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The cranky thread


Hermit

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Re: The cranky thread

 

I just want to be drug-free and able to drop off to sleep in three seconds like OddHat.

 

You know what gave me that capability? Kids. I can lie down just about anywhere that's reasonably comfortable and fall asleep inside of a minute, whether I wanted to or not.

 

Of course kids wake you up, on average, ten seconds after you fall asleep. But for nine seconds it would be a solution.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

I'm supposed to restrain my fluid intake to 48 ounces per day. That's everything, including drinks, fluids in foods (like soup), stuff that's fluid at room temperature (like ice cream or gelatin), sauces, everything.

 

This is not easy. My impulse control is lousy on a good day, and I have absolutely no concept of measurements. Unless I have a solid measuring tool handy, I absolutely suck at estimating time, distance and now, volume as well.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

My Dad is unexpectedly in town for a few weeks. He's being 'helpful'. That, and the fact my brother got his measurements wrong by 100%, meant I was up until midnight rolling out turf.

 

I weep to think what trying to keep this gift alive is going to do to my water budget. We're already on a 10 minutes a week water restriction.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

New turf? On 10 minutes of water per week? In summer? Really? Did someone not think this through?

 

yup. And my mom bought my brother a water feature. In Morocco. Customs charges came to $300. And the pump was not only a hazard to life and limb, it was broken anyway.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

The engineering students whose tests I am grading are really, really stupid on average. More people than not failed the question I'm grading* because they cannot factor a simple cubic polynomial with integer coefficients and roots. They should have learned this in 11th grade. Arrgh. The worst answer I got was "I can't factor this polynomial with the means available to me, so it must have no roots." The best wrong answer I got was some attempts at a solution, then a picture of a smiling whale with the caption "partial marks save the whales, every part mark helps." I gave him 1/10 and drew a picture of Captain Ahab holding a harpoon and saying "Tharr be the white whale!"

 

 

 

*(I grade 1000 copies of one question, and a different TA grades each question for all the sections for fairness)

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Re: The cranky thread

 

The engineering students whose tests I am grading are really, really stupid on average. More people than not failed the question I'm grading* because they cannot factor a simple cubic polynomial with integer coefficients and roots. They should have learned this in 11th grade. Arrgh. The worst answer I got was "I can't factor this polynomial with the means available to me, so it must have no roots." The best wrong answer I got was some attempts at a solution, then a picture of a smiling whale with the caption "partial marks save the whales, every part mark helps." I gave him 1/10 and drew a picture of Captain Ahab holding a harpoon and saying "Tharr be the white whale!"

 

 

 

*(I grade 1000 copies of one question, and a different TA grades each question for all the sections for fairness)

 

The Partial Marks thing is turning up a lot on My Life Is Average and is sometimes a Ninja whio protects the paper from the red pen although someone has done a whale and said that it blocked them putting an answer.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Honey' date=' I flunked Trigonometry for the year in high school. I'm not dumb. I just could not understand.[/quote']

 

That's perfectly understandable. Trig was the first math course where the math got really far away from everyday numbers and shapes. Either you got it or you didn't, and if you didn't you were playing catch-up all year.

 

I had a similar experience in my senior-level physics math class in collidge. Cauchy integrals were all right, but Bessel functions is where they lost me.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Apparently I slipped a disc where my jaw is. It's no longer painful' date='but according to the dentist it will take four to six weeks to get normal. For now, I can't open my jaw more than a little. It will be a month of eating flat food.[/quote']

Pancakes, waffles, toast, halfwiches (leave off the top slice), roast beef, thin steak, milkshakes (straw)...

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Re: The cranky thread

 

My mother-in-law has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The coming weeks/months are not going to be a happy time.

 

Her condition has taken a severe turn of the worse in the last week. I expect she won't make it to New Years; I suspect she may not make it to December. We've canceled Thanksgiving. Daughter's birthday (Dec 2) will probably get celebrated in January.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

The engineering students whose tests I am grading are really' date=' really stupid on average. More people than not failed the question I'm grading* because they cannot factor a simple cubic polynomial with integer coefficients and roots. They should have learned this in 11th grade. Arrgh. The worst answer I got was "I can't factor this polynomial with the means available to me, so it must have no roots." The best wrong answer I got was some attempts at a solution, then a picture of a smiling whale with the caption "partial marks save the whales, every part mark helps." I gave him 1/10 and drew a picture of Captain Ahab holding a harpoon and saying "Tharr be the white whale!"[/quote']

 

In the 101 course that is my bread & butter, I don't put math questions on the exams. (They get them in the homeworks and labs, of course.) Too many people -- about a third of the enrollment, by my estimation -- lock up at the sight of an equals sign used in anger. For a number of folks (like my wife) the difficulty can be partially attributed to a bad teacher at that critical high school trig juncture; that's the thing that gels the common certainty that math is arcane and unknowable.

 

That said, there's a big chunk of people who can't perform multi-step reasoning chains of a non-mathematical variety, either. One step they can hash through (or memorize enough so they can fake it). Two is severe challenge. Three, and less than a quarter of the students can perform the task.

 

And if there's a easy logical fallacy to latch onto, they'll march into it like infantry into machine gun fire in 1915, with the obvious result. At least half of them make the mistake.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Her condition has taken a severe turn of the worse in the last week. I expect she won't make it to New Years; I suspect she may not make it to December. We've canceled Thanksgiving. Daughter's birthday (Dec 2) will probably get celebrated in January.

 

I'm sorry to hear that, Cancer. I'll keep her in my thoughts and prayers.

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