Solve this equation for me

[leonid]

Re: Solve this equation for me

recursive triangle logic will make things a lot easier imo

hint: you know how big each square is, and you know that the dimensions of the encapsulating triangles over the inscribed square must be 689 by 1320 by 1489

That's exactly where I'm at right now.

I haven't heard of recursive triangle logic though..

Got to go to school now. Later.

[Necamus]

Re: Solve this equation for me

code golfing

rofl, awesome game/concept/whatever, except i feel like the best language to use in most situations is something really obscure.

[MrRubix]

Re: Solve this equation for me

I personally golf with python -- I think leonid uses Ruby

[aFreakOfNature2332]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Hey MrRubix,
Do the glass balls break on floors greater than X and not break on floors less than X and crack on floor X?

Or do the glass balls break on floors greater than or EQUAL to X and not break on floors less than X?

[Necamus]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Yeahhh, I've never really heard of Ruby except in the context of code golf, and I've never done anything in Python. Majority of my programming experience is Java, C, and C++.

Also, most of thsoe USAMTS don't look terribly challenging.. unfortunately, I suck at proofs. =[

[Bluearrowll]

Re: Solve this equation for me

To the average man this thread has gone from nonsense to systematic chaos.

[MrRubix]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Hey MrRubix,
Do the glass balls break on floors greater than X and not break on floors less than X and crack on floor X?

Or do the glass balls break on floors greater than or EQUAL to X and not break on floors less than X?

Depends on how you want to frame it -- I mean, if floor X is where the spheres break, then they also break on X+1 etc but not X-1

[leonid]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Hey guys I'm back
Looks like someone actually knows about codegolfing..

I'm kinda good at it

To the average man this thread has gone from nonsense to systematic chaos.

It's all rubix's fault

[LongGone]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Does the lattice problem require modulo/observing integers?

[Squeek]

Re: Solve this equation for me

By the way Guru, that really is pre-high school math. What you're doing now is an introduction to much harder topics in Algebra II (I hope, otherwise your school fails).

As for sharing complicated problems... I didn't have any math homework in any of my college courses (well, I did, but since none of them were graded, I didn't do any of them), so I have none of those to share. But I do have this!

This was just a generic IT class. The professor was too busy with her job to bother to lecture us, so she'd continue her office work on a laptop in the room while she put some old IT history film on.

Then we got landed with this:


PLEASE PERFORM THE FOLLOWING TAKS (A) “DEFINE” EACH TERM BY INCLUDING WHAT (OR WHO) IT IS, AND (B) WHY IT IS IMPORTANT FOR BUSINESS STUDENTS TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION IN THE CONTEXT OF BEING A GLOBAL MANAGER IN AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGE. 3-4 SENTENCES EACH TERM IN YOUR OWN WORDS




3COM
ALOHAnet
Andy Bechtolsheim
AOL
ARPA
ARPAnet
AT&T
Bandwidth
BBN
Berkeley UNIX
Bill Joy
Bob Kahn
Bob Metcalfe
Bob Taylor
Browser
CERN
Cisco Systems
Click
Cold War
Domain Name
e-Commerce
e-Business
Eric Schmidt
Ethernet
ExCite
Frank Heart
FTP
GUI
Honeywell
Host
HTML
HTTP
Hypertext
Hyperlink
IMP
Internet
InterNIC
IP
J.C.R. Licklider
Java
Javascript
John Doerr
John McAfee
Killer Application
Larry Roberts
Leonard Kleinrock
Local Area Network
Mainframe
Marc Andreessen
Metcalfe's Law
MIT
Modem
MOSAIC
NASA
Netscape Communications
Node
Norm Abramson
Novell
NSF
Packet
Packet Switching
President Eisenhower
President Kennedy
Protocol
Ray Tomlinson
Raytheon
Rep. Frederick C. Boucher
Robert Cringley
Router
Sandy Lerner
Scott McNealy
Search Engine
Severo Ornstein
Sputnik
SRI
Technology Standards
Stewart Brand
Sun Microsystems
Surf the Web
TCP/IP
Ted Nelson
TELNET
Tim Berners-Lee
University of California at Los Angeles
University of California at Berkeley
University of Utah
Unix
URL
Venture Capital
Vinod Khosla
Vint Cerf
Whole Earth ‘Lectronic’ Link (WELL)
World Wide Web Consortium
Xanadu
Xerox PARC


This piddly little assignment was worth five points. For each term she felt you didn't elaborate on enough (and honestly, how can you elaborate on the business context of people?), you lost a point. Most people got 0/5 on this assignment.

Now here's the best part. This was a night class. It ran from 7:30 to 10:00. This assignment was given to us at the end of class and it was at that time that we were told it was due at noon the next day. We had 14 hours to do this, assuming you didn't sleep or have other classes in the morning.

Oh, I almost forgot. She did this two more times after this assignment. Same concept--paragraph-length definitions and business context for names, places, dates, technology, etc. I recall having to define "keyboard", "techie", "monitor", "killer application", etc.

This was the same teacher who also made us present a stupid, meaningless company bio on some random tech companies. Wouldn't be a problem, except for this:

Presentation 1 Guidelines

6. The project shall be done / submitted using PowerPoint Version 2003.
7. The file shall be entitled “company.ppt” where company is the name of your selected company.
8. There shall be no spaces in the file name.
9. There shall be at most 5 total slides, plus reference information slides (which does not count in the 5 pages.)
10. All slides must use WHITE as their background color. (You can shade tables, graphics, highlight text etc….)
11. All tables, charts, text, captions, illustrations, graphics, etc shall be newly created by you. Under no circumstances shall any information be copied and pasted into the slides from third party sources. The only exception is using company logos or copyrighted graphics. This means you need to properly cite all artwork; certainly you can take ideas from sources, please just reference them.
12. All fonts must be either from Arial or Verdana families. No other font types can be used.
13. No font smaller than 9 point shall be used on slides, including captions.
14. The font size for header or footer items shall be exactly 8 point.
15. Any figures, tables, charts, text, captions, illustrations, graphics, etc shall have a title and properly labeled for horizontal AND vertical axis. Be sure to state assumptions.
16. Presentation shall use a standard outer bullet color and type
17. Presentation shall use a standard inner bullet type and color
18. No more than 2 levels of bullets shall be used on any slide
19. All slides, except the title slide, shall have a page number in the bottom right corner
20. All slides shall have footer with the company name on it.
21. Any presentation, which is hard to read or has spelling errors, will drop a letter grade.
22. Don’t forget all of your references need to be in a SOM accepted standard format!!
23. All presentations shall be uploaded on the class blackboard, so that class members can print advance copies of slides, See syllabus for dates.
24. Each team shall print one full-page color copy for the Professor and bring to the presentation on respective dates.
25. Students are responsible for printing their own hard copies.
26. The Project Grade will be broken down into the following areas: (1) completeness of content, (2) accuracy of information and proper sources of information, (3) slide formatting (look and feel), (4) oral presentation, (5) Business Professional Dress, and (6) Peer Review. Based on this method of calculating grades, each student may get different grades from team members.
27. Completeness of Content is worth, 20%
28. Accuracy of Information & proper reference citation is worth15%
29. Slide Formatting is worth 15%
30. Oral presentation is worth 20%
31. Any student not submitting an adequate peer review will be penalized 15% off their grade:
32. Any student not dressed for a business presentation will be penalized 15% off their grade:
33. Each team is limited to 5 minutes for their entire presentation 1. This includes where to stand, introducing team members, and changing slides.
34. A good practice for presentations is to present each slide in approx 1 minute or less.
35. Each person of the team will present no more than 2 slides per Presentation. Team members will not know their actual slide assignment until the day of the presentation.
36. Students are not permitted to look at the slides while presenting the information. Anyone reading the slides will get a zero.
37. Students are not allowed to use notes during the presentation. Any student using notes will get a zero.
38. All students in the team are expected to answer questions about the company from the class or professor.
39. Any presentation, which goes over allocated time, will be penalized.

Check out #35, in case you missed it in the sea of insanity. "Team members will not know their actual slide assignment until the day of the presentation." So, this assignment had 5 slides. Each team had 3 members. So you give the hardest slide to one guy and give two each to the other two. Problem is, you don't know if you're presenting your own slide or not! And because of #36 and #37, you can't even look at the presentation or notes!


The teacher is now fired and everybody got an A in the class due to her incompetence.

Do I win the game?

[All_That_Chaz]

Re: Solve this equation for me

That prof was retarded.

PS you should go with a darker color for slide backgrounds because they're less grating on the eyes in a dark conference room. I knew that business minor would come in handy someday!

[MrRubix]

Re: Solve this equation for me

That teacher sounds absolutely horrible. I am glad she was fired -- people who assign crap like that are nothing more than huge obstacles when it comes to learning ****.

Rules 35-37 are absolute bull**** lmao, way to set up some absurdly awkward and choppy presentations there, professor.

There was a professor at Penn who I think was fired (never verified for myself, but I know he no longer teaches there)... I had him for a math class but I luckily switched out to a slightly higher math class and took the midterm there on the same day having not taken the class before lmao -- didn't do super well but I got an A in the class in the end, which is what matters.

Anyways, this dude spoke bull**** for like an hour and just SCRAWLED the **** out of the chalkboard... it was a mess. He'd write diagonally, squeeze things into random spots, and just yammer at 88 MPH and nobody understood what the hell he was doing. Then came the midterm, and it was equally bull****. 90% (yes, there were 10 questions and 9 of them did this) of the questions started off with "According to lecture..." and proceeded to ask crap that wasn't taught in the book... we were basically being tested on how well we could memorize and decipher the dross that the professor was spewing. I decided to drop that course once I realized I would have, at best, gotten maybe 1 question correct by no fault of my own.

I later learned that everyone in that class completely nosedived the midterm (15% average) and yet people got A's in the end... so I have to assume some administrative influence came into effect.


PS: I second dark slide BGs

[Squeek]

Re: Solve this equation for me

I later learned that everyone in that class completely nosedived the midterm (15% average) and yet people got A's in the end... so I have to assume some administrative influence came into effect.

I wrote about this in SUPER SECARET FORUMZ during my college years.

So I'm in class and it's a big day. We get our exams from three weeks ago back today. I get mine and it says...


32.

Out of 60, but still, 32. So yeah, I failed the exam. There's no shame in that. To be honest, in the academic world, I'm used to failure. So of course I listen intently for the word "curve". Instead I get this.

"The average score was in the thirties. This is a pretty standard trend we see in this class anyway, so don't feel like this grade will hurt you too much. Just do well on your projects!"

Wait, so... you knew most of the class was going to fail when you gave us the exam. In that case, shouldn't you, I don't know, fix the exam?! An exam tests whether or not you're learning anything in the class. If the class average is "fail", then that means most of the people in the class aren't learning anything.

Here's a tip! Either dumb down the exam or learn how to teach your goddamn class. You can't expect everyone to pass an exam, but to expect everyone to fail? Seriously? How is that going to make people try harder? If everyone fails, the University says they all pass and that it's the teacher's fault. According to this guy, that's the way it's been since the course was introduced. And this course is required for all IT majors. Not only that, it's a pre-requisite to a bunch of future classes.

This isn't the only class that I've managed to fail the exam and have no repercussions from doing so. Not by a long shot. It seems the idea is to teach whatever the hell you want, then make an exam that meets some random standards set by the university that may or may not meet up with what's "taught" in the classroom, then curve the grades to reflect on university standards.

So I've learned that failure is irrelevant in the real world. That's a great thing to teach future network security analysts, right? I mean, we mess up, no big deal, right? Sure, some networks may fail miserably and companies might lose billions of dollars as a result, but who cares? You can curve that loss into a profit, right?

In short, college is dumb.

Also, I wrote this before the "Projects" were graded. The average grade on them was a 30/90. Yet, pretty much everybody passed the class in the end.

Professors aren't allowed to fail everybody. Some aren't even allowed to pass everybody. It's dumb, but those are the rules. If everybody fails, then everybody passes. Even though this means that nobody in the teacher-student relationship is benefiting from the class at all. The professor isn't learning how to teach, and the students aren't learning the material.

[GG_Guru]

Re: Solve this equation for me

Do I win the game?

You'd be more apathetic if you weren't so lethargic.

[NocturneAunamic]

Re: Solve this equation for me

You'd be more apathetic if you weren't so lethargic.

I think lethargic means apathetic... doesn't it?