w-I

Spoiler alert: this post is about week one in the course.

The first week lecture was really only 2/3 of a lecture with the first 1/3 being dedicated to reviewing the syllabus. I made sure to accidentally get some coffee on my syllabus to mark it as my own in case some other student tries to make off with it. It was pretty exciting that we get to write a blog about our experiences in the course as opposed to most of my courses where I am forced to sign a waiver stating that I will maintain the secrecy of the goings-on in the course and transgressions of this nature are punishable by death.

Over the course of the lecture we were reminded of the benefits that active participation in the course has. Science has show (or at least the lecture notes have shown) that active participation and engagement in the course is equivalent to punching all of the inactive non-participant students in the face.

I appreciated the idea in the lecture of precision versus ambiguity in human language and that we must strive to be `as precise as as [is] necessary' in order to make communication maximally efficient. This is really just a nice philosophical idea that underlies the ways--importantly the differences in the ways--that we communicate in different settings and with different people. For the past two years I was working on a graduate degree and studying a single subject area in that way almost `warps' your thinking and vernacular to maximal efficiency in that field. It is hard not to think of blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI signal when people around me use the word `bold', but this is simply an adaptation made in an attempt to be maximally efficient when discussing functional MRI.

I also enjoyed the `streetcar drama' problem. The problem involves minimal information overheard on a streetcar about the ages of a person's 3 children. We know the product of the ages but the other information is less clear and needs to be interpreted cleverly in order to solve the problem. While we are never given the sum of their ages we can glean from the information given that the for all integer combinations, the sum is degenerate (which is to say, not unique, and not to say that it is in any sense immoral). Lastly, we learn that there is only one eldest child, that is to say one child is strictly older than the rest. Using this information we are able to solve the problem.

Going over the problem in class I remembered that I really wanted to punch someone in the face (metaphorically) so I did put up my hand for this problem and contributed the information that the oldest child must have a unique age. I certainly will remember doing so from the emotional ordeal that doing so has caused (which is what is says in the lecture notes).

A lot of the quantifier stuff I was previously familiar with from other math courses but it is still a good review as I haven't touched that stuff in a long time.

I'm also pretty curious about how SLOG feedback works. Is this a decent post? Maybe even a spectacular one? I would like to know. I don't want to get to the end of the course and then get told that my SLOGs are too irreverent, or I am too good-looking, or some other thing and I am losing marks in the SLOG section. I'm just trying to enjoy it and have fun with it. Maybe that's the motivation behind having us do this at all? I have no idea.

Okay. Cool.

Thanks for sluggin' it in my SLOG,

J