Grad-Blog
A List of Lists
Inspired, and requested, by
a friend, here's some lists of stuff:
Seven things I plan to do in the afterlife.
- Take an 1000 year nap.
- Learn to play the harp.
- Play air hockey with Isaac Newton.
- Visit another galaxy on holiday.
- Cause my visage to appear in tortillas somewhere in Mexico.
- Always speak with a fake British Accent.
- Throw a LAN party and invite Alan Turing.
Seven things I'm good at doing badly.
- Getting up early in the morning.
- Finding my wallet, keys and/or cell phone in the morning.
- Remembering dreams.
- Not pronouncing the word "nuclear" like George Bush.
- Getting dates with super models.
- Not repeating myself.
- Differential Geometry
Seven celebrities that make me want to be celibate for the rest of my life.
- Pamela Anderson
- Yoko Ono
- Paris Hilton
- Courtney Love
- Martha Stewart
- Oprah Winfrey
- Ashlee Simpson
Seven things I've never said.
- "Well, when I think of it, I'm glad I had that operation."
- "I feel like watching The Princess Diaries about 12 times in a row today."
- "Who drank all of my prune juice?!"
- "Graduate school is so much fun!"
- "I tried, I tried! But the monkey wouldn't let me in!"
- "Well there goes my chances of being a Speedo model."
- "I wonder who left this $100 bill on the ground?"
Seven people who I think would be a better president than George Bush.
- Bozo the Clown
- John Stewart
- Derek Smalls
- Gene Wilder
- William Shatner
- The Blue Man Group
- Thom Yorke
Seven people who should also do a list like this one.
- Stephen Hawkings
- Linus Torvalds
- Richard Stallman
- Andrew Wiles
- Steve Wozniak
- Donald Knuth
- Richard Dawkins
Evolution ... a health threat in Australia?
In
this podcast Ken Ham (a leader of
a creationist organization) talks about how bad suicide is in Australia and lays the blame on evolutionist thinking. But today
I read that Australia is sixth in the world for life expectancy. By Ham's logic, it seem that evolutionist thinking is paying off. When will people learn? Correlation does not imply causation.
Where is Aggieland?
According to googlism:
- aggieland is considered "in bad taste" and is thus a good reason to suppress a book
- aggieland is in the trigon area behind the psychology building
- aggieland is not yet a perfect place
- aggieland is working on a process to interpret cow moo’s to see if the cows are somehow feeling they are no longer useful
- aggieland is monotonous and i'm loving it
- aggieland is actually maroon
- aggieland is the problem you must move
- aggieland is made up of a diverse group of people
- aggieland is that there is nowhere to go but up
- aggieland is great but there are too many trees
Satisfaction
Although I've been bashing the
ITMS here lately, I've actually have something good to say about it. They've
finally got 1960's Rolling Stones songs. Oh, and, uh, I broke my promise, to myself, not to buy anything from ITMS and downloaded 11 Stones' songs.
Names
While writing a computer program, it is considered good practice to name your functions, variables, objects, etc. with descriptive names. That way someone can read your program and have an idea of what it does. But there are mathematicians that don't seem to care about descriptive names for theorems and mathematical objects. Specifically, they like using mathematician's names (especially famous ones), e.g.
Cauchy sequence,
Riemann hypothesis,
Hilbert space,
abelian group, etc., and I wish they would stop.
I'm complaining about this because for the longest time I didn't know what a Hilbert space was. I've heard whispers of it in conversations, like some secret that hasn't been revealed to me yet. So, like the good student I am, I look it up, and it turns out that I've worked with Hilbert spaces in the past, they where just never called that in class.
One of my undergraduate professors was of the same conviction, although I didn't think much of it at the time. He called Cauchy sequences "closing sequences." He did this to avoid intimidating students with names like Cauchy. I imagine itimidation is a reason to use names. Riemann hypothesis sounds more impressive than "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function lie on the critical line" hypothesis. Not to mention Riemann hypothesis is shorter, which probably lies at the heart of the issue.
