May 2007 Archives
Two imposters caught in two days! I am sincerely impressed.
I am particularly tickled by the fact that this imposter claimed to be a humanities graduate student, trying to provide an "interdisciplinary perspective" on theoretical high-energy physics. Inform me if you have any idea what that could possibly mean.
Brood XIII of the cicadas are just starting to mature. They are an absolutely fascinating insect. Every 17 years they come out en masse for a week or two before laying their eggs and dying. The insects in this brood are apparently approximately 3-4 cm in length and make a cacaphonous sound. They are so loud that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has rescheduled their outdoor performance so that it will not overlap with the cicadas. But the most remarkable fact of all concerns the duration of their lifecycle. Different species have different lifespans, but 13 and 17 years are common. Why is this? 13 and 17 are prime numbers, so their lifespan will not overlap with the lifecycle of any shorter-lived predator.
Sorry for my vapid postings recently: I have too much stuff to do. But here's yet another...
Since nothing happens in Hyde Park, the UChicago Maroon has practically nothing interesting to write about. To fulfill my fix of college newspaper, I consequently must go to other schools. The Crimson and Daily Princetonian are pretty good. The Stanford Daily also recently impressed me with this article. Only at Stanford...
Update: Apparently my claim that this would only happen at Stanford is false, as this article from The Crimson confirms:
Murky Past Trails Man to Harvard
I guess the truth is that Chicago appears just miserable enough to most outsiders to keep all the imposters away...
Courtesy of the Math Club listhost:
Why did the mathematician name his dog “Cauchy”?
Because he left a residue at every pole.
What is a topologist?
Someone who cannot distinguish between a doughnut and a coffee cup.
Why didn’t Newton discover group theory?
Because he wasn’t Abel.
What’s yellow, linear, normed and complete?
A Banananach space.
What do you call a young Eigensheep?
A lamb, duh!
What is a compact city?
It’s a city that can be guarded by finitely many nearsighted policemen.
Why can’t you grow wheat in Z/6Z?
It’s not a field.
What’s the value of a contour integral around Western Europe?
Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe.
ADDENDUM: Actually, there ARE some Poles in Western Europe, but they are removable!
Today the dining hall served "Chicken Lo-Mien." I guess serving chicken faces, rather than meat from the rest of the body, cuts down on costs.
Only at this school would the "Kick Coke off Campus" campaign be countered by a "Keep Coke on Campus" campaign (run by economics students, I'm sure). And definitely only at this school would the "Keep Coke on Campus" campaign be purchasing ad space on Facebook that states, "100% Self-Funded - Soda debate is not where your student activity fees should should be going to. That's why Keep Coke on Campus is 100% funded by third party sources." You would think that a.) they would have something more important to say like, oh, I don't know, an argument, for example; and b.) you would think that they wouldn't make their "sources" of funding so painfully obvious. Take a guess... I'll bet that you guess correctly.
That being said, I am marginally in favor of their side, but only under some assumptions of whose validity I am uncertain.
On Amazon.com you can purchase a copy of Frank Swetz's Socialist Mathematics Education for $125.96. I thought that was ironic in so many ways.
"For decades before that, physicists in the United States and Europe had leapfrogged one another with bigger, more expensive and, inevitably, fewer of these machines, which get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, the smaller and smaller things they can see."
--The New York Times
Q: What's the value of a contour integral around Western Europe?
A: Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe.
Item #112: "Carhenge! It’s Stonehenge, only made out of cars! Don’t you understand? [10 points]"
Item # 252: "While at Carhenge, drive the earth into the sun! [1,000,000,000 points; 2 points for effort]"
Item #59: "Pat Robertson’s Age Defying Protein Pancakes. [4 points]"
You can read all about them on the website of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Item #265: "Tired of being sexiled? Why not convert a study room in a University library into your new dorm room? Be sure to bring your original dorm furniture and provide some homey touches including your mini-fridge, international shot glass collection, föm pillow, stuffed animals, and the one poster that makes it a real crib. G [63 points]"
The U of C's annual "Scav Hunt", the world's largest scavenger hunt has begun! I shall post the list once it's published online. Meanwhile, feast yourself on last year's 302 challenges:
Update: The official 2007 list:
Remind me never to become an economist...
I have been living in the Reg for days on end, working on a disastrously overambitious project for SOSC. It's kind of interesting, but what's more interesting is what I have learned about urban economics and the role of modeling in economics.
I've become interested in crime, gentrification, and urban matters, so the natural course has been to build a toy economic model, generate some hypotheses, and then test them by doing some regressions on crime and census data. Naturally, I've been investigating the discipline of so-called "urban economics." It's a fairly small subfield to be sure, but the vast majority of its theoretical foundation (from what I can tell from my humble researches) is centered upon a single model created in 1964. The model is incredibly simple, and I think I can understand the basics with nothing more than my six and a half weeks of the first quarter of UChicago economics. Practically every other model in urban economics is simply a derivative of this single primative abstraction. It's really amazing that someone hasn't created something more sophistocated.
I suppose all of our urban problems are really just that simple, right?
