Yes, you heard right. I must be a terrible person for doing this, but Professor Xun’s particular strange Chinese accent makes it impossible to follow o take notes from his lectures. I’ve actually begun teaching myself Calculus outside of the class in order to make up for the man’s lousy teaching skills, and it hasn’t been to difficult. The guy never did anything but regugitate what the textbook said anyway, so reading the textbook actually provides me with clearer information.

But Jason, you haven’t made a post in nearly two months! I know, something must be wrong with me! I probably died or something. Or I didn’t, and everything’s fine, since it is and I’m alive. And not much, incidentally, has happened in two months – to explain my absense, I’ll simply say I’ve been focusing a lot more on schooling and much less on web development and side-projects. I do, however, have a few updates for my design portfolio; I designed a new logo in my absense, and obviously I would like to put my covers for The Typist in there, as well as the logo design for Cydia. Expect that in a couple days.

As for the Maple Story Soundtrack, which I get a million emails about – it should be obvious by now that I can no longer update it. Not only do the tools no longer exist, but I’ve switched operating systems and the most I would be able to do is name the unknown tracks. I will do this, but I won’t go further; as soon as I identify aqnd sort the unknown tracks, the Maple Story Soundtrack is going out of commission. I will always host it, and you all are free to send me tracks I’m missing and I will add them to the soundtrack, but I will no longer actively maintain it. I’m sorry, but school takes priority over a silly game!

In addition, I’ve discovered some very cool note-taking tools in Curio + Evernote. In the past, I’ve tried Evernote and failed to realize its usefulness until I used it in combination with Curio to manage my IBE Freshman Workshop project. Curio integrates seamlessly with Evernote, so Evernote becomes your online project library, which is great when you need to capture and photo of, say, a powerpoint presentation or a whiteboard and keep it in your notebook for later. I’d say my class notes have also become supercharged with Curio + my Wacom tablet. I’ve never been more pleased with my class notes; pencil and paper can suck it.

I’ll be back sometime soon with more stuff to talk about. Until then… goodbye? ;)

He knows how to lighten the mood. My other teaches are interesting, but he’s downright funny. If only I knew his name. I should get on that.

“The two hardest courses you’ll ever take are Freshman English and Freshman Calculus. Freshman English because if you don’t right well, then people will make fun of you behind your back, and nobody wants that, you have to learn to be a good writer, know your grammar and all that.

“And Freshman Calculus, well, I had a student once who went off and got a job working for some big company, General Motors or General Electric, something like that. When they hire people, if the person got an A in Freshman Calculus, they let them name their salary. Great deal, right? Sounds pretty good!

“He named his George.”

Priceless, right? I love learning Calc from this guy, even if I don’t understand it all yet. More practice, more work, and I’ll have everything down. Exams aren’t far off – next week, in fact!

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Calculus happened, as did so many other courses. Economics was for sure a bore, but we didn’t really do anything – so I suppose it has grounds to be a bore for now. Physics the same, though it seems I’m incredibly rusty and prone to getting questions incorrect as always. I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of things, althogh I’m ashamed at some of the basic stuff I’m getting wrong. Perhaps it means I have a bad foundation. That makes this a good time to build up the foundation.

Calculus is about the infinitely small and large; thus my calculus professor saw fit to tell a story. In calculus, you can calculate the area of a three-dimensional solid with the use of integrals. You do this by chopping up the 3D solid into infinitely small “slices”.

“You can find the volume of a cube easy,” my professor said. “But what about irregular solids? Here, I’ll draw one.” He sticks his chalk on the board, and as he draws this curious shape, he speaks:

“So, this is a pretty irregular solid. Yes… a loaf of bread. Now, you sell bread by volume. So in order to sell bread, bakers used to dunk their loaves of bread into buckets of water and measure the water that was displaced. Naturally the bread got pretty soggy – that’s why European bread has such thick crust, to prevent it from getting soggy.

But then a man came along, by the name of Newton, and invented integral calculus. And what do we do to calculate the area of something? We chop it up into slices. And thus, sliced bread was invented.”

We all laughed.

I sit under the stars as I write this, comfortably in a chair beneath a tree, watching students pass me by in the sidewalk lights’ glow. There is a beautiful cobblestone walkway just ten feet away from me, and a magnificent engineering facility some two hundred feet behind, but you wouldn’t know it from looking, because it looks more like a castle. I suppose if Archimedes had to discover that the volume of a solid is equal to the amount of liquid it displaces, such a building would be the appropriate place to do so. I read here, I write here. I check out some of the many cute girls here (I’ve abandoned my quest to garner a girlfriend in one week, which is up tomorrow, in favor of exploring all of my options, to which there are many).

And still not a single sign of a party. I wonder where they all could be… because that would be how I’d meet someone, if I did. That, or look for a photography club. By the way, I’m working on a new short story… I’ll probably have it finished rather soon. Especially since my favorite month of the year is just around the corner.

More recently in math I’ve come to the conclusion that every graph we make is a cross section of something three-dimensional. This is probably wrong, but I can’t help but wonder in my n-dimensional mind, are many of our polar graphs simply cross sections of 3D shapes?

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