Thanksgiving Break



Thanksgiving break was pretty good... and long. My family had Thanksgiving dinner at my grandma's house here in Cleveland, and I got to visit my cousins from Ann Arbor and Buffalo. It's a lot different now (in a pretty good way) when we visit family, because all of the cousins (including myself) are getting older, and we can do things like drive and go places.

Before the feast.
During the feast.
The bad dog who must be tied up if we want to eat the food ourselves. She's so sweet, though:)

Also, being in Cleveland, I made a run to CiCi's Pizza and Pasta Buffet. Usually we try to stay for a long time and eat as much as possible (we once stayed for 4 hours and I ate 21 pieces of pizza). We generally photograph all of the food that we eat, but it was really a very unimpressive visit -- I think I only was able to eat 12 pieces of pizza. What has college done to me?!

A fresh plate

On Friday I attended the 10th Annual St. Ignatius High School Debate Team Alumni Football Game. One might think that this would be a pretty funny event to see -- a bunch of nerdy dudes trying to play football. Alas, this is mistaken. In fact, the game got incredibly competitive! It was full-contact, with no pads... it got rough. About 20 people showed up, and by the end of the game, we had a person out with a knee injury, one out with a head injury, 4 guys with torn clothing, blood on quite a few people, and myself with a very messed up (turned out to just be a bad sprain) finger and headache. Excellent.

I usually don't pay attention to the school calendar, so I didn't know when classes started up again. I assumed that Thanksgiving break would just be Wednesday through Sunday, and that classes would start up again the following Monday. Luckily, though, I found out on Sunday night that my class didn't start until Thursday!

The 12-week session of the first semester is over, and the 3-week session has now begun. My one class over the next 3 weeks is PHIL-121, Elementary Logic. So far so good. Only had 2 days of classes so far, but since we have class for 3 hours a day, we're already off to a good start. Essentially we will be learning how to deconstruct and evaluate arguments, study other principles in logic, and hopefully improve our own abilites to persuade.


Prof. Andersen seems like a cool guy -- he's extremely logic. (Makes sense, eh?) Anyhow, though I'm not particularly thrilled with having a 3 hour class every day, I still think that the setup of the 3-week session is really cool. A couple main reasons:

First, class doesn't start until 1.00PM. This is excellent compared to the 9.30 class that I had during the 12-week. Now I could literally go to sleep at 5.00AM every night, get 7 hours of sleep daily, and wake up with plenty of time to grab breakfast and do anything else I need to do.

Second, it's much more simple and easy to keep track of things that I need to do. Not like it was ever a huge problem, but I recall many times over the past semester when I'd find out about or remember some assignment that I had to do.... at midnight, or some equally or even less desirable time to do homework. That was never much fun. Although the reading/studying and logic problems that we have to do for my current class do seem like they will be a bit timely sometimes, I know I'm not going to forget about anything. I'd much rather have 1 large assignment a night than 3 smaller ones.

Then, today, I took the Putnam! The Putnam is an annual math contest which people take at colleges all over the country. There are 2 sections, each with 6 questions. The test is 6 hours long total. Each question is worth 10 points, so it is scored out of 120. The average score on the test is 0 out of 120. (My average I mean the median -- so, more than half of the people who take the test get zeroes).

In the words of Prof. Gubser, who was administering the test, "It is difficult to describe how hard these problems are." Anyhow, I did pretty good on the test, and got a zero. Since that's average, I guess I can say that I got a C on the test.

Yeah, so I didn't know how to do any of the problems. I certainly tried, on some of them... unfortunately, the test is VERY picky with partial-credit. I knew that I hadn't gotten far enough on any of the problems to get any, so I didn't even submit my work. I turned in blank envelopes for both sections of the test.

Two examples of test questions (ones which I can easily type out because they aren't full of tons of crazy math notation) are:

1) Find the volume of the region of points (x,y,z) such that (x^2+y^2+z^2+8)^2 < 36(x^2+y^2)

6) Four points are chosen uniformly and independently at random in the interior of a given circle. Find the probability that they are the vertices of a convex quadrilateral.

7) Show that the curvev x^3+3xy+y^3=1 contains only one set of three distinct points, A, B, and C, which are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.

I think that #1 and #7 were probably some of the easiest problems on the test. I might be able to solve them eventually. Some of them were so confusing that I had no idea what the problem was even asking... I skipped those:)

VAST respect given to any person out there who can solve any of the above problems in fewer than 3 hours!

On the bright side, Professor Gubser took the 7 of us out to lunch at a nice restaurant. I had a great sandwich!

At the moment though I feel sick to my stomach though, so maybe it wasn't that great. (Though that was about 5 hours ago -- it might not be the food).

--David

ps -- I did take a nap during the first section of the test.. and I left 2 hours early from the second:)