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sniffnoySo today I had a doctor's appointment, having been in the hospital last week, which was at 8:40. My alarm woke me up at 7:30, and, not being careful, I hit the "turn off alarm" button rather than the snooze button. Within a few seconds I had fallen back to sleep and was only woken up by Chen around 9:00. Now, Aunt Rochelle was supposed to be waiting for me outside Towers by 8:40. I immediately hurried out of bed, afraid that she would have left. Actually pretty soon some RA came to my room telling me she was waiting outside, I said, I know, I was just going down there, although of course I didn't actually know she would still be there.
...as it turned out, the appointment was at 9:30, not 8:40. So... yeah, saved by dumb luck, I suppose.
So in geometry, we got the final problem set, which we're just supposed to work on after PROMYS, really. It's actually labeled "Problem Set #6" because last year it was. There's some pretty neat stuff on it.
The 3 presentations today...
Dragon sequence group - pretty pictures, not a lot of definite results, it seemed. But still pretty pictures. :D Including the 11-dragon, the "Contour integral curve", because it takes the shape of the contour integral sign. Made up, of course, of smaller contour integral signs...
Josh was afraid that Lucas would spend 10 minutes or so defining contour integrals just so he could say that the curve looks like the symbol for it, but he didn't.
And of course they ended it by pulling up the board to reveal a picture of Trogdor with "Trogdor was a sequence" next to it, which they quickly corrected to "a dragon sequence" and then "a dragon".
Theta sequences... not a lot to say about it. More interesting than dragons and also had pretty pictures, including the Fractal Amorphous Underwater Space Station.
Then us. Oh boy. We went *so* over time.
Now, before all this, we were having a big argument with Sunok about our earlier attempts to put a partial ordering on planar trees based on the one on planar binary trees. She apparently couldn't understand the idea of antisymmetry.
Have I said about Sunok before? Consider Dan is Wrong, only make him wrong about *math*. That's Sunok. She was also the least productive member of our group, unless you consider that to be Will Chen, although I'm sure she doesn't thing that. The only thing she did was to prove total ordering of sums, and even then she didn't realize that her proof was not formal or how to make it so; I had to do that.
Once the combined force of the agreement of Tom and Sherry *finally* managed to drill the meaning of antisymmetry into Sunok's head, she *still* wouldn't accept that that would be dropped from the presentation, even after the *entire rest of the group* said she was not to speak about it and that it didn't fit in with the rest of the presentation, that we would force her off if she started to speak about it. We ask a counselor, with Fried standing right nearby, "If she starts to speak about something the rest of us have all agreed she *shall not*, we have the right to force her off, right?" And Fried, who you would think agree, wanting to shorten things, instead says we shouldn't. So she presents it, and awfully. But anyway.
Malcolm explained the basic definitions, but slowly. Will then wasted a few minutes saying how he had written up functions in MatLab (why weren't we just using Scheme?!) to compute these things, which is not really interesting at all, as we already knew how to compute them. Then Steve talked about how various good properties failed, but wasted way too much time giving examples in MatLab. He mentioned that we had proved there was no division algorithm but didn't give the proof. At this point Malcolm suggested we speed up. I did proofs of cardinality of addition of trees and total ordering of addition of trees (or the "Double Diamond Bubble Bursting Theorem", as some people in the group have named it), but went so fast that I don't think most people could actually follow. Sunok then presented the algorithm we found for comparability of trees, and then awfully, with no motivation, not fitting into the rest of the presentation, and not explaining exactly what she meant, talked about how we couldn't find a good definition for comparability of nonbinary trees. Wasting everybody's time. And we didn't force her off. Then Dan is Wrong, who did some interesting stuff and, though he didn't actually go slowly, considering how little time we had, he went too slowly. Then finally Dan Le who gave our formula for the product of unimodal trees, without proof, and some of our conjectures. Then finally Dan is Wrong and started talking about his Fermat's Last Theorem thing.
This, he should not have talked about. We were already over time. But instead he goes up there and makes our himself, if you know him, but presumably our entire group if you don't, look like idiots. We've already *proven* Fermat's Last for groves; because degrees add and multiply, it's a trivial consequence of Fermat's Last for integers. Although because of total groves, Fermat's Last for groves also proves it for integers. So Dan has this idea that we should try to prove it for trees without using the fact that it's true for integers, and then we'll all be famous. Of course he seems to be the only one who thinks this is actually a good idea. So he says about this, and everybody laughs at him, and then it ends, about half an hour over time.
So, we should have really just cut out Will's section, cut out that final Dan thing, cut out the planar trees from Sunok's part which we did except, you know, Sunok doesn't seem to get the idea of just accepting what is not only a majority but a unanimous-except-for-her decision by the rest of the group, made Malcolm go faster. Also we should have proved no division algorithm, because it's our one actually nice proof.
-Sniffnoy the Flipper of Soda Bottles
--
"Remember, kids. With great power comes great opportunity to *abuse*
that power."
-Black Mage, 8-bit Theatre
...as it turned out, the appointment was at 9:30, not 8:40. So... yeah, saved by dumb luck, I suppose.
So in geometry, we got the final problem set, which we're just supposed to work on after PROMYS, really. It's actually labeled "Problem Set #6" because last year it was. There's some pretty neat stuff on it.
The 3 presentations today...
Dragon sequence group - pretty pictures, not a lot of definite results, it seemed. But still pretty pictures. :D Including the 11-dragon, the "Contour integral curve", because it takes the shape of the contour integral sign. Made up, of course, of smaller contour integral signs...
Josh was afraid that Lucas would spend 10 minutes or so defining contour integrals just so he could say that the curve looks like the symbol for it, but he didn't.
And of course they ended it by pulling up the board to reveal a picture of Trogdor with "Trogdor was a sequence" next to it, which they quickly corrected to "a dragon sequence" and then "a dragon".
Theta sequences... not a lot to say about it. More interesting than dragons and also had pretty pictures, including the Fractal Amorphous Underwater Space Station.
Then us. Oh boy. We went *so* over time.
Now, before all this, we were having a big argument with Sunok about our earlier attempts to put a partial ordering on planar trees based on the one on planar binary trees. She apparently couldn't understand the idea of antisymmetry.
Have I said about Sunok before? Consider Dan is Wrong, only make him wrong about *math*. That's Sunok. She was also the least productive member of our group, unless you consider that to be Will Chen, although I'm sure she doesn't thing that. The only thing she did was to prove total ordering of sums, and even then she didn't realize that her proof was not formal or how to make it so; I had to do that.
Once the combined force of the agreement of Tom and Sherry *finally* managed to drill the meaning of antisymmetry into Sunok's head, she *still* wouldn't accept that that would be dropped from the presentation, even after the *entire rest of the group* said she was not to speak about it and that it didn't fit in with the rest of the presentation, that we would force her off if she started to speak about it. We ask a counselor, with Fried standing right nearby, "If she starts to speak about something the rest of us have all agreed she *shall not*, we have the right to force her off, right?" And Fried, who you would think agree, wanting to shorten things, instead says we shouldn't. So she presents it, and awfully. But anyway.
Malcolm explained the basic definitions, but slowly. Will then wasted a few minutes saying how he had written up functions in MatLab (why weren't we just using Scheme?!) to compute these things, which is not really interesting at all, as we already knew how to compute them. Then Steve talked about how various good properties failed, but wasted way too much time giving examples in MatLab. He mentioned that we had proved there was no division algorithm but didn't give the proof. At this point Malcolm suggested we speed up. I did proofs of cardinality of addition of trees and total ordering of addition of trees (or the "Double Diamond Bubble Bursting Theorem", as some people in the group have named it), but went so fast that I don't think most people could actually follow. Sunok then presented the algorithm we found for comparability of trees, and then awfully, with no motivation, not fitting into the rest of the presentation, and not explaining exactly what she meant, talked about how we couldn't find a good definition for comparability of nonbinary trees. Wasting everybody's time. And we didn't force her off. Then Dan is Wrong, who did some interesting stuff and, though he didn't actually go slowly, considering how little time we had, he went too slowly. Then finally Dan Le who gave our formula for the product of unimodal trees, without proof, and some of our conjectures. Then finally Dan is Wrong and started talking about his Fermat's Last Theorem thing.
This, he should not have talked about. We were already over time. But instead he goes up there and makes our himself, if you know him, but presumably our entire group if you don't, look like idiots. We've already *proven* Fermat's Last for groves; because degrees add and multiply, it's a trivial consequence of Fermat's Last for integers. Although because of total groves, Fermat's Last for groves also proves it for integers. So Dan has this idea that we should try to prove it for trees without using the fact that it's true for integers, and then we'll all be famous. Of course he seems to be the only one who thinks this is actually a good idea. So he says about this, and everybody laughs at him, and then it ends, about half an hour over time.
So, we should have really just cut out Will's section, cut out that final Dan thing, cut out the planar trees from Sunok's part which we did except, you know, Sunok doesn't seem to get the idea of just accepting what is not only a majority but a unanimous-except-for-her decision by the rest of the group, made Malcolm go faster. Also we should have proved no division algorithm, because it's our one actually nice proof.
-Sniffnoy the Flipper of Soda Bottles
--
"Remember, kids. With great power comes great opportunity to *abuse*
that power."
-Black Mage, 8-bit Theatre
