June The Second, 2006
Not Much Happening at Lehigh
I slept most of today. I had to have my mom send me some cash via Wester Union because I ran out of money to buy food with again. I thought today was payday but no such luck. Next Friday, then.
I was just getting some corn ready to boil and found a slug living just inside the head of one of the stalks. I thought about it, and I think it’s probably not that bad. I mean, the slug didn’t get in the corn at the supermarket, it probably had been living in the corn since the time it left the cornfield. And if there’s one thing Pennsylvania can be proud of, it’s their heritage of a rich and bountiful corn crop. So rah rah corn slugs.
It is wicked boring around here this summer, there’s so few kids around and even the ones who are here during the week are likely to go home from Thursday-Sunday if they live close enough. So if you want to come hang out in Bethlehem, PA for a few days, come pay me a visit. There’s usually something to do.
Pinewood Derby
Pinewood Derby is playing at All Asia tomorrow, wish I could have been around to see it. I’m glad that’s going so well for Jack - quite a bold move to give Engineering the cya in lieu of full time table-waiting and rockXmusic’ing. When and Jack and I played there last summer with AJ Elliot and Will Szabo we had like 4 people there for most of it. Then in the last half hour people started showing up so we just played our better songs again. I think we played from like 4:00-6:00 on a friday. So, not really the best time.
PD is going at 6:00 which was right about when the “regulars” started showing up, so hopefully they’ll have a good crowd in addition to the kids they bring in (which I think should be a hell of alot more than we did last summer anyway!)
I’m going to go check on that corn. Brb.
Thermodynamics
Check. It’s sitting to my left, undergoing a steam rejection process as result of the increased temperature gradient. (Boiling pot vs. Room with AC) Hell, this could be a thermodynamics problem.
So thermodynamics is pretty cool, I guess. So far most of the problems have one of two basic flavours: Isobaric or Isometric Processes of Closed Systems. That means that you have some mass of a pure substance in either (1) a “rigid tank” or (2) a piston cylinder. There are so many ‘v’ symbols in that class. it’s ridix.
I think the volumetric flow rate symbol is pretty cool looking. Especially when you add the subscript ‘1′ to denote that you’re talking about the rate at state 1 of the system.
Mathematical Notation
That’s one of those symbols that if you just opened a thermodynamics book and saw it, you’d be like “oh bother! What difficult coursework.” Sometimes in Mathematics you can use some really abstract symbolism to denote some pretty basic ideas (and of course some pretty abstract ones.) The use of symbols in Mathematics starts to get intense for one of these reasons, usually:
- The field of study stemmed off of another, and thus all of the original symbols were in use in the parent discipline. Thus, the child study started with a more complex symbolic structure. Vector calculus is a (weak) example.
- There are a tremendous amount of different quantities that need be represented, and each merits it’s own symbol as opposed to complex representation of fundamental or parent symbols. Logic is a good example.
- Symbols are chosen to dissuade the mind from affixing preconceived ideas to the statements. This is done to emphasize the relationship between the symbols where the symbols themselves are not of highly specific meaning. This is done notably in the development of formal grammars for axiomatic systems.
Formal languages are really cool. I have this weird artistic/aesthetic desire to always use attractive symbols and to value mathematical expressions on the elegance of the symbols involved. Also, the entire expression should be a piece of art to be really good mathematics.
Ampere’s Law is a good example when written with the LHS on the RHS and vice-versa. I would include that here, but I’m tired of making .gif’s of forumlas and symbols for today. And this blogXpost certainly has enough (a wopping 2) of them as it is.
Next Steps for Jameson Williams
Well, I finished my corn, so I’m going to go clean my dish, drink some juice-fluid, smoke a cigarette, and then probably play some computer games. And then probably read some text.
Oh before this blogXpost is over though, I should mention about my study abroad meeting. Katie (at the study abroad office) informs me that people who have been accepted at Oxford from Lehigh have had GPA’s right in my range. So I’m going to fill out the necessary essays/paperwork and hopefully that’ll happen. I am looking forward to doing some first rate Mathematics at Oxford.
Aside from being gnarly in its own right, I think having studied there will really help my chances of getting into MIT for graduate school. And once you’re in graduate school at MIT, well, you’re pretty much a scholar. If you look at usnews.com’s 2007 graduate school rankings, you’ll notice that MIT is ranked 1st for like, 50-60 percent of the sciences/engineering. More like 80 percent for the things I’m interested in.
Other competitors include:
- UCal Berkeley
- Carnegie Mellon
- Stanford
In 2-3 years, I hope to be in a position to be a competitive candidate for all four of those graduate schools.
With love,
Jameson.