I kinda mashed two surveys together
1. What would you pick as a major, if you could go back to college and do it again?
I did go back to college and do it again (or am doing it again, I guess). I picked math.
2. Who is the one celebrity with whom you would most like to have an in-depth conversation?
Leibniz. He’s a celebrity. YES HE IS, SHUT UP AND LET ME LIVE IN MY FANTASY WORLD.
3. If you could make a living doing ANYthing, what would that be?
Doing statistics, teaching statistics, writing, blogging, raving about Leibniz.
4. What’s your all-time very favorite dessert?
Peanut M&Ms. Yup, I’m classy like that.
5. How many pairs of jeans do you own?
Jeans are for squares.
(I’m a triangle)
6. What is your favorite flower, and why?
I’m not much of a flower person. I can’t smell them so that kind of takes away some of their appeal. Sunflowers are badass, though.
7. What book has most changed your life?
Candide, ‘cause it got me interested in philosophy, which took my education in a very different direction.
It also introduced me to Leibniz. There’s not too much else I can say about that. ;)
8. What is your least favorite vegetable? Is there any way you can be persuaded to eat it?
Celery is the most disgusting thing ever (texture-wise). You can eat a stick of it with a whole jar of peanut butter and it will still be terrible.
9. If you could take a nonstop first class flight to any destination, where would you pick to land?
Either Antarctica (South Pole please?) or Hanover (Leibniz’ archives, please?)
10. If your 15 minutes of fame included a stint on American Idol, what song would be your trademark solo?
Well if we go off of what I sang in Rock Band, it would either be Peace of Mind or Maps.
11. If you could pick one former friend (who has remained elusive in this wild Facebook world) to reunite with, who would you unearth?
Anastasia!
12. What period of history is your favorite to read about?
The European Enlightenment!!!!!
13. What is your favorite genre of fiction?
Historical’s always good.
14. Do you choose a book by its cover?
I choose a book by whether it’s on my list or not.
15. Where do you do most of your reading?
At the rec center on the recumbent bike.
16. Without looking, guess about how many books are in your TBR pile. Now look. Were you right?
Well, since I just recently re-started my 200 Books list, I’d say there are 195 left. Ah, I was two off. There are 193 left.
17. How many movies on your TBW list?
I have no such list.
18. What’s your favorite genre of movie?
“Horribly Scientifically Inaccurate Disaster Movie”
19. Do you still go to see movies in the theater?
Nope.
20. You have $10,000 and no strings or obligations for one full day. Where do you go and what do you do?
Get up super early and go to Vancouver with my mom!
21. How many songs on your mp3 player?
2,000-something. Quite a few.
22. What comes next? Monster, monkey, helicopter…
Heliosphere.
Internettin’
Haha, oh, Sound Cloud.
Do you remember this? DO YOU REMEMBER THE NIGHTMARES?!
I saw this video quite a few years ago and now this song always reminds me of Vancouver:
Another awesome Rage Quit I don’t think I’ve ever posted on here.
In this blog: Claudia Wordles Stuff
I’M SO FREAKING BORED
I WORDLED “ODOR”
I WORDLED WIKIPEDIA’S “LEIBNIZ” PAGE
I WORDLED MY THESIS
I WORDLED THE LYRICS TO INTERACTIVE’S “DILDO”
I THINK I NEED TO SLEEP
COPERNICUS, NO!
THEY
PLAYED
TROLOLO
IN THE OPENING CEREMONY
RUSSIA I LOVE YOU
But seriously (and my mom can confirm this): a couple weeks ago, I suggested how awesome it would be if one of the figure skaters chose to stake to Trololo.
And then they PUT IT IN THE OPENING CEREMONY (at least for like 5 seconds)
I laughed so hard. Why isn’t the internet freaking out about this?
(I’m freaking out about this)
GAMES
There is no better way to start an Olympic games than with this man:
Evgeni Plushenko!!!
And that was a damn good program he gave us tonight, holy crap.
Have some more pics:
The fact that I was in the same city as him–for a few days, at least–makes me super happy.
(I love him sorry)
In other news (and the reason that this blog is password protected), my STAT 452 class is really starting to suck. I definitely need to rant about this—which will happen later when I have more time and am not absorbed in watching figure skating—but I just needed to mention it somewhere before my head explodes from anger.
TWSB: C is for Complex Number, That’s Good Enough for Me
Well this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever learned about.
So I’m in Complex Variables this semester, right? Today we talked about how to take limits of complex numbers as well as the closely related topic of infinity.
I’m assuming most people who read this regularly (or just happen to stumble upon it) know at least a little about infinity in the context of real numbers. Mainly, if we represent the reals on a number line, we have a direction that goes off towards negative infinity and a direction that goes off to positive infinity. But does this translate to complex numbers?
Well, not really. When we deal with complex numbers, we deal with the complex plane: a 2-D space with one axis representing the real part of a number and the other axis representing the imaginary part of a number. That is, one way we can think of a complex number is as a set of coordinates on the complex plane. For example, if I had the number z = 3 + i2, I could represent it with the coordinates (3,2) and plot it like this:
Since we’re now dealing with a plane, we actually have infinitely many directions that can be thought of as infinity—basically, any direction out from the origin.
So how do we define infinity in the complex plane to allow us to, among other things, take limits involving the point at infinity?
Answer: The Riemann sphere!
The Riemann sphere is a stereographic projection of the complex plane onto the unit sphere at the point (0,0,1). Piccy from Wiki:
So what does this do? Well, for each point A on the complex plane, there exists a line that intersects both the point A and the north pole of the sphere. This line hits the sphere itself at α, point unique to the position of point A in the complex plane—that’s how the plane is “mapped” to the sphere and that unique mapping point is called the “projection” of point A.
The further out you go on the complex plane—that is, the further away from the sphere you go, those projection points get closer and closer to the north pole itself. However, no point is projected directly onto the north pole. So we can think of the north pole as being the image of all the points in the complex plane that are at infinity.
Isn’t that cool? It’s a way to reduce an “infinite number of infinities” to a single point.
We didn’t have time to talk about how we’re going to use it yet, but just that idea is super cool and required a blog post.
Claudia’s Pointless Blog Post of Pointlessness
So I have a metric crapton of pictures on Vaio.
But I think this one is still my favorite.
(Yeah, that’s all I got for today, sorry)
Burfday
Heeeeeeeeeey, look, it’s my birthday.
And the Superbowl.
Woo.
Americans
Here is a super interesting interactive graphic showing how different groups of Americans spend their day.
Examples:
- “At 3 AM, 95% of Americans are sleeping” (guess when I’m typing this)
- “At 8 AM, 23% of Americans are at work” (I’m in that group on T/Th!)
- “At 3:30 PM, 27% of Americans are at work” (I’m in that group on M/W/F!)
- “At 8 PM, 1% of Americans are shopping” (that’s usually when I hit up WinCo/Walmart/whatev)
Click through by activity type or sort by sex, education, age, race, etc.!
Public Service Announcement
A friendly reminder that this man existed and that he was glorious:
You know, in case you forgot.
Happy bday, UI!
The U of I is 125 years old today!
About three days ago all these giant person-sized black boxes started appearing all around campus…they actually looked kind of creepy until they finally put bows/ribbons/decorations on them to make them actually look like presents.
Also, no band today! It’s weird just teaching at 8 AM and then being done for the day.
I should probably do homework though.
jkdfjksdf
[Blogger’s note: this one got lost somehow and never got posted when it was originally supposed to!]
What was your first job like?
My first “job” or my first actual paying job? My first “job” was working as an apprentice at Linda’s art camp over the summer. I could have gotten paid for it, but instead, Linda gave me the option of basically attending the camp for free (as in, getting to do all the art stuff that the campers were doing) in exchange for doing the apprentice work. So I did that.
My first job job was at Wendy’s. It was actually pretty fun. My manager was awesome and I liked working the closing shift.
It’s a typical Sunday, how are you spending it?
Either doing absolutely nothing productive (likely) or working on homework/projects/teaching prep.
What was the happiest day of your life?
My first college graduation (once I knew my GPA, haha). And one specific night in July in 2009…
What was the best decision you ever made?
Quitting UBC. I wouldn’t have gotten this amazing job if I hadn’t done that.
Tell us your go-to “pretend” game as a child.
Coos. All day, all the time.
What email service do you use?
Gmail and Outlook. I still have a Hotmail account out there somewhere, too.
What fandoms would you consider yourself a part of?
Metalocalypse, definitely. Would Achievement Hunter have a fandom? If so, Achievement Hunter.
Do you use anything on your lips? (e.g. Chapstick, gloss, balm, lipstick)
Vaseline. It’s the only stuff that really makes my lips feel better.
How many devices do you own which can access the internet?
Four: iPad, iPod, desktop compy, lappy compy.
Last strong smell you can remember smelling?
I’ve never smelled anything!
If you had to move your birthday to another date, which one would you choose and why?
I like my birthday. Though I guess being born on February 29th would be pretty cool.
Inspiration behind your blog title?
I can’t actually remember when or why I thought up “Eigenblogger.” It fits, though, don’t you think?
If you could spend a rainy day with anyone in the world, who would you choose and why?
Leibniz. Do I really need a reason? Really? Don’t you people know me by now?
Is there a foreign culture that you love?
Meh. I like different parts of different cultures.
Do you have a favorite soft drink?
Nope! Don’t drink ‘em.
More Teaching Stuff
I think my favorite part of teaching is helping the students who really struggle with math/stats.
There’s a huge range of familiarity and comfort with math in 251. That’s likely because you only need two years of high school algebra to take it (or, failing that, MATH 108). The stuff we start with isn’t too conceptually hard or even computationally hard—the mean, median, standard deviation, etc. However, the notation for these calculations seems to be what trips some people up.
Example: I’m sure we’re all familiar with the mean and how it’s calculated. Suppose we had a dataset with values 3, 5, 2, 6, and 7. To find the mean, we add up all the values and then divide by the total number of values, which in this case is 5.
But here’s the formula to do that:
If you’re not familiar with summation notation, this calculation, as simple as it is, might look really intimidating, right? And I’d guess that students who have taken MATH 108 as their highest math class at the U of I haven’t been exposed to summation notation. I know we never saw it in MATH 143 (which is a horrible class in general, but I won’t go into that). Personally, I don’t think it was ever explicitly explained until I took MATH 176 (Discrete Math).
Unfortunately, I’ve heard from a LOT of students who are re-taking STAT 251 or who had taken stats in high school that a lot of the “basic” notation we use right at the beginning of class was never really explained. It was just knowledge that they were assumed to already know, and so was glossed over rather quickly.
That really bothers me.
That’s why my favorite part of teaching is actually helping to make sense of these “everybody should already know this” concepts…these concepts that, in actuality, not everybody already knows. I’ve had a lot of students who have taken stats in the past say that no one has ever explained those things to them and that they really appreciated a basic “here’s what this capital sigma means and how to calculate stuff with it” and other such explanations.
And that makes me happy. Not happy enough to alleviate my anger over the lack of standardization across all sections of STAT 251 at UI, but happy.
Nonficpalooza
I finally had Advanced Nonfiction today!
It’s a Monday-only class!
I’m still in fiction mode and I have no idea what I’m going to write about for my three essays, but I never know what I’m going to write about until it happens, so yay.
Maybe this semester I’ll try an essay about anosmia rather than a fictional story. We’ll see.
MINECRAFT TIME!
Absolute Zero is a Government Conspiracy
Ever have those days where you’re just having the worst time ever for no good reason?
That’s today for me.
So you get an Achievement Hunter survey, ‘cause those guys always cheer me up and it’s my blog and I can do what I want so HA.
Favorite Achievement Hunter crew member
Ray!
Yeah.
3 favorite let’s plays
Let’s Play Worms
Let’s Play Skate 3
Let’s Play WWE2K14
4 favorite Minecraft let’s plays
37 – Clouds
19 – Altar of Pimps
13 & 14 – Find the Tower
3 – Plan G
Favorite Let’s Fail
GTA V: Wrecking Ball
Favorite Animated Adventures
El Pizza Bandito
Favorite Versus
#13 – Ray vs. Gavin (Maaaaaark Nuuuuutt!)
Favorite Rage Quit
Cat Mario is great.
Favorite AHWU
AHWU 191
Favorite Behind the Scenes
Let’s Play WWE ‘13
First AH/RT video you ever watched
Rage Quit – The Impossible Game Level Pack: Level 2
Thank you, Tumblr.
A video you could watch 100 times and never get tired of
Clouds. Definitely.
List any AH/RT merch you own
Tower of Pimps shirt! It’s so soft and pimpy.
What video(s) you look forward to the most each week
I love AHWU and Go!
A let’s play you wish there was a part 2 for
Skate 3.
A game you’d want to see Michael rage quit
Viva Piñata.
Do you ship Mavin?
I’m pretty sure everybody, including Michael and Gavin, ship Mavin to some extent.
WHOA
I AM GOING TO PEE MY PANTS
LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL THING
Midnight Planétarium from Van Cleef & Arpel’s Poetic Astronomy series.
One of the comments on the video: “In addition to telling time by way of a shooting star that rotates along the outmost area of the face, the watch more prominently features an accurate rotation and representation of the Earth and the five other planets visible from here around the sun—Mercury in 88 days, Venus in 224, Earth in a year, Mars in 687 days, Jupiter in 12 years and Saturn in 29. It’s a very complex watch and a true display of supreme watchmaking. But as complicated as the piece is—with 396 parts to the movement—it’s also beautiful.”
FREAKING
CRAP
I really need to get a book (or two) on watchmaking, ‘cause these things are becoming a bit of an obsession.
De Moivre!
Today in Complex Variables we learned about the de Moivre formula. So, like I do every time I learn a formula named after some dude, I had to look up the dude to see who he was.
Abraham de Moivre lived from 1667 – 1754 (another one of those long-lived mathematicians) and was friends with Newton, Halley, and Stirling, among others.
Originally from France, he moved to London and, while there, became pretty obsessed with Newton’s newly-published Principia Mathematica and basically memorized the material.
In fact, he took Newton’s binomial theorem and was able to generalize it to the multinomial theorem. This work (plus the fact that he was friends with Newton, I’m sure) got him membership in the Royal Society in 1697.
[And—I have to mention it, I’m sorry—he was one of the dudes on Newton’s little crony committee that was put together to hear the plagiarism charges against Leibniz in 1712.]
De Moivre’s famous formula originated (apparently) from this derivation in 1707:
which he later generalized to this form:
Euler proved it using his own Euler’s formula, so that pretty much cinched it. The reason de Moivre’s formula is so important is because it creates quite a nice connection between complex numbers and trigonometry.
Nifty, eh?
Book Review: Dune (Herbert)
Hey, so…remember that book list? I finally finished another book on there, haha. SHUT UP, SCHOOL IS ALL-CONSUMING.
Today’s book is Dune by Frank Herbert.
Have I read this before: Indeed! Way back in 7th grade in our “advanced” English group.
Review: There’s…a lot more to this book than I remember, haha. It’s hard for me to get past the sci-fi in here, which is funny, ‘cause Dune is pretty much known for how hugely it contributed to the genre. I do really like how Herbert seamlessly incorporates all the sci-fi/technology aspects into a story that’s really about power/relationships/family. But for my personal taste, it’s still a liiiiiitle too sci-fi. Not that I didn’t like it or didn’t appreciate it, it’s just not my usual style of book. I did enjoy it, though, especially now that I could understand it better than I could when I was 12, haha.
Favorite part: I have a soft spot for the Paul vs. Jamis fight, just because that’s the scene we “re-created” (in the loosest sense of the word) for our 7th grade reading report. Bloopers and everything.
Rating: 6/10
Wha?
So I was scrolling through someone’s Tumblr this afternoon and I came upon this gif:
Is that the Kibbie Dome? I mean, I know it’s kind of “generic indoor sports arena,” but that really looks like the Kibbie Dome steps.
If so, that’s hilarious. The blog on which I found this has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything remotely related to the U of I…I think the person is in Florida. And it’s mainly an Achievement Hunter blog, not a gif or “funny pics” blog.
Haha, it made my night.
Mathymaths
Do you like math?
Do you like fiction?
DO YOU LIKE THEM BOTH??
Go here! It’s a pretty comprehensive list of math-related fiction. If you so desire, you can search by keyword, genre, topic (calculus, chaos, fractals, statistics, etc.), motif, or rating in terms of literary value or math involvement.
Just a quick little blog today!
SurveyevruS
1. What do you think is the most unique thing about your generation?
It’s a more specific time span than the whole generation, but I think people born between, say, 1985 and 1995 are unique in the sense that they didn’t grow up with all this insane technology that we’ve got now (internet access everywhere, iProducts, big n’ fast computers, etc.) but we were young enough as these things were introduced to adapt to them in stride…or at least, more in stride than kids who grew up with the technologies already present. I think we’re lucky.
2. Do you speak out as often as you should?
Nope.
3. How often are you tough and unreasonable?
Not very often. I don’t like conflict.
4. Do you believe that sometimes you learn more from a failure than a success?
Well, I pretty much never succeed, so I guess I’d have to learn more from all the failures.
5. Do you feel that you always have to win?
It’d be nice, but I’m me, so it won’t happen.
6. Do you think tradition matters?
If it’s still meaningful to the people carrying out the tradition, yes.
7. Do you tend to root for the underdog?
Actually, no (at least in games/fictional situations). If there’s somebody who is on top/winning, I usually root for them to keep their streak going.
8. Have you ever felt that you want to exceed your parents’ successes?
Eh.
9. Of all the cartoon characters that you know of, which is most like you?
Tina from Bob’s Burgers, both in appearance and attitude towards butts.
10. What was the last event or situation that got you really excited?
School starting!!!
11. How old were you when you started working and what was your first job?
Are we talking like a technical job where I got paid with money? If so, I was 19 and worked at Wendy’s. If not, then I was like 13 or so when I worked at Linda’s Art Camp in exchange for free art supplies. That job rocked.
12. Tell us about your grandparents.
My grandpas are unfortunately both dead. My grandma on my mom’s side is evil. But my grandma on my dad’s side is still rockin’ in California.
13. Do you procrastinate or are you usually on top of situations?
I’ll answer this question later.
14. What would others say about you?
“AHHHHHHHHHH GET IT AWAY!!!”
15. Do you believe in life on other planets?
It’s out there somewhere.
16. When was the last time that you were called too thin?
PFFT. Never.
17. Do you work out? Have you ever joined a gym and quit almost immediately?
Yes. Though gyms are super boring now that I prefer walking 9+ miles at a time instead.
18. Do you feel that you utilize all your intelligence in every situation?
Haha, have you met me?
Don’t have a fun title, sorry
This is beautiful and rather haunting.
NEERNEERNEER
Wow, nothing beats hearing nearly an hour-long conversation about how hopeless/useless/manipulative/fake I am.
I’m so angry right now I’m not quite sure what to do.
only capitalists capitalize
There are few things that are more hilarious than dubbed infomercials. These two are great.
The old lady at 1:05, oh my god.
Yes, I think the farting sound effects are funny. I’m an adult.
Eigenblogger 