Beefless

Starting this quarter, every Thursday the dining halls are beefless - which basically means all of the beef is replaced with turkey or chicken. I guess the die-hard beef fans are upset about this but I welcome anything that begets a little variety. Though I'm not entirely sure they're accomplishing much when it's only one day per week, and they're just substituting meats.

It's almost fourth week already - I think I've got midterms coming up but I don't know when. I haven't written about my classes yet so I guess I will:

Math 151A - Applied Numerical Methods - I love this class. If you've ever become disillusioned by your math classes then you ought to take some numerical analysis. For example, after elementary calculus you know how to integrate a few pretty functions in a few special cases - that's great, but real life rarely works out like the questions in your calc textbook do. In real life, you don't get functions, you get data. Or approximations of functions - and even if you have these there's a huge chance you won't be able to manipulate or analyze them by hand. Numerical analysis is all about how to cope with this sort of problem - in particular, with computers. I'm not the hugest fan of the professor, nor the TA, who spends most of his time advising us about programming in Python. Which would be nice and all if only this were a programming class - but it's not and I wish he'd discuss the actual numerical analysis a little more. The programming required is rudimentary at best, especially since we can use MATLAB.

PIC 10C - Advanced Programming - I find it funny that inheritance and other fundamental topics in object-oriented programming are taught in a class with the word "advanced" in its title. I suppose it's not that necessary in C++, but with Java these are always the first things you talk about. Fortunately this has permitted me to tune out a little, and made this class very relaxing so far. This week we switched to C# - I guess we are working towards making some nice little Windows applications, which should be handy. But of course we have to start with basic syntactical issues - and lucky for me C# is even more similar to Java than C++ is. It amuses me that writing one program in Java ever allows me to breeze through so much of this class.

Physics 1C - I hate this class. I come in every day and tell myself: "Self, this is the day you will stay awake through an entire lecture" - but it never happens and within five minutes I'm out cold. My notes are consequently a little disjointed - fragments of the second half of the past few weeks' lectures. Incidentally, I strangely recall saying most of this about 1B - physics classes must not be my thing. We'll see how the midterm goes...

Math 131A - Analysis - Another theoretical class in the same vein as 115A. This one starts with everything we've taken for granted since elementary school; for the first three weeks we have been building up from simple set theory into constructing number systems. Like defining what it means to add integers. Proving things that we have used without thinking for 75% of our lives. The professor insists that the actual analysis will start soon. I have grown to appreciate this type of material much more through 115A - it's nice to see where all of this came from.