Dan vs Josh part 3 (or, Sleep is Good)
Aug. 8th, 2003 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyYou'd be completely wrong to think that Dan has backed down from his ridiculous position at all. Much like Daniel has become "Oblivious Dan", he has quasi-become "Stubborn Dan". Meanwhile the argument continues to get more ridiculous. Josh has actually gone so far as to compare Dan to Hitler.
However, I missed much of it, as I was sick. Contrary to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonpin's claims, I was sick on the same day as Etienne, and SecondYearJosh says my symptoms (headache, vomiting, being OK again after sleeping) are consistent with food poisoning. Of course, those seem consistent with a lot of things.
Despite the fact that it made noone else sick, my initial reaction was that it was my Knightmare Chess cards that had made me sick. As you may recall, they had been irrepairably rain-damaged a while back. SecondYearJosh wanted to see them, though, so I took them out. Many were completely stuck together - some had practically merged. And when taken apart, they released a completely *awful* smell, to which I attributed my sickness to for some time. I went to bed at approximately 20:00, but I was unable to sleep for some time due to the people dancing around in a circle and shouting in the area between the two lounges. Apparently they were ITRP people celebrating their last day there. I must have gotten enough sleep, though, since I woke up at 7:00.
For the record, I did approximately 0 work yesterday, for obvious reasons.
Lab presentations today. Went well.
A bunch of people plan to go see Spellbound on Saturday.
So QR has actually been put on the problem set now. For positive odd primes, it was on there yesterday, and for odd primes in general, it's on there today. And, IIRC, there was a generalized version using Jakobi (sp?) symbols on there today as well, though for all I know that could be false.
They put some problems about quaternions on today's pset.
For those who don't know what quaternions are:
Complex numbers can be described with 2 real numbers; quaternions require 4. They are in the form a+bi+cj+dk. i2=j2=k2=-1, and there's one other basic law of them as well. (I think it's ijk=-1.) Their multiplication is not commutative. There are also the octonions, which, IIRC, don't even have *associative* multiplication. How you can really do anything without associativity, I don't know. Apparently at 16 dimensions you lose so much that you can't really do anything at all.
Scary, but the problems they put about them don't look too hard.
I might have more to say, but I'm already late for the completely evil Mandatory Fun. I suppose I'd best show up. It was originally supposed to be either: 1. a toga dance or 2. a 1/2 hour movie about hyperbolic geometry, followed by... I can't remember, but it was supposed to be a really good movie (which was actually Not Math). That's what Eric said, anyway. Instead, they decided to do a costume dance. How anyone was supposed to think up and find/create a costume in such a short amount of time, I don't know. I suppose I'm about to find out...
[Correction: It actually starts considerably later than 19:00, the usual time. It's now 20:06, and it hasn't started yet. Oh, and may I just say: *3 games of Illuminati going on in the lounge at the /same time/!* Although one of them ended. I'm not in any of them, I arrived there too late.]
-Sniffnoy
--
"There's nothing worse than having only one drunk head." - Zaphod
Beeblebrox
However, I missed much of it, as I was sick. Contrary to
jonpin's claims, I was sick on the same day as Etienne, and SecondYearJosh says my symptoms (headache, vomiting, being OK again after sleeping) are consistent with food poisoning. Of course, those seem consistent with a lot of things.Despite the fact that it made noone else sick, my initial reaction was that it was my Knightmare Chess cards that had made me sick. As you may recall, they had been irrepairably rain-damaged a while back. SecondYearJosh wanted to see them, though, so I took them out. Many were completely stuck together - some had practically merged. And when taken apart, they released a completely *awful* smell, to which I attributed my sickness to for some time. I went to bed at approximately 20:00, but I was unable to sleep for some time due to the people dancing around in a circle and shouting in the area between the two lounges. Apparently they were ITRP people celebrating their last day there. I must have gotten enough sleep, though, since I woke up at 7:00.
For the record, I did approximately 0 work yesterday, for obvious reasons.
Lab presentations today. Went well.
A bunch of people plan to go see Spellbound on Saturday.
So QR has actually been put on the problem set now. For positive odd primes, it was on there yesterday, and for odd primes in general, it's on there today. And, IIRC, there was a generalized version using Jakobi (sp?) symbols on there today as well, though for all I know that could be false.
They put some problems about quaternions on today's pset.
For those who don't know what quaternions are:
Complex numbers can be described with 2 real numbers; quaternions require 4. They are in the form a+bi+cj+dk. i2=j2=k2=-1, and there's one other basic law of them as well. (I think it's ijk=-1.) Their multiplication is not commutative. There are also the octonions, which, IIRC, don't even have *associative* multiplication. How you can really do anything without associativity, I don't know. Apparently at 16 dimensions you lose so much that you can't really do anything at all.
Scary, but the problems they put about them don't look too hard.
I might have more to say, but I'm already late for the completely evil Mandatory Fun. I suppose I'd best show up. It was originally supposed to be either: 1. a toga dance or 2. a 1/2 hour movie about hyperbolic geometry, followed by... I can't remember, but it was supposed to be a really good movie (which was actually Not Math). That's what Eric said, anyway. Instead, they decided to do a costume dance. How anyone was supposed to think up and find/create a costume in such a short amount of time, I don't know. I suppose I'm about to find out...
[Correction: It actually starts considerably later than 19:00, the usual time. It's now 20:06, and it hasn't started yet. Oh, and may I just say: *3 games of Illuminati going on in the lounge at the /same time/!* Although one of them ended. I'm not in any of them, I arrived there too late.]
-Sniffnoy
--
"There's nothing worse than having only one drunk head." - Zaphod
Beeblebrox
