Icosahedron

I went this morning to write my formal languages exam. It was quite easy. Not only was 90% of it absolutely straightforward, 24% of it was multiple choice. To the left by the way is the answer to one of the questions. In short, I vaporised this one. Yay! Just one more tomorrow, and it’s an easy one. So now I just have to find a job.

I’m also going to practice more on the piano, and read lots of books. Ins’t that cool? I also might take a course and I have about eight days to decide (I think). Maybe not.

Near exams my room always gets a bit disorganized. Okay, it’s a disaster area. Today I’m going to make it better, but where to start? I’m standing here and I think the mess has reached fractal level. Within every mess there’s a smaller mess, ad infinitum. So I just can’t start anywhere. It’s so bad that if you clean it, it looks worse. That’s how bad it is. Ah well. I won’t post pictures.

My last two exams are easy and then I have my summer! But I have to find a job. I need some $$$ and I’m quickly running out of what I have, ’tis most unfortunate indeed. I need money for lots of things, but first and foremost I need it to live and to buy furniture when I move away. So I’m going to go searching after I finish my last exam. I think I’m going to take a course this semester (another $500+ for that :( :( ). Oh well. I still have a little bit of money left. And lots of PC points. That will help.

BTW, my exams are formal languages (theory of automata, regular languages, CFGs, and TMs), and vocal music appreciation. Wish Me Luck.

For my hundredth post I give you my results on the complex analysis exam! I don’t know exactly how I did but I can say I did well. Surprisingly, there were no questions on evaluating real integrals with the residue theorem. Kinda sad, because I studied most for that part.

Other than that…well, life is ok, whatever.

I’ve finished studying for complex analysis, which is tomorrow. I can’t believe I didn’t just study earlier. Why do I always have to do things the hard way? It feels so frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I just started (a few weeks ago) taking Seroquel and I feel a lot different now. I can pay attention to one task and filter out the other tasks lingering in my mind like flashing lights in the dark.

I feel a bit ill. I’m so stressed out sometimes that I just feel a bit ill. Do you ever get that?

Over the past four days I went over Cauchy’s Theorem, Cauchy’s integral formula and variants, series representations and Laurent series, classification of singularities (pole = only finitely many of the coefficients of the inverse powers are nonzero, essential singularity = infinitely many of the coefficients of the inverse powers are nonzero, removable = can be represented as a Taylor series) and finding residues. After that the residues are used in the Residue theorem and the calculation of definite improper integrals such as and . Essentially the entire course in four days. No I’m not manic - it’s normal.

So enough of that. I am a tad scared. Honestly, I think if I lived back in the early days in small tribes I wouldn’t even have a problem. I could probably live like that without medication. Today’s society is just so fscked up I think. Everyone at the university just seems so tired, especially the profs. Everyone is so driven and stressed out by grant applications and form filling and a whole truckload of other crap.

What’s wrong with it all? I dunno.

Maybe later I’ll write a post on how to evaluate weird looking integrals. Maybe.

So, I did pretty well for this course. There were six questions, summarised as follows (obviously I don’t remember the details):

1. Prove that multiplication by elementary matrices is equivalent to row operations in Gaussian elimination.

2. For a real inner product space with inner product (.,.) and induced norm |.|, prove the identity 2(|x|^2 + |y|^2) = |x-y|^2 + |x+y|^2

3. Find the normalised and unnormalised QR decomposition of a matrix.

4. a) Find the change of basis matrix and its inverse for a given vector space and two bases.
b) Prove one norm is equal to another norm, given two norms.
c) Calculate the norm of some linear map.

5. Prove that if p(x) is a polynomial and h is an eigenvalue of the matrix A, then p(h) is an eigenvalue of p(A)

6. Diagonalize a matrix.

Surprisingly no question on singular value decomposition! Not hard, although I didn’t 4b and only partially did 4c. But tomorrow’s complex analysis, also at 0930, will be a bit harder. Shit.

At 0930 I will start writing an exam that will consist of questions on matrix decompositions and normed spaces. I am quite tired now. I took my Seroquel not too long ago and I am very drowsy now, so good night! Tomorrow I will tell all of you how it went. I’m a bit scared.

This is the new theme for my blog. Isn’t it great? Even I’ll admit that it’s a tad hideous but it’s growing on me. I’m strange. Anyways, I don’t have too much time so I’ll write something with content later.

I’ve finished my presentation on my simulation. I managed to find a retractable antenna-type pointer (I hate laser pointers) by using…an antenna. At the Source there are these retractable antennas that make _perfect_ pointers, and they even have red tips for easy visibility! Down with lasers!

Now I probably won’t be able to post much. Um, I’m a little worried about my exams. My two hardest are next week. I truly hate exams. But oh well.

Just one more semester after this one. I’m holding on…sometimes I feel lost, but I’m holding on. Send me some good thoughts and vibes. I could use a few.

This is why I’ve not had much time to write. That, and the fact that this new WordPress interface is too new.

But I digress. For the past few days I’ve been working on this modelling project that uses simulation written in C++ that takes a bunch of digital individuals and places them in an environment. These individuals behave with certain rules that the user chooses. I have to present a summary of my work so far on Friday, and I’m almost done with the slides (written with the LaTeX beamer package of course), and it looks rather nifty. I’ll get a few screenshots of it when I feel like it.

I’ve also been feeling tired, and I’ve had a sore throat for a couple of days. I feel I’m leaving the woods on this, but it’s left me more stressed than usual. Sometimes I just need to learn to take things one day at a time. But that’s for another post.