May 12th-17th: studying

I'm writting this blog very late. So I might just skip over a bunch of details.

I spent this week just doing studying. I had my first exam on the 17th. The exam is Topics in Scientific Computing. I haven't really been to many of these classes so I was a little concerned. However during my revising I managed to score a level up in maths. Taylor series expansions of things are now really easy, and I can almost do it in multiple dimensions as well. Except during the exam there was a question which I had not done before, where the function had two variables going on and there was soemthing strange and I couldn't do that for some reason.

But I was able to derive some numerical methods for multiple dimensions just by holding a few variables here and there constant and using some Euler methods or mid point rules and combining them. I was very happy about that.

Sometime during this week Karlijn got really annoyed at me because I didn't eat all my dinner. I didn't eat my dinner because it tasted like sewerage. But she made a big speech to me about people starving in Africa. I think she maybe has a tiny point there, that waste is not good, but also, sometimes you see the food and it looks really good, and you're very hungry so you put a lot on your plate and then you realise that the food is actually incredibly gross and will make you feel sick if you try to eat it all. Also, I don't think economies work at such a simplistic way as Karlijn was suggesting. I think we already produce more food than we require, and I'm fairly sure that farmers actually destroy some of their food fairly often because there's too much of it. Also, if people are worried about food waste then they should not be eating meat every day as Karlijn does, because meat uses a very great multiple more food to produce than does food that is not meat. Karlijn was just having a bad day, and apparently Dutch people have a stereotype to be like that.

I was feeling quite stressed about exams and stuff.

I went to the library a few times and I found that studying late at night in the library is really great. Toward the end of this week I was feeling reasonably well about the upcoming exam.