Archive for the ‘Damn’ Category
to show the world i am a gentleman
big pharma saw america/ the dying and the sick/ “we get it now:/ america—/ a place to get rich quick!”// religion saw america/ believing in a lie/ “come join *our* side, america/and fight the other guy!”// the lawyers & the media/ made a little note/ “we see it all. america:/ a place where people vote.”// the internet’s america/ was talking on the phone/ and left me in the library/ writing songs alone// so if you see america/ tell me where to find her/ the blind men found an elephant/ but these guys all are blinder// my living blood, america/ and this, my beating heart/ tell me my america/ has fallen quite apart.
anybody enduring this crap.
that isn’t in for the money.
is a blockhead.
bye, now.
7 principles (UU; uuce) the hymnal
7 days (_genesis_ & dylan) gods & traditions
7 seals (& churches; _revelation_) pointless lies
7 planets (& 7 “sisters” [“pleiades”]) science & mysticism
7 ages of man (_as_you_like_it [act 2, scene 7]) whining schoolboy; mere oblivion
7 deadly sins (dylan again [wiburys]; PALEGAS) i’m confident, you’re proud, he’s arrogant
7 colors (ROYGBIV MRBGPYO) i quit forever; i mean it this time.
VME, alas.
quadrivium & trivium
(7 liberal arts:
arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, music,
grammar, rhetoric,
& logic)
i’ve probably understood your remarks…
but thanks for the clarifications anyway.
i *certainly* didn’t think you’d asked me
to abandon my (long-cherished) handwriting
conventions.
or to comment less.
*that*, i’m just admitting to myself,
is the only way i can get through
duties like this: grind away like
some team of grad students on some
late night, all in a huge hurry (the
“grading parties” that make huge
classes possible [multiple-choice
“objective” tests having long ago
been judged too, um, objective…
or maybe it was too “harsh”]).
and as to the tone. if i speak in
any other voice than my own, well.
it’ll not’ve been what i spent my entire
working life and much of my real life
trying to be as clear as possible about
what i’m trying to say, for.
if i forget jerusalem let my right hand lose its cunning.
i’d be thrilled to discuss specific examples
(with the actual paperwork in front of
us, face to face, in the best case).
i’m the only person i know about who
actually *reads* upper-division student work
in mathematics in any large quantities.
i’ve found much to be learned from
such reading more or less of course
but like most learning it’s *hard work*.
almost all college faculty will find that
they’ve got lots of better ways to spend
their time (and i sure don’t blame them;
specifically, i’m not about to try to get
*you* to change any part of *your* style;
indeed, if lecturers were to be made to do
this kind of stuff, i’d be out of a job).
getting back to work (other broken deadlines).
mond’y’s USA labor day
& campus is closed. so
i *won’t* be visiting.
stephen “the phlatt rascal”?
might be doing the usual
monday night variety show
or not; you won’t learn it
from me. here. now.
Introduction
(Lines 1—40)
God (as I choose to call my higher power)
Grant me an audience for half an hour
And I will, if I can, do all the rest.
My subject is the story I know best;
I mean my own. It starts in a motel,
The night of my divorce. I felt like Hell.
Think of a pilot, learning how to fly,
Who, though he should know better, flies too high,
Then falls in the Atlantic and is drowned.
His body and the plane are never found.
There’s something like our marriage in that story,
The way it shoots to misery from glory.
The similarity might not be strong,
But, as to suffering, I’m never wrong:
Divorce is brutal. Trust me when I say
I’d rather be that pilot any day.
Lisa, in a voice that tore my heart,
Had told me, “From now on, we’ll live apart.
I’ll keep your stuff till you’ve got your new place.
The First Street house is mine. I want my space.”
And so, a stranger in my own home town,
I left my room to have a look around.
Across the street, a Big Red liquor store
And Waffle House. A porno shop next door.
“The restaurant then. For now, I’ll do what’s right.
I’ve got no strength for sex and drugs tonight.”
The waitress, call her Ruby, perked me up.
I never saw the bottom of my cup.
A refill and a smile, and off she’d glide;
She wore her sixty years with grace and pride.
“Why look upon myself and curse my fate:
I couldn’t stand to only serve and wait.
I’ll bet that woman’s life is harder still
Than mine, by far. And, if I only will,
I could throw all my misery away
And love my life the way it is today!”
If that was true—and I don’t think it was—
I proved myself an awful fool, because
For years I didn’t love my life at all.
The story starts with my decline and fall.
dick’s exegesis.
inspiring visions of an inspired visionary.
my recent example of bad freshman calculus
was, heaven knows, something egregious.
but *this*! this is something else again.
on another day, i might have just bitten down
and let it go with full credit… the very
kind of thing i have to do dozens of times
a night when i sit down to earn my right
to go on calling myself a math teacher.
ordinary unambitious undergrads
will *never* be made in classes like ours
to write carefully. and they’ll take any
attempt to do it as a violation of their
basic civil rights *as* undergrads and
threaten to vote with their feet.
so you’ve got to play it pretty cool.
even though it might break your heart.
just mark it wrong, again.
and tell ’em why, again.
“CODE IS NOT ENGLISH”
usually doesn’t get points-off
*regardless* of how badly the little
dears have mangled plain sense into
worse-than-meaningless mumbo-jumbo
by using “syncopated style”.
but this example, on this day?
i just couldn’t do it. its author
lost a half a point (out of two).
“f(x) = log_a x = (ln x)/(ln a)
f'(x) = 1/(ln a) * 1/x” …
thus far well and good …
“since the derivative of ln x = 1/x”.
and my first instinct, and indeed my
first move, is to circle the “=”,
write “IS” near it, put a big “X” near
the whole mess so far, and write out
“CODE IS NOT ENGLISH”.
and let it go at that.
like usual.
but, finally, dammit.
if that thing deserves a perfect score
then i’m carl friedrich gauss.
if i *ever* encounter “ln x = 1/x”
*without* letting it bother me,
may my right hand lose its cunning.
take away my mathbooks and send me
to seminary or something; i’ll’ve
quit being a *math* teacher altogether.
the student in question will almost certainly
take my comments for raving lunacy. and so,
i suppose, will some portion of readers of this
post. none of *my* business either way, though,
i suppose. sometimes you’ve just gotta get up
on the net and *vent*. thanks for reading.
6.
With a TI “grapher”, I’ve just found that
244^2 == 5 (mod 1009). One simply puts
Y_1 = 1009(fPart(X^2/1009))…
this computes the equivalence-class-mod-1009
of the square of each input successively…
and “scrolls down” in the TABLE window
(set to display natural number X’s).
Hence x^2 == 5 (mod 1009) *does* have a solution.
(In fact, two of them; the other is of course
765 (= 1009 – 244)).
In detail,
244^2 = 58536 = 59*1009 + 5
and
765^2 = 585225 =580*1009 + 5.
(The point here is that one may easily
*verify* such results by “paper-&-pencil”
methods.)
To find the roots *entirely* by p-&-p methods,
the best line of attack would probably be via
“primitive roots”.
trouble is, is, that that “5”
was supposed to’ve been “150”.
once more, dear friends!
(or close the wall up with our
english dead!)
the livingston review 