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| On a Midsummer's Eve - Pt.II |
| Wed July 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 AM PDT |
|
So where was I? Oh yeah. CodewiseBlog eating my posts. Yeah, it choked when I entered the HTML entity for 1/2, posted, edited it, and saved. Everything past the half was cut off. No idea why. There's like 4 layers of input filtering in there and I admit, it's a mess. I'm working on it. No wait, where was I really? IE 342. Probability and Statistics for Engineers. Dag, it's a godawfully boring subject - trivial stuff that any middle-schooler should know. But there's a bright side: story time with Uncle Yarin. Prof. Yarin gets two and a half hours twice a week to lecture on this subject. If he actually did that, It'd be a lunchtime siesta for me every time. But instead, what he spends most of the time on are these digressions that have little or nothing to do with the subject matter, and they're often highly amusing and/or thought provoking. For example, last week he started talking about how the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Boltzmann's Law seem to suggest that there is something very large and significant outside the boundaries of the Universe that we aren't seeing. (I think he's misapplying the Boltzmann Law, but he is a professor of mechanical engineering, so he should know better, so I'll go with him on this one.) And today, Prof. Yarin calculated the probability of the air molecules on the left side of the room all spontaneously moving to the right side of the room and asphyxiating everyone on the left side. Long story short, while it is possible, the time it would take for that event to become probable is greater than the amount of time the Universe has been in existence for. But then that somehow segued into a discussion about the storied history of nuclear energy and the Manhattan Project, and about how uranium centrifuging works. So every class period, I write maybe one or two pages of notes, and the rest of it is spent listening to and sometimes chuckling at the professor. But I stay awake! Overall: good class. There's more to tell, but it'll have to wait for another post. _WRF. |
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Anonymous:
lonely shoutbox :( Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:09 PM PDT |
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Anonymous:
hello Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:12 PM PDT |
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Anonymous:
o hai Mon April 28th, 2008 at 12:31 PM PDT |
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CHIZUBAGA:
I CAN HAZ CHIZUBAGA!!!!!!! Wed January 20th, 2010 at 12:58 PM PST |
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Not Jeremy:
o hai remember when i threw hot sauz in yer eye. lulz Thu January 28th, 2010 at 11:28 AM PST |
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JEREMY:
MOAR NAPKINS DURR HURR Thu February 11th, 2010 at 9:33 AM PST |
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Shoutbox:
I wuz on a DAtZ.. haffing chizubaga!! Om nom nom nom!! Wed May 26th, 2010 at 1:04 PM PDT |
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Totally not anyone you know:
Problem? Thu June 3rd, 2010 at 2:09 PM PDT |
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Random Randomstein:
Shitpickle. Fri June 11th, 2010 at 6:04 PM PDT |
