Monday 14th - Friday 18th: studying, movie, miscellaneous

I did a bit of studying this week. I've got a fair bit to do and I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed possibly. I had this idea that it might be helpful to write up all the mathematical theorems and definitions I'm supposed to know for linear analysis and put them on the wall so that I can easily remind myself of how they all interrelate.

Cutting out all the maths theorems.

The names / brief summary of some stuff I'm supposed to know for numerical methods.

Some people kicking a football around. These people were actually a little skilled. Before this, I strangely noticed that there was always one person in the group that was consistently terribly inaccurate to a comedic degree. But these people are good.

All the stuff for chapter one of Linear Analysis. There are 8 chapters in the module. The blue things are definitions. You can make any definition you want. It's just a convenient way of naming things that posess some properties. The orange things are theorems. They relate combinations of objects posessing certain properties to other objects. All theorems need to be proven by using definitions and logic in a rigorous and sometimes complex way. That's what a lot of maths is about.

 On tuesday night I went to the mooch bar in the portland building to find the gliding club. I found them and signed up for the coming saturday. I also found Paul Mignot from Belgium whom I met at rambling, and another exchange student he was sitting with, Didier from Switzerland. After signing up to the gliding club I sat with those guys for a while, drank some beer, and talked about some cool things. Didier is a masters student studying electrical engineering. I've just started getting into electronics in quite a basic way, so I was interested to hear what he had to say about it.

On Wednesday I went to the Savoy Cinema with Matthias, Charlotte, Paolo, Fred, and Fred's housemate.We watched Battle: Los Angeles. The premise of the movie was something like "aliens invade Los Angeles and some army people have to hold them off". That sounded pretty cool but unfortunately I think this was the worst movie I have ever seen. It was bad in basically every way. The aliens were stupid, the "marines" could only speak using cliches, the action was boring and repetitive, out of 3 adult "civilians" that they come across, one turned out to be a veterinarian who is able to do an autopsy of the half dead alien corpse for them, the boy of 8 years old is feeling okay again 1 minute after his father's death by the marine's stating that he is now also a marine, and, 'marine's never give up'..... That's just the beginning. The list of criticisms of the movie could continue a long time.

Luckily Savoy Cinema is very cheap so we didn't really mind. We all had the same opinion of the film so it was a bit amusing.

Thursday was St Patrick's day. I only heard about it in the morning, and as I started to think about it decided I didn't really need to go out for that. It's not really my favourite scene. I stayed home, did a lot of homework, and read some of 'The Dying Earth' by Jack Vance. Possibly the best fantasy novel ever.

I think Friday was fairly uneventful.