will involve committing a bunch of calligraphic characters to memory.)

Motörhead - Enter Sandman

Their cover of Metallica's Enter Sandman, probably the most recent song I really like that was ever a hit on US radio. I didn't like the Motörhead version at first, but it really grew on me. I also stumbled on this:



Jhee-zus... o_O

finding the size of a family with combinatorics

Here's a cool problem, not very difficult to solve, but there is a bit of number crunching.

Four children are picked at random (with no replacement) from a family which includes exactly two boys. The chance that neither boy is chosen is half the chance that both are chosen. How large is the family?

Any time you see 'choose' (order doesn't matter) and 'no replacement' together in the problem, you'll most likely use combinations to solve it. The easiest part of such a problem is to find the denominator of the fraction that gives the probability for an event expressed with combinatorics, which represents every event in the sample space. In this case, it's , where is the unknown number of people in the family. Then the number of ways to choose a group containing no boys is (i.e., choose four kids from the whole group minus the two boys), and the number of ways to choose a group containing both boys is . Actually, it's (i.e., choose two from the two boys and two from the remaining girls, who are out of all the kids), but is always one, so that can be left out. All told, the equation described in the original problem is . With some algebra, that reduces to , whose roots are two and seven. Since there's no way to take four from two (at least not in ), there are seven kids. Must be a Catholic family. And indeed .

ben stein: science implies genocide

No really, he said that.

Well, as long as we're blaming biology for the Holocaust, let's ignore the numerous Jewish contributions to that science.

Wow, gg Ben Stein, for saying some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard. Now I'm thinking a lot harder about which country I'm going to move to eventually.