This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

I’m Up So High

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had problems with Advanced Placement transfer credits showing up correctly in my degree audit report. I had seven separate AP scores for tests that I took during high school, but I only got credit for one of them. I tried emailing and calling people asking them to solve the problem, but that didn’t work. I decided to go find out the solution to this problem myself.

First I went to the walk-in advising office for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I talked with an adviser for several minutes, and she concluded that there was nothing she could do about this problem. She suggested that I go to the registrar’s office.

Apparently, they had to put the registrar’s office on the eleventh floor. I got on the elevator, and after pausing at the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 10th floors, I finally made it to the 11th floor. I looked out the office windows and realized that this was the highest point I’ve been at in Madison, so I decided to snap a picture.

Unfortunately, the people at the registrar’s office also didn’t know how to solve my problem, and they suggested that I go to the place that actually receives the AP score report directly from College Board, the admissions department.

At this point it felt like I was calling a customer service line for a too-large-for-its-own-good company, and was being forwarded over and over again from department to department. The only problem was that instead of going from line to line like in a phone call, I had to walk from building to building.

I finally made it to the building that was home of the admissions department. Of course, admissions had to be on the upper-most floor, so I got on the elevator. When I looked at the buttons, I realized that admissions wasn’t exactly on the third floor – it was just labeled that way. Apparently there are multiple subfloors between the first and second floors and the second and third floors, making the third floor more or less the sixth or seventh floor.

After finally reaching the admissions desk, I had a small chat explaining my problem, and they told me to fill out a yellow message form that would be delivered to someone that could solve my problem. This sort of defeated the purpose of my elongated trip because I planned on solving the problem in person, but I was rapidly running out of options so I explained my problem for the fifth time, this time in words on paper.

Believe it or not, it worked – the following morning at 6:05 AM, someone re-evaluated my Advanced Placement scores and I got all my credits.

Two hours later, a staff adviser I had emailed two or three days prior to my quest responded to my email saying, “I just checked your account and it appears to be that everything is entered properly, what exactly is the problem you are having?”

(Photo taken using an Apple iPhone)

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS360

Gauges, meters, and turn signals are all indicators. Make a photograph of an indicator that catches your attention today.

 

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This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

The Remains...

The remains of the baked potato that I just ate.

 

What I’m Reading

For my readers that have stuck with me for a long time, you may or may not remember this section I used to have called “What I’m Reading” where I described books that I was reading. I haven’t had this section of my blog since the end of the summer, but for those of you that were actually interested in this section, I have good news – I will most likely be bringing it back soon.

The main problem was that I wasn’t able to find a generic library here on my university campus. I know of several libraries, but all of them are specific libraries dedicated to specific topics. Simply going to one of these libraries wasn’t sufficient for finding some good books to read for entertainment. That, in addition to my increased busyness, made it more difficult to read for fun.

However, a few days ago, I managed to get a hold of electronic copies (which may or may not be legal) of books that I was interested in reading for a while. I have six in total – two of them are The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, and the other four are the four books in the ever-so-controversial Twilight series. I actually have not read a single Twilight book before, but regardless of the implications reading the books may have, I feel it’s important enough to read a book that has gained such popularity in modern-day culture.

I’m not quite sure when I’m going to start reading, but hopefully it will be soon, and hopefully I will finish my first book in a few days. I’ll have my normal “What I’m Reading” section in my blog when I finish the book.

 

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Canadian Bacon

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

Click on the image for more information.

 

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I Said Sharpen, Not Mutilate

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Click on the image for more information.

 

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Daily Shoot Assignment Catch-Up

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

>

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

I finally caught up on all my Daily Shoot assignments. Click on the images for more information.

Edge of a Knife

Triple Snickers

HD Camera

Pencil Eraser

Shifting Curves

Strawberry Starburst

Windows 7 Clock

 

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I Still Remember How to Breathe

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

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.

 

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