Ex-Semi-Professional Chef

“Asparagus is the funniest vegetable” - W

Veggies and Differential Equations

Today, in diff eq, we discussed our favorite vegetables during break. My personal favorite is the shiitake mushroom, because it smells so good and has a certain freshness. In Mandarin, the character consisting of the symbol for fish and lamb (鲜) describes it perfectly. I wonder if that appears on the website properly.

Whatever, I have a chemistry test tomorrow so I should get this out quick.

The teacher said that he used to be a professional chef, but as many people describe IWillDominate, it seems that the title of “ex-semi-pro” would suit his particular situation better. I’m sure that everyone in the class had the vision of a fancy restaurant when he said “professional chef,” but he really meant that he ran a food stand when he was our age. However, to his credit, it required multiple skills because there was a decently large menu.

Differential Equations, For Real

Someone was confused about a homework problem from the previous night, which asked the solver to prove that a function fulfills the differential equation given. He was confused because when dy/dx (solved for in the solution function) and y were plugged into the equation was dy/dx + 2xy = 1, the +2x(y(x)) term and the =1 seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Fundamentally, this comes from not understanding the purpose of differential equations, which is to find a function to make them true.

I don’t blame him though, the book seems to teach it backwards: starting by proving that some function is a solution rather than finding ways to solve for the function. However, I guess it would be hard to know what to look for if you don’t know the criteria that has to be fulfilled. But, by doing that, it makes the objective unclear. Students are still stuck on solving for dy/dx in y = f(x).

As Jerma once said, it’s like that spinny thing on the playground and I can’t get off! This is an apt description of calculus.

Man Versus Manim

I am trying to learn Manim because I cringe at my old math videos. They are just MS Paint and a very quiet mic. They aren’t bad though. I have always seen my past self as very foolish, but every time I revisit my old content, it is surprisingly good. Whenever I revise for mistakes, there are very few, probably because I am a perfectionist. It all began when I was in first grade or so, and I would be as lazy as possible on my homework, but my mom insisted that I make it as good as possible before handing it in, so it just became a habit.

During 6th grade in China, I remember a moment in which I was thinking about just throwing my homework together, but decided against it. That may have been the period in which I was around rank 50 or 100, which is a story for another day… However, I think the only big mistake I revised out of my past work was that I used the training set as the test set… but as long as you fix your mistakes it’s ok. But again, I guess I am still a bit young to worry about my “past work,” just like having a LinkedIn.

Anyway, back to Manim, it’s what 3b1b uses to animate his videos and it is incredibly fun and impressive to look at. I am someone who looks at movies and tries to think of how it was shot. Those scenes where it’s the character looking into the mirror but the camera recording that scene doesn’t show up are quite puzzling to me. I also should write some post about Sudoku but that’s just a note.

I want to animate something about differential equations and multivariable calculus eventually, but I definitely can’t do that now. So, I will start with visualizing slicing in Python, especially negative indices. For example, slicing from 0 to -1 with an increment of 1 should give a whole list, excluding the last element. Also, I have some ideas for showing the nature of the “looping back” in this system.

Prince to President

President sounds very pretentious, but so does prince, so I guess it’s fine. But, I did just ask my programming teacher if I can start a USACO club, to which she replied I can just take over the coding club because no one is actually running it this year. Sounds like a great deal, and there is one senior interested so we could probably think something up. I don’t actually know him well though, so we would have to know each other first.

I also joined the STEM Journal club, so that should be pretty fun. I haven’t done any math club problems in a while, but I get the feeling that I’m just getting better at problem-solving in general by learning new things, which is arguably better than just doing a bunch of math problems over and over.

L8R