April 7, 2009
March 28, 2009
Basic Math: Algebra 102
Last time we got all the way to very basic quadratic equations. I didn’t tell you they were quadratics, we just did them. This week, we’ll take about quadratics in much more detail, describing three different methods to solve them, and why you might want to use any given method at any given time.
September 8, 2008
Grad School Tags
You can see all the various sites I’ve bookmarked about Gradschool @:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/jfredett/gradschool
It’s an RSS feed, but also the only sane url-link to the specific tag. It’s just my del.icio.us space under the tag “gradschool”
Down the Graduate School Rabbit Hole
So, I know my posts are quite sparse to begin with, and sporadic at that. But, sadly, I’m here to tell you, my faithful and equally sporadic readers, that problem will be getting worse.
Heres my situation, I transferred last year from one school (WPI) to another, cheaper school (WSC)[1]. In doing so, two things happened.
- I had to redo a fair deal of work. Many credits didn’t transfer, weren’t applicable, or became electives due to requirement differences
- I suffered a bit of a blow to my now fragile GPA, I’ve had 10 classes so far, and due to the rapid change of material and teaching style, as well as the new stresses and frustrations of repeating much of what I already knew, or taking classes I had no interest in, I did not do very well in most of them. My GPA is a pitiful 2.6… (I got a fuckload of C’s.)
Now, fortunately, I have good grades in my Core courses, most of the outliers (Philosophy excepted, I am stunningly good at that, it seems) are the ones that caused the brunt of the average-destruction. My hope is to pull these grades up with all my vigor. I have calculated that — in the 10-12 classes I have left, I need to get consisent B’s and B+’s to recover to a “safe” 3.2 or so (what I had when I left WPI). The various websites I’ve read say that this is a good average, and combined with me doing un-fucking-believable on the GRE’s, I should be able to get into a decent grad school.
I’ll try to keep Lowlymath.net[2] updated with my adventures in grad school application, and hopefully it will be a resource to anyone else hunting for graduate education.
No little thing like a bad GPA will keep me down, if necessary, I’ll take every math class WSC, WPI, and the rest of the consortium[3] offers to pull up my grade! Someday you’ll all be able to say “Whatsup Doc?” to me, and I will be quite pleased about it!
/Joe
[1] Thats Worcester Polytechnical Institute and Worcester State College, respectively.
[2] I’m actually posting to both blogs at once right now, so the Lowlymath Readers can just mentally replace “Lowlymath.net” with “this blog”
[3] The Consortium is a group of 6 schools which allow for “easy” crossregistration of classes and (supposedly) “easy” transfers between institutions. Though the latter is somewhat of a misrepresentation, given my experience.
July 30, 2008
Evolve — The History Channel may have finally done something right.
I just watched this show, on THC. I actually liked it, the title of the show was “Evolve” and it has to be the first show I’ve seen on THC that didn’t bugger up the science much at all. It was unabashedly pro-evolution, one of the biologists on the show (whose name escapes me) called out the ID frakwittery without any qualms. It was fantastic.
Everyone should watch this show, Hold off on buying episodes till they air a few more, but I guarantee, if this is going to be the road the show takes, I’ll be buying a full season.
Fan-frigging-tastic.
On another note, hopefully I’ll start being able to do some more blogging, I’ve been working on some videos, I’ve put a few up on the tubes. In any case, check it out, subscribe if you like, hopefully I’ll be internet-famous someday, like thunderfoot or edwardcurrent. 
Oh, one more tube related thing. In case you people feel that I hate all religious people, you should check out DonExodus2 on the tubes, he’s a PhD biologist, anticreationist christian.
If all Christians were like DonExodus, I would be out of a job.
June 2, 2008
Basic Math: Algebra 101
In High schools across the country, kids learn algebra. I know quite a few parents who have some big problems with algebra. For some, it’s just because it’s been a while since they’ve needed to use it, for others, it’s always been a hard thing, but it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the basic concepts of algebra as if you had never seen it before, it’ll be a bit of a whirlwind review of the idea, but (hopefully) written well enough so that someone who has never fully understood algebra. Oh, yes, by the way, there will be word problems.
June 1, 2008
Quoting in Haskell, Redux
So- Apparently I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to scheme-style quoting in haskell. Augustss Says you can’t do it because of- well, some reason beyond my comprehension. He’s a smart guy, so I’m inclined to believe him. However, I still think that what I proved in my last post holds- if not for quoting in haskell, then for quoting in scheme. The operations are still the same, dequote is just eval, quote is ‘. In any case, my goal wasn’t to really come up with some fantastic new insight into haskell, it was mostly just something I hacked on in my spare time- and thought might interest others. In any case, like I said, Augustss knows what he’s talking about, so take the last post with a grain of salt.
Quotable Haskell
> module Quotable where
This is a nice little code dump I was trying to have posted yesterday, I’ve finally got most of the formatting bugs worked out. I wasn’t thinking I was going to post this till I got about 2/3rd the way through it, so it’s pretty rough. Think of it as a look into my notebook. Enjoy.
May 31, 2008
Thar’ Be Gremlins
So- I was going to treat you all with a nice brain-dump style posting about Scheme-style Quoting in Haskell. But Wordpress is being bitchy, so it’s going to take a while, disregard any spam in your RSS feeds, it’s unintentional, I promise.
Sorry.
May 25, 2008
Basic Math, how to use numbers any day.
On reddit today, there was a comment about a radio personality who argued with a Mathematician about how percentages work, specifically about how percentages are combined. I replied with a short explaination of how 35% + 15% = 55.25% and not latex 50%. Shortly thereafter, there were half-a-dozen comments, ranging from “That explaination was longwinded/overcomplicated”, to “Thanks, that really made the idea clear.” I realized that, while I don’t hold a Teaching License, or Advanced degree in math, I am pretty good at it, and maybe teaching a bit of basic, useful math or programming that anyone can understand and use might be a pretty popular topic for blog posts, enter the new Sporadic Series “Basic Math, how to use number any day.” (To bastardize the tagline from Numb3rs, which is an excellent show, by the way).
The posts will be aimed at laypersons with no mathematical experience beyond 10th grade or so, we’ll talk about geometry and algebra, basic statistics and numerical stuff, maybe even some more abstract stuff, but always presented from a practical point of view.
For the inagural post, Let’s talk about percentages, we’ll aim to look at percentages from a qualitative, practical viewpoint.