(no subject)

[kleenexwoman]

MATH CLASS: We've moved on from basic, simple "Find X! It's probably under the bed. Did you check the laundry hamper?" stuff to problems like "Illya has two liters of Burnett's 70-proof vanilla-flavored vodka and three liters of 100-proof Smirnoff, the kind with the blue label. How much Burnett's and Smirnoff will he have to mix together to get a drink that's exactly 80 proof?" and "Patrick had $500,000. At the beginning of 1984, he deposited some of his money into a CD at a 5% rate of interest, and the rest of it into a savings account at a 9% rate of interest. After a year, the interest is enough for Patrick to buy a quarter of a kilogram of cocaine for his New Year's party. How much money did Patrick deposit into the savings account?"
I got everything wrong on the mixtures assignment and have nearly given up on this interest-rates thing. The formulae the prof gave us just don't seem to make sense and they don't apply to half the problems, and when I try reasoning them out I get them wrong.

Firefox keeps freezing up on me. Fuck you, automatic updates, fuck you.

STUFF THAT DOESN'T MAKE ME WANT TO SMASH MY KEYBOARD IN RAGE: I found my cell phone. My dad sent me some money. I really need to call most of my relatives. We finally saw Get Smart and it was surprisingly funny, and I vaguely want to download some episodes of the original series but Don Adams' voice is nails-on-blackboard annoying. I want to go to the beach or something for July 4th, but I don't think there are any lakes within daytripping/weekend tripping distance (even if we just followed 10 west or went to Saugatuck or something, it'd still be two hours either way), and anyway we're probably going to stay in the apartment and watch Wonder Showzen or see another movie or something.

There are hawks wheeling in the sky outside. Everything looks beautiful from inside the library.

ETA: I just spent fifteen minutes messing around with Google Earth and planning out a huge roadtrip. Clearly need to get the fuck out of Mt. Pleasant after classes are over.

Comments

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Math is as easily learned from other students as from teachers, if not more easily, because you get one on one tuition. See if you can find someone who is getting it right, or someone who has got it right before, and ask them to show you how it is done. There is often more than one approach, and once you get the hang of enough of it on your terms, the rest will get easier. I've taught people myself before and got them through exams - when I was taking the same ones. There is help out there that you can understand; go make use of it. It's probably Eastern European :)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I ended up asking drworm to show me. We sort of figured it out together, and now I actually understand the principles behind the formulae, which seems to be the important thing--it is no longer magic, just reason.

It's probably Eastern European :)
He is Croatian...

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Told ya! :)

There's one problem with my theory - I'm Anglo Saxon, and I am, or was, a terrific mathematician. However I was taught by East Europeans! Perhaps Dr Worm can advise what I never had the guts to ask - where would I find the name Cerkeliunas? Wyszecki and Zolkiewicz were surely Poles, but the great 'dJoe by dCerkeliunas', Math teacher sans pareil, I never asked where he came from.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

A Google search reveals that Lithuania is a possible source.

When I was in high school, most of the kids who really "got" math were the black kids bussed in from Detroit; they'd sit in the front row and correct the teacher if she got something wrong, and offer simple ways to solve problems which she presented as terrifyingly complex. The white kids (including me) hung out in the back of the classroom and played Tetris on their super-expensive graphing calculators. Good times.

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

You had Tetris?!? God damn it. We never managed to get that file at Lathrup. Which level calculator did you have? 82 and 83 (assuming you had TI too) were the highest readily available ten years ago.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

TI-83. I got the file from a girl who'd downloaded it from the Internet somewhere. During an exam, the prof took all our calculators, deleted all the saved files (so we couldn't cheat by using programmed equations), and returned them to us for the exam. I never got that Tetris file back. ;____;

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Ah. See, back when I was in high school, the Internet was not too widely available. Now of course it comes free in every box of cereal. But it was slow and unreliable way back when, and we got all our calculator files from each other. They just kind of crept through the grapevine, in other words. (I had an 82. Always lusted after an 85.)

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee. Oh, my dear. I feel for you. I really do.

Fourth of July festivities are overrated. Declare your own independence by not giving in to the assembly-line monotony vacation brouhaha, forced happiness and wotnot. Sit on your butt and (re)read one of your favorite books while getting splendidly wasted.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I actually plan on reading some Communist literature and getting wasted! Well, maybe not the wasted part, we'll see.

I sort of want to go buy fireworks to celebrate the decadence of American capitalism, but I'm also afraid of getting my hand blown off.

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Make sure to get the very best of Chinese slave-labor firework engineering: Yang Tse Doodle.

Seven years ago (I may have told you about it already) was the best Fourth I've ever had. Marched in two parades with the county Democrats and a had a delightful lunch with an emeritus prof of mathematics from my college who'd been involved with the college Dems group for about forty years; drove down to a closer Columbus suburb to see Little Richard and Mitch Ryder perform in a high-school football field; ate a huge dinner at White Castle; drank a six-pack of Sam Adams; and closed the day with a wonderful fireworks show over the campus skyline. Two months later came 9/11. I like to keep the memories of that particular Fourth in their own special box in my mind.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

That sound seriously awesome.

We used to spent Fourth of Julys in Traverse City or Charlevoix, setting off fireworks, jet-skiing, and having cookouts at the vacation house of some people we don't really talk to anymore (for some strange reason). I recall being very envious that they had an entire vacation house and we only had a timeshare. LOL privileged.

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Hee hee. My dad had a friend with a house up there and took me up there (and Mackinac) for my fifteenth birthday. Boring as hell. He took his crazy pills as soon as we arrived and conked out. I spent the evening watching the porno channels which they'd neglected to turn off and wandering around the woods out back. Personally I prefer Tybee Island, GA for my dream vacation retreat. It's not too pricey and is delightfully tacky while not being white trashy. Only problem is you risk getting killed by the tide.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

♥ Mackinac. I would wander around there for days if I could.

Charlevoix Lake (where we were) is filled with other peoples' houses, so it's a little tough to wander around properly if you don't have someone to splash around with. Charlevoix proper (the town, anyway) is the best thing. We used to spend weekends there, looking for interesting stones on the beach (which put me into the habit of sifting through small piles of stones looking for fossils, which got me made fun of in 5th grade, when the entire playground was covered with small pebbles. I did not care. I found petrified coral).

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

The highlight for me (other than being on the island itself, because at the time I had a huge masturbatory crush on a particular model's photos from the 1994 SI swimsuit calendar that had been taken on Mackinac) was running into former Senator Riegle and L. Brooks Patterson. My father spent about two minutes chatting them up and kissing their asses, and then when they walked on he turned to me and said: "Those guys are the biggest bunch of crooks in Michigan."

The beach on Tybee has this weird oil-like (meaning petroleum) substance just under the sand. I have no idea what it is. It's also fun to know you're swimming just a short distance from an undetonated nuclear device (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tybee_Bomb).

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I Wiki'd L. Brooks. What a huge fucking douche.

Charlevoix has magnetic sand! And it's right near...that city that makes all the iron crap. Not Jackson. East Jordan!

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Southfield's mayor (Brenda Lawrence) is running against him this year and is the first person in several elections to stand a good chance of unseating him.

Iron crap? What's that? Droppings from a locomotive (the iron horse)?

[drworm.livejournal.com]

I will help you with your maths. But, uh, you have to come home first.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

♥

[cobaltnine.livejournal.com]

He's going to have left-over Smirnoff.

For percentage problems, you have to pretend all you're making is a 1 unit thing. In this case, a 1-unit thing is called '1 drink'. Now, instead of having the volume of the drink be x - which is what I instinctively want to do - remember you just have 1. Thus the drink is made up of x units of vanilla vodka and 1-x units of Smirnoff. Your total will be 1 unit of Drink. This can later be converted into actual units, because 1-x and x will give you proportions.

Ditch the percent signs, but remember you want 1 unit of Drink at 40%. This is your goal percent.

35x = 35% alcohol, amount therein in Drink
50(1-x) = 50% alcohol, amount therein in Drink
1 = unit of Drink but 40% = amount of alcohol in drink

35x + 50(1-x) = 40
Solve for x and you get x = 2/3
2/3 of the drink is vanilla vodka, and 1/3 is Smirnoff.

Given the average drink is about 36 mL alcohol, you end up with 24 mL vanilla and 12 mL plain, with a 40% alcohol content and you are on the floor.

Without the volume of the bottles, I cannot tell how drunk Illya may get, but the answer is presumably 'really', unless given airplane bottles.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Thanks! When I was doing the problems the first time, I kept throwing in all sorts of totally pointless variables before it was pointed out to me that this was not in the least necessary. Very frustrating and bad for drink-mixing.

[inkhornsybarite.livejournal.com]

Come to Brooklyn!

Brooklyn. Come here.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

:D I very well might, once I get tired of bosky solitude (three days max). I mean, if I get a car. Maybe even if I don't get a car.