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Jun. 13th, 2005 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicMy work computer churned out 16,000 runs of the game this weekend, so I had enough data to figure out how to balance the hazard scores properly today. Got a bunch of stuff tweaked, left it running more for tomorrow so I can compare the changes.
I did lots of probability calculations today. Probability is such a useful thing to understand, and important to so many disciplines, that I'm surprised it's not taught more widely in highschool. I'm really glad I took Prof. Rota's probability course my senior year at MIT. (Although, most of the other students seemed to have had at least a little bit of exposure to it, so maybe it's just my secondary education that was totally lacking.)
Today's I-hate-java rant: whoever thought that we still needed to have both floats and doubles as a core part of the language needs to be beaten with a stick. There should be integers and non-integer numbers, and if anybody needs something more complicated, they should use a special package that lets them decide how many bytes of memory to use to represent each number. Compiler errors that claim no matching signature could be found because "0.2" is a double and not a float fill me with homicidal rage.
I did lots of probability calculations today. Probability is such a useful thing to understand, and important to so many disciplines, that I'm surprised it's not taught more widely in highschool. I'm really glad I took Prof. Rota's probability course my senior year at MIT. (Although, most of the other students seemed to have had at least a little bit of exposure to it, so maybe it's just my secondary education that was totally lacking.)
Today's I-hate-java rant: whoever thought that we still needed to have both floats and doubles as a core part of the language needs to be beaten with a stick. There should be integers and non-integer numbers, and if anybody needs something more complicated, they should use a special package that lets them decide how many bytes of memory to use to represent each number. Compiler errors that claim no matching signature could be found because "0.2" is a double and not a float fill me with homicidal rage.
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Date: 2005-06-14 08:17 am (UTC)A few weeks into the course, we did the thing where everyone gets a packet of M&Ms and creates a color distribution. That's all fine and well, but I'd done that before... in third grade.
On another day, late in the class, I was sitting with two friends. Between us, we'd had 6 semesters of calculus at CU (which is part of why the class was so painful). So the teacher said "Today we're going to talk about logarithms. Trevor, would you like to explain logarithms?" I stumbled about a bit, since I wasn't prepared to teach class that day, but between the three of us we conveyed more information about logs than the teacher could.
My friend and I spent much of that course fixing the computers in the lab so that Excel would work for everybody. It's a good thing we took it together, or the snarky remarks wouldn't have been nearly as fun.