Your Bi 1 in April

“It’s the first spring wind!” — Your Lie in April

My Bi-loved Bi 1

W invited me to Bi 1 lecture, taught by Prof Rob B. Phillips, and it’s been a lot of fun.

The most important thing taught in Bi 1 is a way to think in scales. As Phillips says, “If you can’t tell me what sets the scale of something, then you don’t understand it.”

I wrote this post a few^2 days ago

What number is few?

Rob provides the answer of $(few)^2 = 10$

As such, few is the sqrt of 10 which is about 3.16 which is about pi, which is pretty interesting.

This has some implications when doing estimations.

HW

For example, if you have a few homework problems to do and it takes few times ten minutes to do each problem, then it will take somewhere on the order of 100 minutes to do a few problems.

However, there is something wrong with saying that six is a few because 6 times few is 18 which is more like 20 rather than 10.

Mountains

As an example, take a moment to consider:

Q: What sets the scale/size of mountains?

A: The height that a column of rock can be piled up before the rock beneath it collapses.

This is a very different way of thinking and provides much more insight into the nature of reality.

Knowledge and Reality

“I think, therefore I am” is a quote that I heard before taking Hum/Pl 41, aka Knowledge and Reality, but didn’t really get.

I still don’t really get it, but that’s the fun of philosophy: you can ask questions about things that you don’t know.

Prof Chua is a different professor from previous terms of the course but he teaches very well. He’s actually leaving to Singapore to be a professor next year, which is good for them, but maybe less so for us.

He’s quite funny and makes many references to anime, like the example of Fullmetal Alchemist and how the sum of the parts is not necessarily the whole:

If you had a bunch of body parts and just threw them together in a pile, they would not be a person, but if you arrange them in a human shape, then it becomes what we consider to be a human.

Running in the 20s

I was able to run a mile under 8:30, which was my initial goal. I guess my new goal will be to be able to run two miles continuously, but at a slower pace.

Squirrel Summoners

I was walking from class with W and J, and had the sudden urge to show off my skill of summoning squirrels. Basically, you make clicking noises and wave your arm like a tail and wait for the squirrel to come over.

It worked well, but I wanted more.

I’ll have two number 9s, a number 9 large…

Together, we all started clicking and waving our arms to attract squirrels. C showed up at some point and joined our trio.

As squirrel shot-caller, I was getting everyone to kind of attract in the same direction so that no squirrel would be surrounded by two people. That would scare them away or make them attack, probably.

Unconvincing

I’m not sure why squirrels fall for this, maybe because they think that we are squirrels doing some kind of mating call or maybe they think that we are going to feed them?

Anyway, there was one in a tree that I couldn’t get to come down because it was eating. The others were handling about four squirrels at this point so I regrouped and drew attention from one that was going up behind W.

Eventually, we ended up with around ten squirrels around us and we decided it might get too dangerous to continue further.

Your Lie in April

I titled this post “Your Lie in April” but I didn’t actually have time to watch the show at all, but I don’t want to change the title either.

SPOILER ALERT: YOUNG SHELDON FINALE EPISODE

Young Sheldon

However, Young Sheldon came to campus last week to film. It’s basically the prequel to The Big Bang Theory (TV Series 2007-2019) from the perspective of Sheldon Cooper.

Apparently, the prequel actually gets to the point where Sheldon first gets to Caltech. However, they filmed it in the interior west side of the campus near the geology building rather than where the “California Institute of Technology” sign is.

Note: I just looked it up and they were actually recording the finale episode where Sheldon comes to Caltech.

So, they built a replica of the sign for the filming and placed it in the middle of the campus, which was pretty interesting.

Some people actually got to take a picture with the actor while he was on a break, but I was in physics class. Isn’t that kind of funny?

CS 3

CS 3 might be one of the most annoying courses I’ve ever taken, but it is highly instructive in that sense. However, I must complain about the teaching.

Basically, there is a solo project and group project most weeks and the group project is to program a game while the solo project is about teaching how to program in C.

The group project is split into many components, so no one really knows what’s going on, but here are my key takeaways.

What does it teach?

Software design is another name for the course, and the way that things are split up for each member of the group is using header files.

Essentially, by including the .h files in your .c file, you can access the abstract functions from the .h file while pretending that they all work.

When you run your part, as long as the .h file is the same as given, then you will have access to the “correct” functions which were made by the professor and TAs.

It’s actually kind of ingenious, but also hard to understand at first.

How does it teach?

The lectures and office hours are quite vague in the help that they give. For example, in order to load an image into the game, there are all these modularization considerations that are just not taught at all.

It’s more up to the student to figure it out. So, if you already know it or have done something similar before, you can map it onto that. Otherwise, good luck!

Art is not a straight line

Artists like Pewdiepie have experienced a random decrease in their drawing skills for no reason. Progress does not happen linearly because there are many overlapping ideas that fight with each other.

S

The second model for PVA 62c, S, has a much smaller frame than the first model that came in. As a result, it was much harder to draw her in correct proportions.

Proportion and movement are sometimes opposing: if you draw someone with measured proportions and balance, they might appear static. However, if you draw them somewhat incorrectly, you could get some sense of movement from it.

Even Mr. Barry draws the wrong proportions sometimes, but it ends up being interesting anyway.