(As you can clearly see, this is a very text-heavy and possibly boring blog post. Don’t read it if you have a life.)

I just realized that it’s been a week since I last posted in my blog and ten days since I’ve made a video. I actually intended to post a video on Tuesday, November 8, 2010, which was a day after my most recent video, but I ended up not having enough time on that day. I kept procrastinating until I ended up forgetting about it for a while. The topic of the video was slightly time-based as well – it was a story about daylight savings time. I still want to film and post the video, but I’m not sure when I’ll have enough time to do it.

The main reason I’ve been overly absent online for the past week is because of an upcoming calculus exam. I fell behind on the stuff we were learning, and eventually, I fell so far back that it was hard to seize opportunities to catch up. I have an exam this coming Thursday, and I’m still behind – I’ve been trying to learn calculus like crazy this past week, but it hasn’t been working very well. I’m going to continue this failing effort until Thursday before the exam to try to get as high of a score as possible on the exam, because, even though they’re both horrible, a C is still better than a D.

I’m expecting to be more available website-wise after this Friday. I’ll be spending most of late Thursday night and Friday doing a programming assignment for computer science, which, with respect to the amount of time we were given to do it, I am also behind on. Once I get that out of the way, the only major thing I have left before my Thanksgiving recess is a Spanish exam, but those tend to work out well even without extreme intensive studying. I should also catch up on my reading for botany, which hasn’t gotten any easier – if you happen to remember (or happen to have even seen) the picture of my botany binder from a while back, my binder now is about twice as thick as shown in the picture. I’ll eventually post another picture of how much my binder has grown.

I also noticed that I’m getting really bad at tweeting when I’m posting new blog posts, and I think I’m losing a handful of views on each of my blog posts because of that. I’ll try to remember more often.

Picture of the Day

Click on the image for more information.

Click on the image for more information.

You should check out this random article that I wrote for LiquidPHP:

http://liquidphp.net/content/i-still-remember-how-breathe

No, that is not at all relevant to what LiquidPHP is about, but the LiquidPHP home page wasn’t updated for almost 11 months, so I decided that today would be a good day to take action.

Leave me a comment on that page saying something random of your own.

Update: I just realized that you have to sign up for LiquidPHP’s Drupal to be able to leave comments, so I guess you don’t HAVE to leave a comment.

Second Update: I just realized that the LiquidPHP website is down, so in case that happens again but you still want to read my post, here it is:

I Still Remember How to Breathe

The LiquidPHP website has been pretty dormant for a long time (meaning, nothing new has been posted since late 2009), so I decided to finally log in to this home page management thing and actually put something up on the website.

Tip of the Day: It doesn’t matter how many alarms you set on your cell phone if it runs out of battery overnight.

Anyway, are we all ready for a calculus lesson? Let’s learn about triple integrals and their relationship with integrals of other orders. We all obviously know that a standard integral finds the two-dimensional area under a particular curve. Bringing that up an order, a double integral finds the three-dimensional volume under a particular plane. So a triple integral must find something four-dimensional under a particular volume.

If you don’t know already, the fourth dimension is time. Obviously, we cannot represent time itself on a (theoretically and conventionally) two-dimensional piece of paper, similar to how we cannot represent depth (the third dimension) on a sheet of paper. However, we found an easy work-around to this – draw a graph on a sheet of paper in a way that we can mentally visualize the third dimension, namely, drawing a third axis and pretending it goes into and pops out of the paper.

So to represent the fourth dimension, or time, on a sheet of paper, we would have to draw multiple versions of the same graph as it changes over time. Simply put, if our time range was ten seconds and we wanted to represent a function of three variables in units of seconds, we would have to draw ten separate three-dimensional graphs, each of them depicting what the function looks like at each interval of one second.

Now that we can depict the actual graphs of the functions, we have a general idea of how we can solve them. All integrals come with two bounds, and these two bounds are necessary for finding out what two volumes we need to draw. Once we have these two volumes based on the bounds, we need to find the time it took for the volume to change from the lower bound to the upper bound based on the constraint of the function that relates area, volume, and time.

Of course, not everyone living in the third dimension (which, I’m assuming, is everyone that’s reading this) can necessarily picture that well enough to get an idea of how to find the integral, so we have a method of solving triple integrals into iterated integrals which represent each variable independently.

Consult your local calculus professor if you have any questions, and thanks for attending lecture today.

—
Adam Parkzer

In other news, I plan on spending eight hours tonight from 6 PM to 2 AM catching up on homework that I’ve been procrastinating on for the past week, so I will most likely be unavailable between those hours.

And finally, this is a new must-see music video by Bo Burnham for his comedy song Oh Bo. Lauren Francesca is in it, if you need another reason to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcLFmN7aJe0

That’s all, bye humans.

I was doing a bit of experimentation with Photoshop earlier today, and it involved taking a few pictures. I accidentally took this picture of the corner of my room, then made a revolutionary discovery.

My wall is not only a single shade of disgusting dark brown, but two shades of disgusting dark brown!

I don’t know how that discovery is revolutionary.

But it’s still interesting.

My classes start tomorrow, so I spent this afternoon walking around campus searching for my lecture halls and discussion rooms.

The trip took about an hour and twenty minutes. The longest part was trying to find my Computer Science room; I thought the room number was 367, but after I searched for Room 367 for about ten minutes and couldn’t find it, I realized that 367 was the course number, not the room number. The real room number was 121. I have no idea how I made a mistake like that, seeing as I’m normally extremely alert to small details.

I also have a few pictures for today.

The first is a request by a few of my friends that I voice chat or webcam with. I told them that my microphone is over ten years old, but still works perfectly fine; they wanted to see what it looks like.

The next picture is also a request by someone who was interested in seeing what I eat on a random day. I ate this at around 3 PM on a day that I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch. To get an idea of how much that is, that plate has a diameter of about 10 inches. I finished all that in one sitting, but I don’t always eat this much every meal; I prefer to eat a little bit all day.

This is a picture of my calculus textbook. I originally took it to submit as a customer image for Amazon, but I had it handy on my camera so I decided to put it here too, in case anyone was interested.

If you watched my video from August 28, you’ll know that the people that come to my apartment are horrible parkers. The next two pictures were awesome examples, so I decided to share them.

This picture shows an online food delivery company parked sideways across about four or five parking spots:

And in this one, it’s almost like those three sideways-parked cars planned this whole thing out: