The Topic of Great Randomness

[Angel_Star]

Yuuuuck, AP tests.
I had AP Chemistry today. That was a nightmare/death/evil/everything awful in the world. English Language & Comp is tomorrow...which I didn't worry about until I saw that I er...misplaced my book that I was going to study with. So, yeah. Pray that I remember everything...oh, wait, I didn't learn anything this year. So, hope that I get really good at making up answers. Our midterm was an old AP test (though only a portion of it), and I got a 5 on that. So...I can only hope for the best.

Prom was awesome. =) J dances!! lol. He was so much fun. My boyfriend rocks.

And I really don't have all that much interesting stuff to talk about, so I'm gonna go study or something.

[eowyngirl]

Emi: That's awesome that you have a boyfriend now! And him being gentlemanly is definitely a plus.

Not much has been going on in my life...hang on, did I just type that?? I guess I'm so busy--and will remain that busy--that I don't realize how busy I am sometimes. I've been having choir, band, choir, U.S. Constitution test (105/115! Best grade in my class!), studying for Missouri Constitution test, science test, studying for next science test, then finals, then D.C. on a band trip, then Poland and Germany on a choir trip, then summer school for Personal Finance and Driver's Ed, the summer musical, then summer youth theatre, then band camp and possibly a Harry Potter conference (Terminus??), then band camp, then back to school. And next year I'm having three electives and two AP classes, so I will have no free time until possibly next summer sometime. If I'm lucky. What on earth have I gotten myself into....?

[kk]

I've been busy also...

I got a job, though! (which some see as abnormal, seeing as I'm 14)

I work at my church now on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, arranging the powerpoint slides for the next Sunday. It's fun, yet occasionally tedious...and the person who supposed to assist me this week didn't show, but that was OK. It turned out fine.

And I finally finished a math problem that took me four days to finish! (yay)

I'm really not good at word problems involving linear equations in two variables...

[Emi]

KK: One not really word but word to describe your math problem. UGH. Yeah, I'm not one to like word problems and when it has to deal with linear equations.... that's even worst. Oh and congrats on the job. Sounds like it's fun to do. I wish I could get paid just to make a slideshow!!

eowyngirl: Thanks!!! I know it's a very good plus! Seems like you're running a very busy filled life. My life consists of school work and home. Haha.

Okay... And I'm sick. Once again. Is there ever a time I'm not sick??? I just want to know peoples secrets to not getting a cold?!?!!

And I have to work. So not cool, especially when your nose is on the verge of running right in the middle of an order. It's horrible. And I need the money so I don't want to call out!!! Ah, this is not cool.

So yesterday was like one of my worst days ever. I woke up so late... I usually wake up at 6:00. But yesterday I woke up at 6:45. Luckily I took a shower the night before and somehow I got myself ready and out the door in ten minutes. Not really sure.. but I was so tired and sick for the whole day. I hated it. And lastly to top it off... my cat attacked me last night. Deep gash. No kidding.

Alright, I need to go... before I start not making any sense.

Dai all.

[kk]

You're cat attacked you? Ouch!

And thanks! The job's not as easy as it sounds...though it usually is. Although sometimes, I have to copy songs out of really old hymnals and put them to PowerPoint, and the computer they have at the church is basically useless (it freezes up for a while sometimes if I use words like "thou" or "lest" or "ne'er" or other words you might find in old hymnals).

As for secrets to not getting sick: don't as me. I've already been sick six times this year...

[EricG1793]

Originally posted by Emi:
I just want to know peoples secrets to not getting a cold?!?!!

1. Wash your hands before you leave your house. Any germs you get from your house will get all over your school stuff and follow you everywhere.

2. Wash your hands before you leave the school. Schools are GERM CITY.... Don't take them all home with you! My teacher has a bottle of hand sanitizer, and I sanitize my hands at the last possible minute before I grab my backpack and go to my bus.

Those are the "normal" things, but there are more things that I personally do.

3. I often hold my breath while I'm walking in the hallway so I don't breath in what other people are breathing out.

4. In the winter, I sleep with my window open and a fan on, with no heat, bundled up really well under the blankets. This way, the dry heat doesn't bother my nose or throat. Also, the fan keeps things circulating so a) my exhalations aren't lingering near my head to be breathed in again, and b) dust doesn't settle as easily. (This also keeps the room cleaner and smelling better. )

5. I sanitize, with Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, surfaces that I frequently touch, such as my laptop keyboard, the family computer's keyboard and mouse, door knobs, etc.


Out of those five points, I'd say that 2, 3, and 4 are the most important.

I've had a few days that I felt a little tired/mild headache/sore throat, but I went to school anyway; I didn't submit to the sickness by sitting around at home all day. Next day, I felt fine.

There you go: My secrets to not having a single absence from school due to sickness (Only one absence, the day after we adopted the dog).

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Originally posted by kk:
Although sometimes, I have to copy songs out of really old hymnals and put them to PowerPoint

That's enough of a leadin for me to plug Lilypond here. :-) Lilypond is an free open source program (part of the GNU project) for typesetting music. You write the music using text, instead of clicking on the staff. For example, the start of Bach's Little Fugue in g might look like:

g4 d' bes4. a8 | g8 bes a g fis a d,4

a-g are the notes. ' and , mean to go up or down an octave: if it's within a fourth, you don't need to specify. 4 and 8 are quarter and eight notes, and 4. is a dotted quarter. | is a bar line -- but it doesn't render in the output. It just counts so that it can warn you if you didn't put enough notes in a measure.

I'm currently transcribing BWV 543 for lilypond: it's fun to figure out how to render everything properly. It can also render to MIDI, so you can hear if you wrote the notes correctly.

You can download it from http://lilypond.org/ if you want to play with it. Let me know what you think, if you try it out.

[Tuttle]

I've both heard and seen good things about lilypond. Also coming out of it. The music comes out very pretty usually.

If you're afraid of using text to describe stuff, it actually isn't nearly that bad. I suggest learning how to do this to some degree even if you like your gui. For formal paper and formal projects being able to turn to LaTeX is very nice.

Lilypond does work much better than the alternatives anyways - even the commercial ones (Finale). If you can learn how to use it it'll probably work out well for you.

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Secrets to not getting sick?
-Stay upbeat when sick. If you start getting depressed you'll get sick again much easier.
-Eat healthy/ excersize of course.
-I actually don't like the over obsessing washing of hands. You're going to be exposed to germs. Let your immune system handle them, you don't want to weaken your immune system so when its hit by something which gets through it hurts more. Of course if big things like the flu are going around its good to stay away, but obsessing seems to hurt more than help.
-Stay away from smokers!

The first and last failed for me this last year and it really hurt my grades as well as my body. I'm going to need all summer to make some dent in the physical issues and probably dropped far enough in GPA I can't make my goal of being invited to pme (pi mu epsilon, math honor society). Of course the professors like me so if I can pull it up enough then the professors may suggest me to get in by the time I graduate. I know I won't be able to do well enough to even be eligable to Upsilon Pi Epsilon (CS honor society), so that one's not a goal (I'm too much a theoretical person).
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The book club Garrett posted awhile ago and the current book has made be sad I'm still working somewhat. I'm basically taking today off and starting working again tomorrow. It also made me really annoyed again that Theory of Computation isn't being offered next year. Though multiple people keep suggesting I should see if its being offered as a grad class. I don't think it is though. I also need to look up how the not being able to take the same class as an undergrad class and a grad class works. One grad class has basically two classes that are the same class (split into more advanced one and less advanced one). The less advanced one is closer to the undergrad one, but the more advanced one also has the same name. If it is able to be taken then I could take that though. I've heard it has basically the same as Theory and there's no issue with taking that instead if I get credit.

My professor for Fundementals of Computer Science's favorite book is Godel, Escher, Bach. and he was an amazing professor and the class was both fun and easy. I want more theory classes, all these programming classes are making me do bad . It also was hilarious to go to his office hours to get the incorrectly graded homework fixed (I worked in ways the TAs weren't expecting), get the reply "Oh, I've never thought about approaching it that way before" and then when he noticed I answered the question that was moved to the next assignment telling him that I had actually been learning a bunch of the stuff a few days before he lectured because it came up in discussions and him complementing my choice of boyfriends. Jono was happy he was remembered by one of his favourite professors after not haven taking classes with him for years.

Also I'm totally being slightly annoyed that if I go to read Godel, Escher, Bach now I'm going to be poked with that I need to read Stranger. I want to read that one too, but Garrett put me in a mood to read the other. Glare .

I do need to read stranger though. I mean, I'm even going to be living with someone next year who sometimes describes his religion as Martian.

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Ooh, another church which uses powerpoint. The service I go to uses powerpoint for lyrics, everything you say, etc. It's the saturday service for the church and is the alternative service. By which I mean music is guitar, bass, african drum. It's actually a really nice service though.


Also, yay for having a job

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Cats can be painful. That's one thing they're good at being. Along with cute.

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Don't let me get started on math. I don't want to scare you guys away from the field. But I've found the best way to be good at math is actually how you approach it. I have always approached math as it being a puzzle, it being something that can actually be fun. Being innately good at it does help, as does being taught well, but that can help just as much. Thinking of school as fun often makes it easier to do well (though not necessarily on tests/exams unfortunately).

Math totally is fun though, I don't care what you say. It's fun to take a weekend to learn all about the abstract algebra concept fields.

I actually think math is taught extremely wrong in schools. That you should start more general, at young ages get formal logic, and work from there. It makes things make more sense. You need to know how to do proofs by the time you leave high school, because it actually can make a difference in how you think, and yet very few schools cover proofs (beyond geometrical proofs which aren't enough). Along with that, students aren't inspired to ask questions, to get into the material, to actually learn in larger degrees as it is taught. There's something inspiring about completing a proof even a simple one, that should be put into math earlier. It is more what math is than arithmatic. I know a majority of people don't want to know real math, but everyone should be introduced to at least simple proofs. At least know things like how to do a proof by induction. Because those types of things help even things like debate. It's about how you think. Math teaches you to be precise, to know what you're talking about. Like Randall says, only math teachers can be certain about what they're teaching.


Schooling really has a lot of issues. I really want to end up homeschooling my child(ren) if/when I have some. I had a lot of issues in public school and homeschooled people generally seem to come out better. I want to teach people to learn. That is missing in public schools really, and I see it in most/all the homeschoolers I have met. I want to learn. I want to get better. I don't want to stop learning. And it seems like this is a good part of why people think I feel like a homeschooler. (You could argue I was kinda. In that I forced myself to be a homeschooler as well as a student in public school). What you should learn in school is the basics of what you need to know, but by the time you're out of college its more important to know how to learn (depending on profession), because if you can learn, you can do what you want as stuff changes around you. Yet it feels like very people learn this. I've heard math majors in college often find it easier to get jobs than a bunch of other majors because they can learn how to pick up any field, because its much harder to get through math than other majors by memorizing rather than thinking and learning. I don't want it to be necessary for people to go through math, because not everyone is appropriate for such a field. There really should be a way that people can be taught how to learn instead of how to memorize. It does require some effort from the student, but the teachers can put a lot more in than they do (as a general rule, there are some amazing teachers out there).

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Okay, got a little rambley there, but hey, its ToGR.


Also random question, why do people dislike math so much? I know its unpopular and I'm weird in my liking it, but I'm curious what people dislike. (mostly actively dislike rather than prefer something else. Prefering something else seems completely reasonable, but the active dislike seems much stronger in math than sciences/engineering, and much stronger in the sciences than humanities.)

[kk]

Garret: actually (and thankfully) I only have to copy the lyrics out of the hymnals, and not so much the music.

For most of the songs, they have the sheet music itself pre-scanned into the PC.

[Emi]

Tuttle: why do people dislike math so much?

Um, part of the reason for me is that I usually end up in the "dumb" class where the majority of the class "can't understand" what the teacher is teaching us, so I end up finishing the work early... and staring off in to space while my teacher reteaches the class about a certain topic. And he assigns us homework... but when it comes to actually handing it in we dont because we end up going over in class because no one "got it". Waste of an hour of my life! I don't even get a grade for it!

Gr, that's why math and I don't get along. I get bored easily in that class... and I do horrible on quizzes even though I understand it. I have wrong-numbers syndrome. My fingers like to punch in the wrong numbers in the calculator. Even when I write out the problem.... I still mess it up. Don't ask me how. Haha.

Thanks for all the tips on staying healthy. I'll try my best to do most of them. Now I must go and avoid getting attacked my cat again.

(I'm not kidding. She really does attack.)
Pic of my scratch... Hee hee

[kk]

Tuttle: I do like math! It's one of my favorite subjects, and it's fun. It just takes a while to solve the problems, sometimes...

...ESPECIALLY when I have my dad looking over my shoulder, saying "No! You divide 45 by 3, not the other way around! That stupid car was going 15mph more than the other!" He then proceeds to scrawl something unintelligeble on my notebook, and claim that it's the answer to my math problem. I can't understand his handwriting in the least...

And my church is trying to stop using PowerPoint. We're apparently transitioning to something called "EasyWorship" which is supposedly easier than our PowerPoint methods...though it doesn't let you add as cool transitions. It can put a video behind the text though, which is awesome.

Emi: Ouch, that looks like it hurt! Put antiseptic on it or something...

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Originally posted by Tuttle:
If you're afraid of using text to describe stuff, it actually isn't nearly that bad. I suggest learning how to do this to some degree even if you like your gui.

Another good reason is that if you do version control on your text project, you can look at the diffs between versions and see what changed. That doesn't work so well with, say, Crystal Reports *grrr*.

Also random question, why do people dislike math so much?

You're talking to the wrong person here. :-) When I took CS51, Discrete Mathematics, my exams and assignments probably earned me a C -- but I got an A, because the teacher knew that I Got It. I learned relational algebra in that class, long before my first database work, but I internalized it thoroughly enough that it took me next to no time to pick up SQL.
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Originally posted by kk:
Garret: actually (and thankfully) I only have to copy the lyrics out of the hymnals, and not so much the music.

For most of the songs, they have the sheet music itself pre-scanned into the PC.

I figured you meant the lyrics, but it was still a good opening for lilypond. I think I first learned lilypond so that I could re-set the music and lyrics in the weekly songbook in a consistent font and style. I got to the point where I could do it in a reasonable amount of time, but never actually took on the project. Maybe in the fall, when the girls start RCIC and we begin attending regularly again...

[spyells]

I've never been good in math. I've always hated the subject because no matter how hard I tried or studied I never understood it. I'm very good in History and English, which is why my dream is to become a journalist and writer. But math is too complex. I can do up to eighth grade level. So I can do some Algebra, basic math, and a little Geometry. But when it gets to the harder levels even in Algebra I just don't get it. And even when I understand what the teacher was teaching in class, I always forget it on the test. That's why I dislike math.

[EricG1793]

Last year, I had Emi's situation.... I was in the "dumb" class. Since I did very well in Math last year, I got placed in the most advanced pre-algebra class this year, next step down from Algebra 1 (A.K.A. the Spice Class). We're doing pretty much the same stuff as the Algebra class... and I had been doing well.... The last thing I did well at was slope. But now that we're in to calculating intercepts, slope-intercept form, and the lovely y=m(x)+b.... My brain just stopped right there. And now that I'm just, just getting a grip on that stuff... we're starting polynomials. Here we go again.

But the good thing about all this is that even if I don't 100% get it all this year, it's a preview for next year. We're covering everything that the Algebra class is covering, so it'll all be review next year.

Spyells: Geometry confuses me too, but not as much as what we've been doing lately....

[kk]

y=m(x)+b? Fun!...and a whole lot easier than what I'm doing...but still, fun!

I used to do some geometry in my spare time. I didn't think it was that bad, and it was more interesting than what I had been doing at the time...it was a while ago, when I was still multiplying fractions...oh, I remember I used to hate multiplying fractions!

Hmm...

That was the year that my dad got weirded out just 'cause I started doodling in pythagorean theorem when I was bored...