Happy Pi Day, all!

Sorry for the double update, but I really don't feel like adding on more addenda to the previous entry.

A while ago I sectioned off a bit of Dr. Mayers's board for myself, and in it, every class, I write a "Fact of the day". Sometimes I come up with it, sometimes someone else suggests it. Usually it's an actual fact, although I have on occasion put up such stuff as "Ammeters are always installed seriously" and "K₆ is pretty safe to do in public." So, for Pi Day, I put up "π=[3,7,15,1,292,1,1,1,2,1,3,1,14,2,...]". Also, in math, Choketsu recited the first 150 digits of pi (which we checked against the digits currently on MIT's front page[0].

We also got our math take-home tests back. Tom got the highest score with 85. I was second-highest with 81. Hooray for Dr. Nevard tests...

So, after waiting quite a while, the Revenge attacked again - on Saturday, when all the rest of my crew was away. They stole *all* the corn and set fire to the Tuna. Now we are sailing on the Salmon, not nearly as good a ship. Targfrg is captured, Tavgfrg dead, and Steph has defected to the Revenge. Not in good shape here... more crew members would be useful...

Finally, some funny AIM conversations:

(18:09:53) fantasychrono: so i asked google
(18:10:05) fantasychrono:
How many strongly connected components does the digraph of the internet
possess?
(18:10:09) Sniffnoy: heh
(18:10:10) fantasychrono: they respond:
(18:10:15) fantasychrono: Thank you for contacting us. We would like to assist you, but we don't
fully understand your request. Please send us additional information, and
we'll be happy to help.
(18:10:20) fantasychrono: I respond:
(18:10:26) fantasychrono: Well, we were having a discussion in class about how the Internet is
effectively a directed graph. A strongly connected component in a directed
graph is a subset of the vertices such that one can find a path from each
vertex in the set to every other vertex in the set. So, we were curious as
to how many strongly connected components the Internet possesses.
(18:10:37) fantasychrono: and i await an answer
(18:10:44) Sniffnoy: yay
(18:10:50) Sniffnoy: I think you mean, though, the WWW is a digraph
(18:11:11) fantasychrono: yeah w/e :)
(18:11:24) fantasychrono: it was written in haste.

(19:35:36) WorldzGreatest44: Shit man, I'm sorry
(19:35:41) Tavgfrg: ?
(19:35:45) WorldzGreatest44: MIT
(19:35:46) WorldzGreatest44: sorry
(19:35:50) Tavgfrg: oh
(19:36:18) Tavgfrg: I was wondering what you thought you had done to me :P
(19:36:36) WorldzGreatest44: Ohg
(19:36:38) WorldzGreatest44: Lol
(19:38:07) Tavgfrg: or perhaps, what you had done that I didn't know about yet :P
(19:38:10) Tavgfrg: don't scare me like that :P
(19:38:21) WorldzGreatest44: Sorry.

-Sniffnoy

[0]This will not work after Pi Day, but right now MIT's front page is filled with digits of pi.

The small envelope

MIT - Rejected
So I'm almost certainly going to Chicago, then...

In other news...

Having already written my 7 page rough draft, I may have to change my topic for my Lit paper.

The one basic requirement is that it has to be about something that someone else has already done a serious critical analysis of.

Now, I picked my topic at the last minute. Actually, after the last minute. So Dr. Mayers calls me over and he says, "Harry, you need to pick a topic."
"Um... I don't know?"
"Well, what are you reading right now?"
"Not really reading anything right now..."
"Well, what was the last thing you read?"
"I reread the Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy?"
"OK, so do it on that."

He then spends the rest of the class searching online and in the catalogs of various libraries (college libraries ("The Rutgers library has a good science fiction collection", he said...)) to find something written about the Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy.

His search turns up nothing. Several books about Robert Anton Wilson (the author), but no critical analyses of the books. Finally, he finds that a professor somewhere wrote a paper about what he called "Gnostic SF", in which he mentioned The Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy as an example of such. He emails this professor, asking where we can find it (and hopefully other things written about the trilogy).

My summary of his response: "Oh, man, I don't even remember that."

So, yeah.

In Nomicron news, Jef and I have signed a peace treaty, forming The Green Alliance!

The other thing I shouldn't say just in case any Nomicron players happen to have found this. :) You'll not get ahold of my evil plans *that* easily...

(Note: They're really not that evil. Really.)

Finally, you all need to see Fergie's latest entry. You must. It's hilarious.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to include this "George is a dumbass" story from the bus home today. George gets on the bus, saying he has a proof that 0=1. "Really." His proof? "Well, the derivative of 1 is 0, and the integral of 0 is 0, so 1=0." We (i.e. Tom and I, and occasionally Eugene) spend the entire bus ride trying to explain to him that there is no such thing as "the" integral of a function, that that's not how the fundamental theorem of calculus works, that antiderivatives are nonunique, that integrals don't work like that - there's such a thing as the constant of integration... "OK," he says, "Make it a definite integral." "No, George, that doesn't work..." We never get to explain why, as we constantly have to respond to everything else he's saying.

"I'm going to submit this to a formal math journal. Leibniz invented calculus, I'm going to be known as the person who destroyed it!"
"George, if you submit that to a math journal, they will send someone to personally come over to your house and slap you." (Oh, I would that were true...)[0]

"Look, the TI-89 says I'm right!" he says, telling it to integrate 0, and getting back 0. After a while trying to tell him that a TI-89 is not proof, I finally take the calculator, type in "1=0" and show its "false" response to him. "Look, the TI-89 says *I'm* right!"

I give him the following analogy... 1+2=3, right? And 2+1=3, right? Therefore 1=2, and 2=1. "No, you can't do that!" he says.
"Why not?"
"You can't just say x+y=y+x..."
"So addition isn't commutative?" says Tom. "Good job!"
"No, no, that's not what I meant! I mean, you can't just say x=y and y=x..."
"Why not? They both add up to 3. 1+2=3, 0+3=3. Therefore 1=0 and 2=3."
He insists this doesn't work. "Why not, George?"

I give him another analogy. "Your reasoning is like this: What's 1 squared?"
"1."
"What's -1 squared?"
"1."
"Therefore 1=-1."
"No, but..." - he then says some incomprehensible stuff about ±1, and, after a bit of what he passes off as thought, concludes that, in fact, 1 *does* equal -1. (This is, after all, an easy consequence of 1=0, but he somehow got it from ±1. Probably he said, 1=±1, -1=±1, therefore 1=-1.)

He said he was going to use this proof so he could pay less for muffins at the bakery. Then he decides they won't understand it there. "I think they'll just slap you," I say.

Yeah... that's all for now.

-Sniffnoy

[0]Been reading The Tempest in Lit, and I have to say I really like the sound of using "would" for "wish".