More Tales from the University

Sorry about the blogging-free week. My evil twin went all emo and used up the week without consulting me.

1. I didn't get to teach calculus. The Topologist made it back from his doctor's appointment in plenty of time, so no one got to see me masterfully demonstrate how to find the Taylor series of natural log of x and then the interval of convergence of the series. No one got to see me describe why the remainder theorem is important -- even though we don't actually assign any problems on it or put it on the test.


2. Biology continues to be awesome. So far there has been no homework. There will be no homework. Hard decision for the premeds, as State U. Med. doesn't require any calculus* for admission: Do the premeds take a year of Real Calculus (required for the biology major) and major in biology (my pre-med and pre-pharm classmates report that none of their biology classes have any homework)? Or do they avoid calculus and major in psychology? (Psychology is well-accepted as the easiest major on campus; students with low cognitive function due to serious, traumatic brain injuries are advised to major in psychology.)


3. Note my restraint in not making a snarky comment about how no wonder more girls major in biology because it is the lamest and easiest science.


4. I've been put on a task at work that seems doomed. We held a meeting on the background, and it was pretty clear to me that there was no communication happening because everyone at the meeting was from a different discipline, and we had no jargon in common. One of the things that makes me a bad employee is that I will not blindly do stupid things just because I've been told to. Instead of writing the code (that I have been assigned) to glue together some modeling code with some other code via a statistical method that I believe is being used incorrectly, I am arranging a meeting with my statistics professor from a year and a half ago, as his research is focused on this particular technique and the appropriate uses thereof.

*Pre-med requirements: 16 semester hours of chemistry, eight of physics, eight of mammalian biology, six in English, and 52 credit hours of electives.