WOO
I graduated!
In my defense, there was a Master’s degree and a year off in between those two degrees, so yeah.
And yes, I dropped down to magna cum laude from summa. I got a B in Stochastic Methods and I HATE MYSELF FOR IT.
FARTFARTFARTFART time for Minecraft.
Catz
There’s this super spazzy black cat that’s been hanging around the house. We call him “Boyfriend Cat” because we like to pretend he’s Annabelle’s boyfriend (even though she’d probably murder him if she got the chance).
He’s got a very high voice and just goes “MEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEWMEW!” when he sees you. I’m not sure if he’s someone’s cat or not—he’s not super skinny, but he pigs out like he hasn’t had food in days and he doesn’t have a collar.
Pics!
Pretty boy.
Hair to the Throne
So I’m ditching my bangs.
I haven’t been without bangs since 8th grade (and even then it was for like a year), but I want to be like any other normal human being and not be so freaking uptight about my hair. I want to be able to go outside without experiencing anxiety about my bangs getting messed up (yes, this is something that happens to me EVERY TIME I LEAVE THE INDOORS). I want to not be constantly worried about whether or not they’re straight.
This is mainly because Calgary appears to be super windy all the time, but also because I feel the need for change.
But that’s hard for me. Change is hard. Change can go die.
You’re probably thinking, “holy hell, it’s just bangs, GET OVER IT.”
But it’s not. I feel…weird without them. I feel very vulnerable without them. I don’t care how damn crazy that sounds, it’s true.
But it’s time to ditch ‘em.
So don’t laugh at my new pic if I don’t have bangs in it; I know I look weird without them.
Okay, bye.
I am upset.
Current mood: wanting to crawl into a hole and die.
Current activity: curled up in blanket in chair listening to music in the dark.
My hand hurts from grading 180 quizzes, 180 homeworks, and about 140 extra credits in the past 48 hours.
My head hurts for other reasons.
My self-worth hurts, too.
This weekend suuuuuuuuuuuuucked.
…
All I’ll ever be is a disappointment.
DONE
I
am
DONE
with this semester.
Today has royally sucked overall, so I’mma go watch AH vids all night.
And then spend the weekend grading! YAY!
Derr-nerr-nerr
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM! I love you!! We shall hang out and be weird together soon, assuming I survive my last final tomorrow.
Also, you know what would be a cool idea (if it wasn’t illegal…which I’m not sure if it is or not)? Get a group of friends together and have an “open to the public” reading of Shakespeare in the park. Like, each friend would bring a cheap copy of Hamlet or something and would read/act out one of the parts, and people walking by could join in at any time. We could bring a small whiteboard or something and indicate on it which parts were already taken (or just being covered), and people walking by could, if they wanted, just jump in and start reading/acting one of the uncovered parts (again, we could get a bunch of super cheap copies so that passersby could just jump in).
Wouldn’t that be cool? I have no idea how many people would join in a group of strangers reading Shakespeare, but I think it would be super fun.
WOO FINALS WEEK!
ONE FINAL LEFT
So rather than studying, I’m filling out a survey! Way to succeed, Claudia.
If I were a month I would be: February
If I were a day of the week I would be: Tuesday
If I were a time of day I would be: Midnight
If I were a planet I would be: Uranus
If I were a sea animal I would be: A sting ray
If I were a direction I would be: West
If I were a piece of furniture I would be: A lamp
If I were a historical figure I would be: Johann Bernoulli (I could never be Leibniz, so I’d be one of his best buds and correspondents and supporters, even when things got rough with Newton)
If I were a liquid I would be: Tap water
If I were a stone, I would be: Limestone
If I were a tree, I would be: A bonsai-styled tree
If I were a bird I would be: The most ostentatious parrot imaginable
If I were a tool, I would be: A nail gun (that counts, right?)
If I were a flower/plant, I would be: A saguaro
If I were a kind of weather, I would be: A hailstorm
If I were a musical instrument, I would be: A clarinet (everybody who ever tries to guess what instrument I play guesses clarinet, so…)
If I were an animal, I would be: A platypus
If I were a color, I would be: Yellow
If I were an emotion, I would be: Road rage
If I were a vegetable, I would be: A carrot
If I were a sound, I would be: A big cathedral bell sounding
If I were an element, I would be: Uranium
If I were a car, I would be: A Volkswagen Beetle
If I were a song, I would be: Gooooo by TNGHT
If I were a food, I would be: Potatoes (you know I would)
If I were a place, I would be: The South Pole
If I were a material, I would be: Concrete
If I were a taste, I would be: Salty
If I were a scent, I would be: [I have no freaking idea. Thoughts?]
If I were an object, I would be: A lightbulb
If I were a body part I would be: The uvula!
If I were a subject in school I would be: Theatre/drama
If I were a cartoon character I would be: Tina Belcher (I look enough like her anyway AND my dad’s name is Bob…)
If I were a shape I would be: A triangle
If I were a number I would be: 3
?!
Woah, what the hell is this?!
Seriously? AWESOME! I honestly never thought this would happen until it became federal law.
Edit 1: one of the comments on the article:
Edit 2: Butch, you turd, just let marriage equality happen already!
I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t give me weird dreams
Wanna trip?
I thought it was decent at first, but the more I’ve watched it, the more I like it. I really like the music, too…thinking of buying the soundtrack.
MOM!
I hate trying to blog about Mother’s Day, ‘cause there’s no way I could ever put into words how much I love my mom and how much she means to me. I want to make everything in her life a lot better than it is right now, but I don’t know how. So all I can do is promise that once I get my awesome stats job and earn/save enough money, I’ll get her the giant awesome kitchen she’s always wanted and we’ll go cruise the Mediterranean.
‘Cause she TOTALLY DESERVES THAT.
Anyway. This blog sucks, but like I said, this is really hard for me to put into words.
So I’ll just say this: I LOVE YOU, MOM!
Leg Socks
So I have like four pairs of pants that I wear regularly.
NOT ANYMORE!
Awesome eBay pants!
(Sorry, I don’t have anything else to post today. I’m super busy studying for finals.)
Claudia Can’t Sleep
(Claudia can’t draw, either, but that won’t stop this blog from happening.)
Remember when I tried to draw the continental US without looking at a map?
Well now let’s try it with Canada! Apologies in advance. Rough sketch:
Oh gods. Manitoba has an oscillating border, Ontario is NOT SHAPED LIKE THAT, and I think I cut off like 6000 square kilometers from the east coast by Hudson Bay.
Let’s take the rough sketch and refine it a bit, eh?
Yeah, Ontario is still screwed up (the dangly bit that dips down into the US is a lot bigger than in the picture) and I have no idea what happens to the northern part of Nunavut (all I knew is that it breaks up in a triangle-like shape, haha), but I guess it could be worse.
Also, ever notice that a lot of the provinces resemble some US states (or vice versa I guess)?
Think about it:
- British Columbia is like a fat California.
- Alberta is like a stretched Nevada.
- Saskatchewan is North Dakota on its side.
- Manitoba is Minnesota with somewhat straighter eastern borders.
- Yukon is a giant New Hampshire.
- Nunavut is an upside down broken-up Texas.
Also, Canada has a hypothetical four corners like the US (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, NW Territories, Nunavut), but it’s in a super remote area and since the NW Territories/Nunavut boundary hasn’t been totally surveyed yet, they’re not sure if they meet at the corner of the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border.
Oh, Canada.
“Trompe l’oeil” is a fantastic phrase
HEY FOOLIOS!
So I’ve always had this suspicion that, on average, grades are better in the spring semesters than in the fall.
And because I’m an idiot, I didn’t find this until just now.
So let’s do some analyses!
The U of I has data from fall 2003 until fall 2013. I decided to use the “all student average” value for my analysis, and I also decided to do a paired means test where the “pairs” were made up of the average for the fall semester paired with the average for the following spring semester. Since most students start in any given fall semester and graduate in any given spring semester, it made the most sense to thing of fall-spring sets, since a fall semester and the following spring semester would most likely be made up of most of the same students, at least in comparison to any other pairing.
Also, there are a total of 10 pairs, so the sample size is OBSCENELY SMALL, but I’m doing it anyway.
Here we go!
Hypothesis: the average GPA for a year of UI students will be lower in the fall than in the spring. In other words, µfall < µspring.
Method: averages were collected for all spring and fall semesters between fall 2003 and spring 2012. Fall and subsequent spring semesters were paired.
Analysis: a paired t-test was performed on the 10 pairs of data and the above hypothesis was tested at an α = .05 level.
Results: here’s the table!
We’ve got a small p-value! That suggests, at a .05 level, that we can reject the hypothesis that the average GPA in fall and spring are equal and conclude in favor of the hypothesis that average GPA is lower in the fall than in the spring.
WOO!
Hey baby, let me indent your contour
Today was the last day of Complex Variables before the final next Wednesday. SAD!
A huge topic we’ve been focusing on for the past few weeks has been the residue theorem. Because I’ve been OBSCENELY BUSY, I haven’t had a chance to look up the dude behind the theorem (and behind pretty much everything we’ve talked about in this class): AUGUSTIN-LOUIS CAUCHY!!
So that’s what I did tonight. Cauchy was born in Paris in 1789. He worked under Laplace and was pretty familiar with Lagrange during the period when Napoleon was in power. Because of Lagrange’s urging, he entered secondary school in 1802 (at age 13) and it quickly became apparent that the dude was SUPER smart. He started winning all these academic competitions and basically out performed everyone else at the school.
When he was 36, he published one of his most important and well-known theorems: Cauchy’s Integral Theorem. A year later, in 1826, he gave the first formal definition of a residue of a function and shortly thereafter gave the residue theorem in another paper.
But that’s not all! Here are some other things Cauchy is responsible for:
- He was the first to rigorously prove Taylor’s Theorem
- He gave the necessary and sufficient condition for a limit to exist—the form of this condition is the one that’s still taught today!
- He created a test for absolute convergence
- He defined the concept of stress in elasticity
- He gave an explicit definition of infinitesimals in terms of sequences tending to zero.
And more! According to a biography written by Hans Freudenthal, more concepts and theorems have been named after Cauchy than for any other mathematician.
WOO!
ANOTHER WEIRD DREAM
So last night I had this dream in which I was hanging out with Euler. We were talking about rainbows or something for like 30 minutes when suddenly he was gone and I was in this big auction house.
I sit down and watch. The auctioneer gets to this one paper and he says, “This is a theorem by Euler, but he forgot it on the bus so we took it and are selling it here. He’s very smart, so you’d better bid high!”
I thought in the dream, “Wow, how cool would it be to have that? I could pretend it’s mine and just erase his name from it!”
(Dream Claudia is vastly less academically honest than Reality Claudia, just to let you all know.)
So I bid like $50,000 on it and since I’m so excited I don’t open the paper until I get home. I make sure Euler’s not around, unfold the paper, and read the following:
“Theory: dogs bark.
Proof: barking dogs.”
And I got SO FREAKING MAD that I spent $50,000 on that. I think I was about to go beat the crap out of Euler but my alarm woke me up first.
Uh…
WEIRD DREAM
(I think this is a sign that I’ve been doing too much of my math studying while watching Achievement Hunter.)
In the dream, I was hired by Nintendo to make a new version of Mario that could be played on the iPad. So I designed this game called “Math-io.” All the characters (apart from Math-io himself) were now mathematicians.
The best part? They were all mathematicians whose names rhymed with the original characters. Like Yoshi became Cauchy, Luigi became Fubini, etc. (I actually can’t remember the rest, but I was super proud in the dream that they all rhymed).
Actually, the premise of the game was exactly the same as your typical Mario, just with mathematicians.
Any takers, Nintendo?
Sorry my posts suck; I’m busy, okay?!
Oh my god, this looks so calming. I should get this when I want to draw but can’t think of any ideas.
Which is always.
‘Cause I suck.
What Does the Blog Say?
So remember when I said I don’t browse Newgrounds much anymore?
I lied.
Anyway, this video is actually quite clever in my opinion (and it’s also posted on YouTube, so I could embed it). Check it out! Safe for work and all that fun stuff.
Eh, good enough
I feel bad for not doing anything for my 8 year anniversary. So here’s some crap:
- Total number of words over the past year (May to May): 99,463
- Average number of words per sentence: 12.09 (in general, I write like 27-word sentences, but I think they average out with all my one-word survey responses and my filler text such as “YO!” and “Anyway.” and “Weird.”
- Gunning Fog Index: 8.25 (so you need about 8.25 years of formal education to understand my blathering, apparently)
- Wordle!
I don’t know why in the hell I started this blog in May. I guess I wasn’t thinking that this would always be the busiest month of the year.
Anyway. Thanks again for reading, all you loyal followers! And thanks for all your comments, Matt!
Eigenblogger Turns Eight!
That’s right, I’ve been blogging for eight years now.
That’s 2,923 days (counting today).
I was hoping to do something cool for today, but I’m obscenely busy and didn’t manage to plan anything.
But there will be later anniversaries, I’m sure. Number 10 will be big, I promise!
Thanks for reading, y’all, I appreciate it. :D
I hate this time of the year
Things I should have done today:
- Studied
Things I did instead:
- Had repeated panic attacks
- Worked on my incredibly crappy fanfic
- Dealt with unreliable people
- Tried to ignore the present in favor of the future
- Freaked out because ignoring the present will cause me to have no future
- Made an obscene amount of stupid puns
- Cried in the corner
- Had more panic attacks
OH MY GOD THREE MORE WEEKS OF THIS
I’m almost done! I’m FREAKING OUT!
I’m so excited to go to Calgary. I’ve been looking up possible apartments and everything looks amazing up there.
Sorry for the short and pointless blog, but I’m just excited. Going to go listen to music and daydream for a bit.
I HAVE FREE TIME WHAT DO I DO!?!?
[Plays Half Life for three hours then wanders aimlessly about the house]
Eigenblogger 