(no subject)

Some things I wish the students I grade for would remember:

• Always check your work. Always. The most important thing you can learn is not what the right answer is, but how to tell a 'good' answer from a 'bad' one. I had to take off 5 points from 2/3 of the class's test grades today as most of them didn't think that the number they got for the velocity of a quasar was unreasonable. Here's a hint -- getting 2 times the speed of light for a velocity when you work a problem 'classically' probably means you should have taken relativity into account.
  
• RTFQ. Read the questions carefully, especially when you are called to compute two or more simple problems. This generally implies you will do some higher-level thinking on it -- comparing, coming to a conclusion, etc. Finding the right formula to get numbers is only part of the work of being an astronomer (or any career with numbers). Knowing what the hell the numbers mean is the rest of the battle.
  
• RTFQ, part II. If the question gives you a hint, and you don't use it, check your math. If there are two ways to do a problem (say the hard-but-accurate way, or the easy-but-kinda-inaccurate way) always see if the question permits the easy way. If the question says you can use a figure, use the figure if it helps. And, trust me, if the choice is between a nice graph where I can get my numbers, or fighting with the Saha-Boltzman equation, I'll take the graph any day.
  

Well at least everyone but one person has mastered the use of scientific notation.

(no subject)

Ya know, I would like to learn to play a White Wolf game, just on the principle it's a system I've never played, but I only know two people in real life who have the books and could possibly run it. One is in Massachusettes for college -- so she is unavailable. The other... well, let's just say I nicknamed him the uber-twink for a REASON. He is the person that kept me from trying White Wolf for all of high school and half of college. His normal practice is to pick a anime/video game character he thinks is cool and try to create/one-up them -- I've heard about him having a Kenshin-knockoff, a Link-knockoff and a D-knockoff in various games. His D&D characters are tank-types that are solely devoted to sqeezing the maximum amount of lethality from his feats and weapons -- or GM had to tell him he couldn't take Infernal AND Diabolic, unless he multiclassed as Cleric or Paladin or something where a knowledge of Outsider languages would be easy to come by. My Halfing currently wants to kill him as he is acting as her human (elven?) shield, just because she is the second-weakest party member.
I am seriously tempted to report him to bad_rpers_suck... thankfully, our Tuesday D&D group is breaking off into a d20 modern and a D&D group, and he's going to 'help' the novice D&D GM.
So, anyways... want to learn White Wolf. Do not want to play with uber-twink.

(no subject)

Stupid homework... I should be studsying for the Putnam with the rest of the math nerds -- for everyone who doesn't know, the Putnam exam is a college math competition given in December nationwide. It's tricky -- the math doesn't require anythign more than Calculus, but the problems are (nonzero) score is considered above average -- last year I scored in the double digits, which make me about 5000th in the country. UNL has the best Putnam team of a public university, so I'm quite happy to go to the practices -- we're smart people.

But, I have to do homework. Boo.

( And now for somehting completely different... )