(no subject)

[prog]

Wowie zowie... just "attended" the first video lecture. Very happy; am officially smarter now, ho ho. I like being able to pause the prof so's I can take notes at my leisure. Dur-heee, it's just like Tivo! Well, not really; rewinding isn't really worth the effort unless you missed a crucial point, since resynching with the incoming RealMedia stream takes so long.

Difference between the me of today and the me of a dozen years ago, the last time I took a math course: I often find it easiest to take notes as Perl code. Not all the time, but when I understood how to multiply a matrix by a vector, and wanted to write down my understanding, any attempt to render it into plain english (or even pseudocode) would have been far less effective, to me, than just writing a couple of nested foreach() loops.

Wonder if I can stick with it through the end, maybe averaging one lecture per day...

Comments

Hmm.

[kyroraz.livejournal.com]

Jmac? How much Calc have you taken?

I just looked through the list of lectures for this class, and some of them (not all, but a few) will be somewhat confusing without Calc 2 and Calc 3 pre-requisites and I cannot remember how far you went in mathematics at UMaine, but you may want to consider reviewing Calc a bit before getting to Lecture #23.

I thank you for pointing this out to me. DifEQ and LA is where, in my own personal math experience, where if it was DDR, I'd start getting lots of Boos. I think I might start looking into this myself and get a real book rather than the self-written book that the prof. at UMaine gave me for his class (and he wasn't really an effective teacher, but I didn't have time to go back and try another teacher).

HTH.

Re: Hmm.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, the book for this class is also by the prof (Strang). no escape

I barely squeaked by Calc I with a C, but that was long ago, and I was much dumber then. I will keep your admonition in mind, though, and fall back if necessary.

I am specifically interested in LA because my boss sez it's the most relevant of the more accessible college-level math courses for hackerly projects, and it doesn't actually require much calculus, even though it almost always has Calc courses as a prerequisite. So I'm kinda cheating, and happy that I can. Thanks, MIT!

[cnoocy]

Interestingly, when I've been writing pseudocode for the C# project I'm working on (C# looks like Java with the capitalization wrong) I've been writing it in Python.