Jury

Got summoned for jury duty the other day…

Q : Years in county
A: 12

Q : Months
A: 0

Q : Years in state
A: 12

Q : Months
A: 0

Q : Place of Birth?
A: China

Q : Marital Status?
A: Single

Q : Age?
A: 21

Q : Number of Children
A: 0

Q : Are you now employed?
A: N

Q : Are you a salaried employee of the U.S. government?
A: N

Q : If retired, what was your occupation, trade or business before retirement?  If not retired, please proceed to the next question.
A: N/A

Q : Are any charges now pending against you for a violation of state or federal law punishable by imprisonment for more than one year?
A: N

Q : Have you ever been convicted, either by your guilty or nolo contendere plea or by a court or jury trial, of a state or federal crime for which punishment could have been more than one year in prison?
A: N

Q : Do you have any physical or mental disability that would interfere with or prevent you from serving as a juror?
A: N

Q : ESTIMATED NO. OF MILES ONE WAY FROM YOUR HOME TO COURTHOUSE TO WHICH YOU ARE SUMMONED
A: 1200

Maybe they will pay for my plane ticket?

Poopy Spears

I was walking this morning and I saw frozen dog poop on the ground. As I looked straight at it, I noticed that I was actually walking closer and closer to the doo-doo. It’s almost like when I’m playing against a Nidalee… I SEE the spear coming, but then I still click in the direction of it.

Not as bad as this guy though…

Fumes

And walks in this woman who’s clearly not American. From her accent, she was like Eastern European or something. Why the hell is she teaching American studies? – Astro Section

Oh sorry, should all the Americans currently studying international relations switch majors right now? You see in drawing, there’s a thing called “perspective”…

This TA is sooo annoying, she doesn’t stop with right or wrong. She says stuff like “why is that right…” – Ivy Room

Oh sorry, didn’t know you want to be made obsolete by an encyclopedia. Maybe thinking is too hard.

Some people just makes me fume.

AP? More Like AUseless.

This has been pissing my off recently: all the AP classes I took back in high school seems to count for nothing in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Yes, it does count for credit. Yes, they do “recognize” it. That’s basically it.

My five AP science courses which I got 5’s on won’t count towards my science requirements, which instead forces me to fit two silly science courses in. In astronomy today, we talked about the difference between velocity and speed, and how weight and mass are different.

Whoop dee doo…

 

Perfect Synergy

The past summer, I was at the REU in UMBC. The head of the math department guy preached about the future of mathematics is the intersection of mathematics, statistics and computing; I agree to a large extent. 

What I ended up working on seemed to be computing, with more computing, with very little mathematical analysis. The system of differential equations that described pancreatic cells was far too advanced for me to do some significant analysis. Heck, that’s how I feel about most of pure mathematics: the interesting problems are always out of reach from what I know.

Before this past winter break, I found a cool book called “Risk and Reward” in the math library. It’s all about the, surprisingly deep, game of casino blackjack, from the strategies to the mathematics behind the analysis. In the analysis portion of the book, 90

If I ever do become a professor of some sorts, I want to be able to teach a class based on games like blackjack and poker. For projects of sorts, the task will be to calculate the probability of various conditions and to figure out the strategies from the math I provide in class. Maybe for a (optional) final, it’s to actually play the games that we studied in class…

As an exercise over the break, I took an existing program and added the functionality to “practice” the card counting went over the book. It’s based on this project which I butchered (honestly, I spent 2 days doing this… trying to understand someone else’s code is tough). To run the program, make sure Python is installed, and run Blackjack.py. Download