sniffnoy: (Chu-Chu Zig)
[personal profile] sniffnoy
I have to say, I'm still a bit amazed that it's "Here's a one-week crash course, go teach". Come Monday the kids are going to walk into class and I'm going to be an instructor. Somehow. Evidently it works, as, well, this is what they've been doing for quite a while, and they say they get good results with it. They have given us quite a lot of resources, of course.

I found a centipede in my room. Can't say I'm a fan of that. Speaking of my room, I've actually got it to myself for a few days, as my roommate engineered a room swap with someone else who hasn't arrived yet.

More people are arriving, obviously, so we now have quite a few more people for Smash, and yet we're nowhere close to the perpetual Smash game, it seems. Oh well. Also in addition to Kyle who does play Brawl tournaments, apparently we have some first-year who used to. Wow.

Also: Did I by any chance mention, when I visited Michigan for recruitment, a cool math student I met by the name of Aubrey who at the time had a broken wrist from doing parkour? ...no, it seems, I didn't. Well, turns out he lives here! Neat! Except not this semester, because he's going to be in Australia.

That lower bound, as small as it is, is now very close to *actually* proven. After fixing the major bug in my code mentioned below, I realized I had better actually prove the algorithm correct, and I hit a bit of a snag at the case of converting multiplication to addition. Fortunately, addition absolutely sucks compared to multiplication, so this should never be relevant. Unfortunately, I didn't have a proof. Well, I had one, but it seemed like it was possibly circular (though I didn't think the circularity was real); then I realized it was wrong anyway. Fortunately, I now have an actual proof (basically just AM-GM, really[0] :P ) that proves that case mostly irrelevant, and I may not even have to do any recalculation (depends on the exact data; I'll have to check).

So now all that remains is to compile the list of possible exceptions (easy) and then, if I want (which I do), check which ones actually are exceptions. Yay. And then to start writing all this up.

-Harry

[0]So I'm looking at this inequality I need to prove, and I think, how the hell do I do this? And I remember Tom telling me, basically only the inequalities you need are Cauchy-Schwarz and AM-GM. Well, I try a bit of Cauchy-Schwarz and can't get anywhere, but hey! AM-GM does the trick. Yay.

Date: 2009-09-04 03:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] grenadier32.livejournal.com
You know a traceur!? That's awesome.

Date: 2009-09-04 05:13 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sniffnoy.livejournal.com
I would hardly say I "know" him seeing as he's not going to be at either Truth House or the school this semester, but yeah. Met him at the big party they held at recruitment - "What happened to your wrist?" That was pretty much my reaction too.

Date: 2009-09-04 02:19 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
What course are you instructing, and was the rabid bat a joke, or have you done anything about it?

Erick

Date: 2009-09-04 05:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sniffnoy.livejournal.com
Math 105, which is basically what in high school they would call "precalculus". It's titled "Data, Functions, and Graphs".

The bats... so when I said I got an email telling me about bats in the buildings, I meant the *school* buildings, not the ICC buildings. There are not, to my knowledge, any bats where I'm living. Also, they're only potentially rabid, for, well, obvious reasons.

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