Yesterday our Math 33B professor wrote a function on the board and then spontaneously decided that it was time to demonstrate that our choice in variable names didn't matter (I still don't understand why he would even consider that students with 3+ years of experience with calculus wouldn't know this.) He erased what he wrote and replaced it with the following:
And speaking of elementary, Monday's Math 61 lecture was all about sets - a concept that always seemed completely self-explanatory to me since it was formally taught to us all in 8th grade. Our professor was showing the class the notation for the null set, Ø : "Does that look like a zero with a slash through it? It's not a zero through the slash through it. It's actually a Norwegian letter or something. I think it's pronounced euuuuugh."After class there was some crazy Chrisitian evangelist telling everyone on Bruinwalk that we are going to hell. This isn't hyperbole - he was brandishing a flag that read DON'T GO TO HELL! and on the opposite side, SATAN'S CHILDREN: followed by a list of everyone. I couldn't help but think of sets - according to this man, hypocritical Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, pornographers, and sodomites were a subset of SATAN'S CHILDREN. Nothing I read made me an element of this subset, but the list dragged on and on so I undoubtedly am. I wish I had bothered to read the rest of the list because it was hilarious.
There was something envigorating about the whole experience. I felt an odd combination of deep appreciation for freedom of speech, shocked disbelief that some people are crazy enough to actually believe that 99% of the world is going to hell, and sympathy for the real Christians who have to put up with this guy. And of course the endless amusement of being reminded that people like this regularly come and preach at college campuses and actually expect to convince anyone of ANYTHING.
