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

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.)

lol Doom soundtrack ripped off classic metal songs

OWNT LOL

ridiculous chain letter

After pissing away most of the weekend on Battle for Wesnoth (with a little worthwhile time spent on linear algebra and game theory), I came across a chain letter that was posted on a forum I frequent. The gist of it is that it will be possible to push down the price of gas with a boycott of Shell and Esso. Here's my synopsis

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this PLEASE.

The capital letters, anonymous executive and company name-dropping make my bullshit counter begin to click and pop.

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.14, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace...not sellers.

Unfortunately, though, buyers don't control how much oil is left in the ground. As such, the law of supply and demand must bring up the price of petroleum and its slick rainbow of distillates.

I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us s end it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) .. and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000)...and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers. If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

This is basically the logic behind the pyramid scheme. The bullshit counter has pegged.

If you don't understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is send this to 10 people.... Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician. But I am. So trust me on this one.

By the geometric series formula , we have 33,333,330 people for the sixth iteration (not ~300 million as the chain letter author claims).

However, even that is a hopelessly ideal figure. It assumes that each recipient is unique, i.e., no one gets the same letter twice. The summation the author uses also assumes that everyone who receives the letter propagates it. Gullible as I am, I played into the author's hands by bringing it up here. Shame on me. (But no one will see it of course, so moot point.)

I'm not even much of a mathematician as of now, but I'm still a hell of a lot better than whoever first spawned this junk. The arrogance of the author is screaming through my head.

Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician. But I am. So trust me on this one

Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician. But I am. So trust me on this one

Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician. But I am. So trust me on this one

Maybe this guy is an agent for McNeil Consumer Healthcare because I need a damn ibuprofen right now.

This is why comprehensive math education should be mandatory in high schools. Wouldn't want anyone pulling the wool over on you.

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did
you! Acting together we can make a difference.

If this makes sense to
you, please pass this message on THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO BELOW THE $1.00
RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

"Acting together ... we can make a difference!" I've never felt so inspired before! Imagine, someone took precious time out of his day to write a chain letter urging everyone not only to indulge in wasteful, short-sighted habits but also to demand that these destructive habits be made as cheap as possible.

It brought a tear to my eye.