(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

I am camping out in the maths department today to do my 251 assignment. It's worth a measley five percent of my final mark, and in the last two and a half hours I've spent SIGNIFICANTLY more time on just the first question than I did revising for a test I had in another class yesterday worth 20%. I fucking hate this lame piecemeal assessment.

I aim to be here until I finish and then hand it in whole hours early, it being not due 'til 9 am tomorrow. Probably it'll take me another six hours, tops, so I should even get to sleep tonight! I plan on keeping myself awake and, um, intense through the simple expedient of buying three boxes of muesli bars - not the healthy kind - a box of those fruit string things, three peaches, four nectarines and two large bags of M&Ms. Possibly overkill, but hey, I'll be haaappy. I also picked up a couple of bottles of TAB, which turns out to taste mostly like creaming soda, except fizzier. It also reminds me intermittently of L&P. This may be the first energy drink I can consume! But I haven't cracked it open yet and I'm going to leave it until I really, really need it, because I don't want to turn into my crazy mother who just about injects caffeine into her veins every morning.

Anyway, I took a short break about quarter of an hour ago and in the atrium I saw a flyer advertising tutoring for a COSC paper. The last sentence? "If you are having a lot of trouble with this course, it is good to get help now then fail the whole course at the end!"

And they say science students are smarter.

Comments

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I've actually never used a slide rule! The most techy thing I've ever used is, like, trig tables in some math class way back in the day when we were learning how they did it back before calculators. Oh, and blocks and things of course.

they have some quite cool computer programmes though. MATLAB and maple.

[chattycheese.livejournal.com]

My father seems to think that it is his job in life to educate my generation about slide rules. He's actually a bit obsessive about it. *le sigh* :D

Oh, MATLAB. You make me squee a little, sometimes. Especially when I've run off with my father's copy of it. ^^

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Aw, but that's sweet! Heh.

It is such a handy little programme - I'm just starting to learn to use it and getting on rather well, although some stuff leaves a little to be desired. On my last assignment we had to do 100 iterations of something, so I (and, I assume, most people) wrote a script to do it using a loop, but I couldn't get it to give me a nice tidy set of results so I ended up reading a list of results for each iteration - but I have a friend who wrote a (hugely fucking complicated) script to do the same thing, but made it incredibly flexible AND got it to give results in a nice line of "the result was true x times and false y times." OTOH, he's actually a programming student, so what the hey.