Finals went as well as could be expected. The math final was open notes and books, so I took advantage of that fact to prepare my scratch paper, with an old exam as a guide, with formulas and algorithms to solve each problem, including prepared truth-tables, etc, so that during the test I wouldn't have to spend any time looking anything up or drawing anything, because I'd already done it. My evil plan worked really well and I was right on schedule right up until the Euclidean Algorithm problem. I know how to solve one of those, but I still messed up a distribution step on the backwards side of it, and had to re-do it three times to finally get the right answer. Not a good strategy for a test like that, but I just couldn't let it go. Foolish pride I suppose. So with that delay I didn't have enough time for the last couple of recursive function problems, which is a pity, because those are fun. We'll see how it turns out.
My computer architecture final was one half-hour after the maths final, so Seri and I grabbed a quick bite to eat (with Clint- a frequent happy occurrence) and dashed off to it. It was mostly a blur of questions and answers. I think I did ok, it was a fun class and I learned a lot. I used to think of myself as somewhat of a hardware guy, but no longer. Once the layers of abstraction are stripped away, how computers really work is just mind-breakingly complicated. I would be just as happy to not ever have to look at assembler code ever again, but I know since I have to take a Senior level compiler design class that that is not to be, at least not quite yet.
So that's it for my first semester at Idaho. I'm in the right place, and I think that they'll let me into the grad program eventually. But I'm not leaving without a degree of some sort. Onward!
Friday, December 16, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Calm
Today is a Sunday and I'm having a rest between my last homework assignment and finals. I am not having urges to study tonight, but I am having urges to eat and close my eyes. I think this has been a really wonderful semester at the U of Idaho, whatever grades I wind up with. It was cloudy today. Mostly it's been sunny. Colleen likes it sunny, something I shall have to keep in mind. Before we got here, Clint had been bewailing the weather in Moscow in winter. "Frozen wasteland" is the phrase I think he used. So we were a little apprehensive. But it's been lovely so far, in a cold-ish kind of way. We've only had one proper snowfall so far, but that wasn't really inconvenient for us. Campus has quite the network of heated side-walks for just such an occasion. They are always clear. I have some Yak-trax to put on my shoes, though, just in case.
Last week I went to a poetry reading on Wednesday and then a Maths lecture on Thursday, and enjoyed them both. The reading was by Alexandra Teague, Colleen's instructor this term. She is quite good. I am encouraged that academic poetry, at least here at Idaho, has shifted back toward accessibility. My impression, at least when I was younger, was that the academics were stuck in the rut of making poems as obscure and as unreadable as possible, judging the best poems as being the ones understandable to the fewest. I suppose the height of glory for an academic poet is to become the subject of someone's dissertation, so I can see how that makes sense. And there is still a bit of political poetry going on, identity politics poetry. Horrible wretched waste of time. Ms Teague had a few of what she called Winchester sonnets. They were only thirteen lines each, with the last line of one being repeated in the first line of the next. Sarah Winchester was the muse for most of them. We bought Alexandra's book. She signed it for Colleen.
The maths lecture was given by Arie Bialostocki, my instructor for Discrete Math. He is retiring after this term, so this served as a farewell event, with Arie bringing his famous hummus and the department bringing the cake. The lecture was about the "Happy Ending Theorem" proven by Erdos and Szekeres in 1935: Theorem. For any positive integer N, any sufficiently large finite set of points in the plane in general position has a subset of N points that form the vertices of a convex polygon. Their friend Ether Klein came up with the idea, and Erdos called it the "Happy Ending" theorem because after it had been proven, Szekeres and Klein got married. Math and romance, what could be better than that? Arie had been a student of Erdos', and has an Erdos number of 1. He says that Erdos still publishes papers, but since he died in 1996, it's now at a slower rate.
So, a couple more days and I'm done for the semester.
Last week I went to a poetry reading on Wednesday and then a Maths lecture on Thursday, and enjoyed them both. The reading was by Alexandra Teague, Colleen's instructor this term. She is quite good. I am encouraged that academic poetry, at least here at Idaho, has shifted back toward accessibility. My impression, at least when I was younger, was that the academics were stuck in the rut of making poems as obscure and as unreadable as possible, judging the best poems as being the ones understandable to the fewest. I suppose the height of glory for an academic poet is to become the subject of someone's dissertation, so I can see how that makes sense. And there is still a bit of political poetry going on, identity politics poetry. Horrible wretched waste of time. Ms Teague had a few of what she called Winchester sonnets. They were only thirteen lines each, with the last line of one being repeated in the first line of the next. Sarah Winchester was the muse for most of them. We bought Alexandra's book. She signed it for Colleen.
The maths lecture was given by Arie Bialostocki, my instructor for Discrete Math. He is retiring after this term, so this served as a farewell event, with Arie bringing his famous hummus and the department bringing the cake. The lecture was about the "Happy Ending Theorem" proven by Erdos and Szekeres in 1935: Theorem. For any positive integer N, any sufficiently large finite set of points in the plane in general position has a subset of N points that form the vertices of a convex polygon. Their friend Ether Klein came up with the idea, and Erdos called it the "Happy Ending" theorem because after it had been proven, Szekeres and Klein got married. Math and romance, what could be better than that? Arie had been a student of Erdos', and has an Erdos number of 1. He says that Erdos still publishes papers, but since he died in 1996, it's now at a slower rate.
So, a couple more days and I'm done for the semester.
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