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Apr. 22nd, 2005 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesI am proud of myself yesterday. I asked what I think of as a CeCe question.
My friend CeCe is a very persistant person. When she doesn't get something, she starts asking questions. She will do this in lecture, in a presentation, or whereever. And she won't stop until she understands what it is she doesn't get. (She also will hate something difficult until she understands it, then will think it's the neatest thing in the world -- this is so predictable that AJ and I joke about it)
I don't normally do this. I never knew if it was because my mind just accepts anythign soemone in authority (read; a teacher) tells me and doesn't fit it together with other things, or if it's because I usually get things the first time I here them in class.
So, in math class we're discussing ways of taking real improper integrals using the complex plane, and the teacher mentions that the magnitude of a certain function is always one. I look at it, and I see that, no, it isn't always one, and how do we keep it from blowing up to infinity? (which is why we were messing with imaginary numbers in the first place, as the real function did do nasty stuff like that) So I asked. And a couple of other people stopped and said 'Hey, wait, she's right'. So the teacher stopped and did a little math (she wasn't exactly sure why it was listed as that) and we figured out that the function wans't always equal to one, but on the integral we were looking at, it would always be between 0 and 1. Since really all we needed was that this function was bounded, this was fine.
Paraphrased Quote of the Day: On the process of science. 'Yay! It worked! Wait a second -- there's no reason this should work. Why does it work? Let's try to break it!' (Our colloquim speaker this week trying to explain finding out that planetary nebulae (AKA shiny pretty things that are bits of dying stars) have a maximum brightness, regardless of what kind of galaxy they are in).
I also discovered in D&D last night that White Dragons (or at least the ones in Gorden's gameworld) think clerics and druids are nummyliscious. This lead to Holly (who plays a crotchity druid) and me (who plays a half-elf cleric) making jokes about gormet food versus gas-station hot dogs.
My friend CeCe is a very persistant person. When she doesn't get something, she starts asking questions. She will do this in lecture, in a presentation, or whereever. And she won't stop until she understands what it is she doesn't get. (She also will hate something difficult until she understands it, then will think it's the neatest thing in the world -- this is so predictable that AJ and I joke about it)
I don't normally do this. I never knew if it was because my mind just accepts anythign soemone in authority (read; a teacher) tells me and doesn't fit it together with other things, or if it's because I usually get things the first time I here them in class.
So, in math class we're discussing ways of taking real improper integrals using the complex plane, and the teacher mentions that the magnitude of a certain function is always one. I look at it, and I see that, no, it isn't always one, and how do we keep it from blowing up to infinity? (which is why we were messing with imaginary numbers in the first place, as the real function did do nasty stuff like that) So I asked. And a couple of other people stopped and said 'Hey, wait, she's right'. So the teacher stopped and did a little math (she wasn't exactly sure why it was listed as that) and we figured out that the function wans't always equal to one, but on the integral we were looking at, it would always be between 0 and 1. Since really all we needed was that this function was bounded, this was fine.
Paraphrased Quote of the Day: On the process of science. 'Yay! It worked! Wait a second -- there's no reason this should work. Why does it work? Let's try to break it!' (Our colloquim speaker this week trying to explain finding out that planetary nebulae (AKA shiny pretty things that are bits of dying stars) have a maximum brightness, regardless of what kind of galaxy they are in).
I also discovered in D&D last night that White Dragons (or at least the ones in Gorden's gameworld) think clerics and druids are nummyliscious. This lead to Holly (who plays a crotchity druid) and me (who plays a half-elf cleric) making jokes about gormet food versus gas-station hot dogs.
