Oppositely, in applicable algebra, I didn’t mind a bit when my crazy Swedish professor went off-topic from the final. He started out teaching mathematical theories about juggling, which was a bit dry, but interesting. He tossed some chalk to illustrate and dropped it all, so I thought he couldn’t juggle. I joked with him “Should you really be breaking all that chalk with the recent budget cuts?”, so he gave me a few pieces to keep in reserve. They sat on my desk just fine till a little later when I picked up my drink, against which they’d been resting, and they rolled off and broke on the floor. “Uhh, crap. We just lost our reserves,” I said, and he chastised me about how I was supposed to be protecting them. The whole class was enjoying things: the lecture, the chalk reserves, him tossing chalk willy-nilly while he scribbled math-based juggling patterns on the board.

Then, however, things got really good: he pulled out this previously hidden sport bag, from whence he took balls, sticks, juggling batons, and other equipment. He then started to juggle for us, and he was awesome! One thing he used was crazy: it was two thin batons with one end on each strung together with a long length of string. On that string, he balanced what looked like a large thread spool, and he did wild stuff with it. He flipped it up into the air and caught it, sometimes flipping it across the front of his body, over one leg, and catching it again on the other side of his body. One juggling trick he did with a ball was to lift a leg really high, throw the ball under his leg, catch it on the other side, and continue juggling. He tricked us, too, and it took a minute to catch on, then we all laughed: he juggled two balls with one hand, but he had a third in his other hand and all he did with it was just hold on to the ball while raising and lowering his hand. It was a good optical illusion with the craziness of the other two flying balls. All the while he was juggling the various objects, he’d talk calmly to us. When we would look amazed at some particular act, he’d ask as if we were silly “What do you do at night?”

Our “quiz” in there was a series of questions about why there are so few math majors at UK, if it’s a boring subject, if the faculty is boring, etc. I suggested he take his juggling act to local high and middle schools, juggle for them, and teach them the math behind it, too. His suggested reading list for the summer included about 6 books by Douglas Adams, who he’s a big fan of. :) It was an awesome end to the semester.

As for good news in my life, I won $200 the other night at UK’s Undergraduate Student Showcase. I submitted a bioinformatics programming project of mine earlier this semester to a university-wide competition, and I came in second place in the Physical and Engineering Sciences category, as announced at the Showcase. Now, ask me who got first place. The answer? No one! The judges award first place, etc. based on the merit of the project on its own, not relative to any other entry, so apparently they thought I did only a second-place job. :P One category didn’t even get an honorable mention, which must suck. Personally, I think it’s a crock. My professors and parents have agreed, thinking the school was just being cheap since first place carries a $300 prize. My dad commented that it’s nonsensical, since you can’t have a second place without a first, unless they’ve come up with a new way of counting. Ah well, at least the $200 will help with rent and groceries.

Living room:

Balcony:

Washer/dryer:

Kitchen:

Dining room:

Bathrooms:

Bedrooms:

Applicable algebra was awesome today because 1) we had it outside and 2) my professor is crazy. (This is the crazy Swedish professor I’ve mentioned before, just to clarify.) So the class was trooping outside when somehow our professor picked up an extra student, a girl who isn’t in the class. We passed a group of girls sitting under a tree and the extra student called to them:

“Do you know why class is cancelled?”
“No… What are you doing?” they replied
“I don’t know, this professor just came along and is now insisting that I follow him.”

Me and my classmates were cracking up at this, of course; our guy knows no bounds. The lot of us settled under some trees out in the middle of several campus buildings. He proceeded to lecture us, as we sat in a circle around him, about error correcting codes and their application to the hat puzzle with 3 or 7 people. He asked our extra girl something and she responded with “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I think referring to randomly joining a class rather than the hat problem.

We proceeded to try out our professor’s suggested strategy for guessing the correct “hat color” we were wearing, though in reality he just had other students sit behind the chosen 7 and hold up a card with either 1 or 0 on it, representing white and black hats. I convinced him that a version of the game should be our Friday quiz, so that should be more fun than a written one. I also asked the extra girl what her major was: Spanish. Our professor brought her into the center of the circle and asked if she understood what was going on; she didn’t and said she didn’t even know how to add vectors, which was part of the game. I can’t imagine being drug into some random, say, psychology class, which would be way outside my major.

I had a linear algebra test Tuesday and, apparently, she already has them graded and ready to hand back today (one of my classmates texted me last night to tell me this). I can’t believe how prompt she is. She’s just a grad student, not a professor, and I swear that has something to do with it. All the professors I’ve had take maybe a week to return a test or paper, and some are worse than that. My applicable algebra professor doesn’t get around to handing back graded quizzes for months; I still think he has some of my quizzes from when I took Calculus IV with him a semester ago.

I’m going to Jessica’s house this weekend to relax for a while but also to help her varnish the dining room set we’re to have in our new apartment. It’s a set of table and chairs that have been sitting around her barn for years, but they’re in good enough condition to still be used, so we’re going to sand them down and re-varnish them. I don’t think I’ve varnished anything for maybe six years, when I helped my dad sand and varnish a computer desk he made. Though I try to avoid them, I always end up with runs that dry into hard little lumps that I then have to sand down.

Varnish fascinates me, actually, both because I like its color and also because of how rock hard it gets when it’s dry. I think it’d be infinitely fun to get some ball-shaped mould and fill it with varnish. I have this idea that it would never really set up, but would instead remain this amorphous blob that I could squish around, so long as I didn’t break through the outer, solid crust. Oh, and it would smell horrible, since it would be varnish and all.

I got my linear algebra test back this morning and was disgruntled and surprised to find I’d made a B on it. I well expected an A because I can totally do row operations and matrix algebra. On most sections I did well, and I got full points on several sections. I did lose a few points here and there, mostly on definitions because, in my view, so long as I can apply the definition to solve problems, I don’t care so much about remembering the exact lettering of theorems from the textbook. I can work with linear transformations, I can find images, I can get an augmented matrix into reduced echelon form, I can make a matrix linearly independent based on some variable, but by God, if I give a geometric description of a span of vectors and leave off saying whether they’re scalar multiples of each other or not, heaven forbid I get more than 2 points out of 10 on the section. Hence, I got a damn B on the test, and I have a B as a midterm grade.

It doesn’t help that on the homeworks, she cares just as much that we write down the question as she does if we solve the problem and solve it correctly. That reeks of busywork to me, though she says it’s for our benefit in studying. Thank you, lady, but I know how to study without having the textbook’s lengthy instructions on my homework. So for the first few homeworks when I wasn’t explicit enough in writing out directions, I lost half a point on nearly every problem. That hurt my overall homework grade, adding to the problem of getting a B at midterm.

I’m pretty incensed about this and think it’s a bitchy, anal way of teaching. I miss my old numerical methods teacher, who was a darn good lecturer and a fair grader. I ended up with an A in that class even though I found the material much more difficult than linear algebra has been so far. Personally, I think a class should be difficult because its subject is more challenging, not because the teacher makes needless demands upon the students. If she had just given us a practical examination asking for us to apply what we’ve learned to solving systems of equations, working with matrices, and performing linear transformations, I would have been much more satisfied, but because I didn’t regurgitate facts from the textbook, my grade suffered.

• The forks, from left to right: salad fork, pasta fork, entree fork. The spoons, from right to left: soup spoon, drink spoon. The knives, from right to left: salad knife, entree knife. The knife on the little saucer is the bread knife. The spoon and fork above the plate are the dessert utensils.
• The smaller wine glass is for white wine and you hold it by the stem because white wine is served chilled. The larger wine glass is for red wine and you hold it by the stem as well. You only ever hold cognac by the bowl because you want the heat from your hands to keep it warm.
• Black, dark gray, and navy blue are the most professional colors. Blue conveys sincerity while red conveys power.
• A woman will be taken more seriously and seen as more powerful if she’s wearing black and a jacket.
• When eating soup, the spoon should be moved away from you while spooning it up.
• Some foods you’re expected to eat with your hands: fries in America, though overseas they may expect you to use a fork; asparagus if it’s al dente; shrimp if they still have the little shell on the end; fried chicken, ribs, and lamb chops if served outside, and use utensils if they’re served inside.
• Standard dining tip: 15%. Excellent dining tip: 20%. Standard hair dresser tip: 15-20%. Bell hop tip: $1 per bag.
• When someone considerably older or higher in rank than you comes in, you should rise and remain standing until they sit down.
• At a table, it’s okay to rest your elbows on the table if there is no food anywhere on it.
• When dining, each course should begin by the host or hostess eating; you shouldn’t start until they have.
• With handshakes, three pumps or about three seconds is good. Be firm but don’t have a death grip.
• When dining, if a lady has to leave the table, she should say ‘excuse me’ and wait a moment for one of the men to scoot her chair back. All the men rise when a lady leaves or arrives at the table. When a lady arrives, she should hover over her seat while a man pushes it in, then she can sit down when it’s far enough in to her liking. When I asked about how this was done, I asked, “So we just kind of… hover?”, which got a big laugh from the group and our etiquette teacher said she would call it ‘the Sarah hover’.
• Twirl your pasta up onto your fork and get it pretty compact before eating it. If some flops off, just bite the strand off, don’t slurp it up.
• You can eat with a knife and fork in the American style, which involves swapping hands a lot, or you can try the continental style, which lets you keep your fork and knife in either hand and not have to swap them around to take bites of the food you just cut. The teacher had an American mother and a German father, so she learned both ways but preferred continental. I tried that but it just felt too weird to flip my left hand up with the fork to stick food in my mouth. Whichever way you go with, you should stick to it for the duration of the meal.
• Whatever you put on your utensil should be eaten in the next bite, don’t eat just half of it and leave some left on the utensil.
• The napkin goes on the lap and stays there for the entire time you’re seated at the table, even after all the food is taken away. The only time it leaves other than to wipe yourself off is when you excuse yourself, and then it gets dropped in your seat.
• When you’ve finished a plate of food, set your utensils (for forks, tines down) in the 3 o’clock position across your plate.
• Don’t cover your wine glass or turn it upside down if you don’t want wine, just tell the waiter you don’t want any. The same goes for coffee cups and coffee.
• Generally, for food you have to take out of your mouth, it goes out the same way it went in. So for a cherry pit, you would spit the pit back into your spoon. For gristle, you would put it back on your fork and then set it on your plate. Our teacher had tried muskrat at one point, apparently, and found it disgusting, so she discreetly spit it into her napkin.
• If you’re allergic to any food or are a vegetarian, you should inform the host of this when you RSVP to the event.
• If you’re not going to eat something on your plate, eat around it but kind of swizzle it around so that it looks like you’re eating on it. If it’s a lemon in tea, just drop it in, don’t set it aside. Don’t remove your croutons from salad, either, just leave them in and eat around them.
• Don’t discuss politics, religion, or sex at the table.
• Your bread plate is to your left, your drink to your right. You can remember this by using a little trick: hold your hands forward and put thumb and forefinger together on each. Your left hand makes a little ‘b’, your right makes a little ‘d’. If you’re going to use this trick at the table, do so subtly, in your lap.
• Anything put on your plate will be edible, so you can eat the garnish if you like. Last night, we had an orchid blossom on top of our pasta, so I tried it and it tasted kind of fruity.
• With the bread bowl, the first person to take it should offer a piece to the person on their left, take a piece for him- or herself, then turn to their right and pass it around. After that first initial offering, it doesn’t get offered any more, it just gets passed.
• Don’t reach for something more than an arm’s length away from you. If something has to be passed to you, it should go through everyone in its path: don’t just reach for it across someone else.
• If something gets passed to you for you to pass to someone else, don’t think, “hey, I need some of this, too,” and take some then for yourself–keep passing it. You have to ask for it again afterward in order to get some yourself.
• The salt and pepper never get split up. If someone asks for just the salt, the pepper goes along, too.
• Whoever is closest to an item on the table, when that item is asked to be passed, is the person that starts passing it. In the case of last night when the sugar container was in the center of the table, I asked, “What do you do when it’s equidistant from everyone?”, which got another laugh out of folks and the comment that that “was spoken like a true engineer.” Ha! The teacher said then to just grab for it.
• To eat bread, you should break off a piece that’s about two-bites big, butter it if you want, then eat it. You shouldn’t just eat off of your big piece.
• Write thank-you notes after attending a banquet, to scholarship donors, after visiting someone’s house, etc.

I’ll probably add more to this list later if I think of others, which I probably will. It was a lot of info in one night.

applicable algebra

My professor is the same one I had for Calculus IV, and he’s just as wacky as ever (the nutty Swede). I figure it will be another tricky class, like calculus was, but just as enjoyable because he’s a very funny and informative professor.

web programming

It was pretty boring today, but fortunately the guy realizes he’s boring and so is limiting the number of lectures. The design of the class is interesting in that it’s all team-based: 30% of our grade will come from our team’s work. It’s also great that there isn’t a midterm or a final.

leadership

This seems like an awesome course. It’s the one for which only 16 students out of the College of Engineering were picked, and I got recommended by the Director of Undergraduate Studies for my major, so I feel really special for having gotten in. We’ll be traveling to Washington, D.C. in a couple of months, and everything is paid for, including round-trip airfare, hotel costs, and food. We’ll have the first day we’re there to just wander around and see the sights, and we’ll be taken to some place like the Kennedy Center or Ford’s Theater for a performance. The point of the trip will be to meet with members of Kentucky’s Congressional Delegation and other leaders. Beyond the trip, the class will involve various guest speakers; after each speech, about three students will be chosen from the class to go out to dinner with the speaker. On the course schedule, one of our classes is called “Etiquette Training,” which will involve a formal dinner. I bet I end up buying a suit for this class, because all I have currently are just nice dress pants and shirts.

linear algebra

In talking with a professor from last semester yesterday about this class, she told me that there were two versions: an honors one and a regular one. While Kathy last semester was in the honors version and had trouble with it, I think I’m in the regular one, and it’s so far a joke. We were introduced to lines and planes today, and I about died of boredom. Kathy said her first day, they were doing matrix addition and subtraction; the substitute today said something like, “There’s an object you’ll use later on called a ‘matrix’, but I don’t want to get into those today.” Good gravy. I’m thinking this one will be a GPA booster. There was no way to know when registering for classes what version of the course each section would be, and Kathy said there’s no differentiation on her transcript that she was in the honors version, so I’m hoping that I’m not missing out on anything by having gotten into a regular version.

networking

The lecture was actually pretty interesting, and I get the feeling this will be one of those difficult but useful classes. I don’t know that I’ll enjoy it; it’ll take a couple more lectures to see if they’ll all be able to hold my attention.

honors

I’m excited about some of the books we’ll be reading in this class: one is a biography of Alfred Hitchcock, another is a science fiction novel by Arthur Clarke, and the others don’t strike me yet, but we’ll see. I bought Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” yesterday for it, since that’s the first novel we’ll be reading, and after reading a few lines of it idly in the bookstore, it didn’t sound horrible. This is another seminar-type class where about 15 students sit around a big table and discuss what we’re reading, which I’ve enjoyed in past honors courses.

My numerical methods final yesterday went great; I thought it was a really fair test because everything she said would be on there was and we had covered all the subjects previously in class. Only one topic (linear splines) showed up that she hadn’t said would be on the final, but I kind of remembered how to do them so I think I’ll get partial credit at least.

Today’s logic final was okay, and definitely better than I was expecting after last night’s review session. I was under the impression that a “review” session should, um, review topics that you’ve already learned. Last night’s logic “review” introduced a lot of new material that we had never seen before. The students that turned up were bitching about not understanding this stuff (reductions, mostly) because we hadn’t seen it before. The book is no help, either, as we’ve learned throughout the semester. However, today’s final didn’t include but one problem for which I used a reduction, and I was able to use my notes on them from last night’s review to do it. I think I did okay on the final, probably a B.

Today’s statistics final was pretty sucky. There were some problems that I felt comfortable with and others that I kind of banged around on until I was sick of trying stuff. That’s the problem I’ve faced in there all semester: all the method and equation names sound the same, the problems are worded the same, and the equations all run together for me. I have the problem of never knowing what he wants for a given question, and the same thing happened today. I’m hoping I got a high C at least on the test so that I can get a B in the class, because I bombed the first exam and got a B on the second. Sigh.

Tomorrow I have databases and on Friday I have calculus. Tonight I need to make out a cheat sheet for databases because we’re allowed to have one (kind of a misnomer then, isn’t it?), but I’m not too worried about that final. I bet some stupid stuff will be on there, though, like B+ trees and memory, which I completely don’t see as being concerns of a databases class, but whatever. Calculus is going to be hell, just like the two exams in there were. Fortunately I’ll have a lot of time Thursday to work through the practice final.

I’ll be so glad when this week is over. I just want to get A’s and B’s in all my classes, go home, and zonk out for a couple of weeks until next semester starts.

This week is dead week at UK, which is the week before finals. Everyone has the impression that it’s supposed to be kind of a break from regular schoolwork, in preparation for final exams the following week, but it’s completely not. All kinds of projects and homework assignments are due this week, leading to stress for all of us. People in all my classes, as well as the university newspaper, have been bitching about how professors squeeze in last homework assignments and projects. My logic professor, for example, emailed us homework 9 a couple weeks ago when she assigned homework 7, just because if she had waited to assign it after we’d turned in homework 8, it would have been assigned during dead week, which would have been against school policy, from what I understand. The assignment wasn’t even posted on the class web page with the other homeworks, and I’d forgotten about the email, so I didn’t find out about it till class on Tuesday when the other students were griping about having another homework. I got it done last night, though, so now I’m finally done with homework for that class. I just have a numerical methods assignment left that’s due tomorrow, and other than my databases project, I’ll be done with homework for the semester.