So Ends Another Semester....

I just took my last final. Seriously, the bonus question took me about 20 minutes, and the other 9 questions took me about 25. No joke.

The bonus was something like this. If you get it without help, I might just call you a math nerd... or dedicated.
"I was on the second floor of a building the other day. My wife says, "lets take the lift. It won't take long, it's on the third floor and coming down." So we waited, but it went right past us to the first floor. Then back up, to the fourth floor; back down to the first again; and up to the fifth floor. "Lets just take the stairs, it'll be way faster," I said. "No," she said, "It's going to continue up to the 9th floor, then come down to us." In fact, it did. How did she know it would?"

have fun with that...

Also, I just picked up War And Peace. It has HOW MANY PAGES?!?!?! (1455) well, it'll give me something to do on a certain car ride that I may or may not be taking...

equations etc.

Well, in Engineering 207 we were learning about polynomial regression, and how to find the coefficients. that's where you have a bunch of points that basically form a parabola or something.

So Chris Jones (excellent math teacher, I strongly recommend him if you're going to HCC and need math) taught us the really long complicated way. Then he said, "and of course you can use MATLAB to do this for you, it'll be a lot shorter...."

This was at about 3pm.

Back up to 10am: we were taught how to get that line in Excel with 1/10 of the trouble from MATLAB and about 1/1000 of the trouble involved in doing it by hand!!!

I mentioned that to Chris... he laughed and said, oh yeah... now i can make you guys really hate me by showing you this... =) (btw that's just how he talks, idk why.)


I also learned that I can store multi-variable functions on my TI89 calculator. THAT FREAKIN ROCKS!!! :) sorry about that, it was really exciting though.

graphing calculator

Ok... so today in Calculus 2 we learned how to do parametric equations. They're actually really easy and kind of mostly just algebra and then you can do calculus things to them, but it was cool.

But what made me smile was when he gave us an equation, and said "put this in your calculator."
And then it graphed in this funky curve, and it was amusing. i might find a picture later to show you guys.