The spring terms in Waterloo are always the hardest. The atmosphere as a whole during the summer is very relaxed. It is hard to sit down and really focus. Also being here for 10 months straight doesn’t help either.
Time to take a nap, then go do some math and philosophy.
I hate probability but you can sometimes pose very simple questions with interesting answers.
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
How would you answer the question? Can you also explain your reasoning without cheating? I wonder if I should post more random/simple math problems
I didn’t graduate but I have friends that did. On Wednesday Amy and I went to Joanna and Nelson’s convocation. It was so boring. I spent most of it just talking to Amy and Joanna’s brother Edward.
After the ceremony it was picture taking time. I really liked how this photo came out. Kudos to Amy for taking the photo.
On thursday the arts people graduated. So I swung by convocation hall, e.g. our school gym, to take some photos of the accountants. I bumped into shawn and talked to him for a while. I forgot that all the accountants are in Arts, for some reason I thought it was an accountants only convocation.
I showed up a little late, so by the time I got there everyone was taking photos with their family. I was just this strange brown man taking photos of friends. I imagine a lot of the parents were like, “Who is this strange brown man taking photos of my kid?”
Today was a pretty chill day. Did a bit of math, made some cookies, nothing too exciting. I also bought all of friends from Amazon.com. AlisoN Sudol from A Fine Frenzy is following me on twitter. I feel so popular now.
I also need to get around to buying Coda and Textmate. I feel I use both programs so much now when building stuff for money that it feels wrong to use it for free. My viewpoint on software piracy is if you are making money with the software you should probably pay for it. If the software totally changes the way you use your computer, you should probably pay for it. If you are just using the software to do school assignments and what not, then I don’t think it is wrong to steal it. Well it is wrong to steal regardless, but just less wrong to steal software when you aren’t actually making any money from it.
The reason I use making money as a criteria for buying software is because if you are making money using a person’s program, then clearly they deserve some portion of that money.
I think I will be giving another talk in July while at the undergraduate math conference. I can talk about anything so I ned to figure out a topic now. The talk has to be either 20 minutes or 50 minutes long.
I wouldn’t mind doing something related to prime numbers but not sure what. Another option would be to just give a talk about the history of math. There are a lot of great mathematicians out there.
Is it wrong to kill animals for food? I eat a lot of meat, yet I don’t mind being called a hypocrite and say that I think it is wrong to kill animals.
My basic reasoning is I would argue that it is morally wrong for a human to harm a creature, any creature. Killing an animal is inflicting harm. If the animal can’t feel pain then I would argue something along the lines that raising an animal for the sole purpose of killing it and eating it is wrong. Raising an animal just to be killed would be equivalent to me cloning a mindless drone of myself and harvesting organs.
We don’t need meat for sustenance. We live in a pretty modern society and can get our nutrients from meats in a variety of ways.
We were talking about this in my moral arguments class and people would sometimes bring up student arguments. One guy was arguing that, “If a cow could kill you it would. Humans don’t kill each other because we have entered this moral contract where it is better for both of us if we don’t harm each other.”
Another person was arguing that babies need meat in their diet. He was saying they would be malnourished if they didn’t have meat. Now I won’t deny that I also thought this at one point until it was pointed out to me that I know babies being raised on a strict vegen diet.
Anyone have any input on this matter? Mind you the only way I will stop eating meat is if people stop selling/cooking it.
I am slowly making a new website. You may ask “Why make a new site when you never update this one?” Well the great thing about this site is it will be updated automagically.
I will post more details when and if I ever finish it. I need to draw up a few things for the site which is proving difficult. I have outsourced Cheryl to do the drawing but she decided sleep was more important.
Maybe after I finish the new site I can finally make that wordpress twitter plugin that will generate new wordpress drafts based on tweets… I really need to be more active at programming… I guess I should also be more active in a more general sense but I doubt that will ever happen.
The series finally came to a close last sunday. Nelson and I watched the series finale from 2:30 – 4ish in the morning. Overall I was pleased. There was one thing I didn’t like but as a whole I felt they did a good job wrapping everything up.
When Tuesday rolled around I felt a little empty knowing that Lost wasn’t on. I have no idea what show can possibly live up to Lost. It has to be hands down the greatest tv show ever made.
Anyone up for re-watching the series in August? I have it in bluray.
I have returned to Waterloo. Finished my first day of classes and my first session in the number theory seminar.
Every Monday for the remainder of the term I will be participating in a number theory seminar. These seminars are epic. Every meeting someone will present a topic related to number theory. For the month of May each graduate student will deliver a talk. In June me and the two other undergrad students will be giving talks. Making this talk is going to be intense. It has to be an hour long. Well we have an hour to present something but I imagine it is suppose to be an hour. I will be talking to one of the profs tomorrow about what exactly I have to present.
In a related note, one of the undergraduates name is Chenglong. When I first heard it though I heard Shenlong and thought, “MORTAL KOMBAT“, however after checking with google in turns out Shenlong is the name of the dragon from Dragonball. The person I was thinking of was Shang Tsung.
After class I played a fair bit of FF XIII and did some coding. Now I am just waiting for some tv shows to finish downloading.
In a few hours I will be waking up to write my second exam. This one shouldn’t be too bad. Joanna is freaking out like crazy but it is just 5 essays, 4 short, 1 semi-long.
After Children’s lit I need to continue studying Graphics. That exam is going to be intense. I don’t look forward to it one bit. No idea how the prof will test us. The midterm was intense. He said its just a bunch of short answers but no idea if they will require a lot of mechanical work or if it will just be abstract understanding of how things work. I am hoping for the latter since that will be easier to study for. Solving some of the more mechanical aspects of graphics can be a bit complicated, like memorizing specific matrices and random formulas.
In other news I am watching another lame JDrama starring Haruka Ayase. It is called Tatta Hitotsu no Koi. So far it is pretty enjoyable. Not much else to say about the series though. I have become a fan of Toda Erika though.
It has been a while since my last post. After finishing my graphics project I went home for the weekend. I bought a new ps3. Came back to waterloo and bombed two assignments. Now I am just studying for finals.
This term has been long and gruelling. Next term I will be doing Real and Complex Analysis. Hopefully those courses won’t be as bad as Advanced Calculus 3. Only after taking advanced calc 3 did I realize I could hate calculus.
Expect another drought in terms of updates. Nothing that interesting will be happening here for the next two weeks. Two things to make note of areAlso for my children’s story I needed to supply some illustrations. Obviously since I cannot draw I just took images from the internet. For the main character, Maya, I used Ruby gloom for the illustrations. You can see the image here.
I had to get Joanna to touch the image up because it originally looked like this. Joanna spotted the not inappropriate part of the drawing right away. I didn’t see it until she pointed it out. I showed it to Derek and Nelson and they also didn’t see it.
Anyways I am off to do more studying. If anyone wants to read about my story they can do so by following the links below.
This is an extract of the book. So its text that would appear in the final publication.
This is a commentary on the story. It goes into how I came up with the story and where I got ideas.
This is a plot summary of the story.
