Posts (page 2)
Yes, in my previous post, I raved about the spiders that live in my garden. But that is only because they don't move. If they were truly creepy crawly spiders that wandered around my bedroom, I would scream, run away, and enlist some braver soul to come kill them for me. In fact, when I first saw one of the spiders in my garden, I made a feeble attempt to scare her away by accidentally-on-purpose being sloppy with my watering and getting a good deal on her web and messing it up a bit.
But now, they've assured me that they aren't going to be scary and they are in fact going to be really, really cool by sitting still and allowing me to stare at them every day.
However, there is no way on God's green earth that I am going to be anything other than absolutely fucking terrified by reports that there is a huge fucking centipede living somewhere in the vicinity of my bed.
Look at this. If you can stomach it! It's so disgusting and scary! This is a picture from Wikipedia of a house centipede. And according to my boyfriend, our resident Centipede of Doom is more than 4 inches long.
FOUR INCHES. HOLY SHIT.
In my BEDROOM.
Yes, I know they are supposed to be good. They eat other bugs. They're not particularly harmful to humans (apparently their bite is like a "mild bee sting"). But there is only so much I can take.
Needless to say, I will be sleeping elsewhere until the Centipede of Doom is apprehended. In the meantime, here is a funny website detailing the author's never-ending battle against the house centipede.
They invaded my garden and terrorize the flies! They're creepy, they're crawly, they're spiders!
This spider and her identical sister (who I don't have a good picture of yet) moved into my potted-plant garden the other day. They are called Argiope Aurantia, or St. Andrew's Cross Spiders, or, more informally, black and yellow garden spiders.
They can apparently grow to have a body size of more than an inch long (eewwww!) but my new neighbors are at this time have bodies only a half inch long.
The trademark of the Genus Argiope is those zig-zags you see in the picture. Those are called stabilimentum and as the name implies, their purpose is to add stability to the web. Or, that's what some people think. Other theories are that it makes the spider look bigger and scarier to predators, or that it helps camouflage the spider, or that it adds visibility to the web so that birds don't fly through it.
Anyway, these spiders build webs and eat bugs and apparently live their entire lives in their webs before laying eggs and dying. It is this reason that I am not terrified of my new neighbors; they stand very little chance of ever trying to crawl on me. Also, they eat the flies, which are really an epidemic in mid to late summer at my apartment, because of the crabapple tree's rotting fruit.
So, eat away, little spiders! Free me from bajillions of flies! And enjoy living in my flowers.
Edit: Thinking about this problem later, the reasoning in this entry is, unfortunately, incorrect. Well, it's valid for this particular case, but not for all problems of this sort so it's not good enough. I'd write an entry explaining how the problem is actually solved, but it involves a lot of Calculus concepts that are way too difficult to explain on a blog entry.
I had a flash of brilliance driving home from my Calculus class.
We were given an equation to try to work out as extra credit last Wednesday at the end of class, and I wasn't there as I left half-way through. Today everyone was talking about it, and nobody had worked it out, so I spent half the class vaguely working on it. And then, driving home, of course, the answer occured to me in a flash of brilliance. Or I guess I should say it was a moment of clarity where I was temporarily not-stupid.
You see, we are working on infinite series. I'll try to explain briefly, if you care. Which you should, because math is cool.
Anyway, an infinite series is basically adding up infinite amounts of numbers.
Here's a simple one: ∑n. The ∑ is the sum notation, and normally there would be at the bottom the number you start at and at the top there'd be the number you end at. So in this case, we'll go from n=1 to ∞ (infinity). So:
So if we add up to infinity, our ultimate answer would be infinity. But there are some infinite series that actually add up to a finite (i.e., not infinite) number, or rather, so close to that number that it may as well be that number. An example is this one:
So that would be 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8+ 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + ... + 1/2^n. If you put just 1/2 through 1/64 in your calculator, you'll get about 0.984. Add the next few terms in the series and it just keeps getting closer and closer to 1. So we would say that the series ∑1/2^n converges to 1.
There are a few things that distinguish series that converge to a real number from those that diverge (go to infinity) and they're pretty logical. First, that the numbers have to be getting smaller as you go along the series. That makes sense; you can't add up ever increasing numbers and expect to get anything other than infinity. Another feature is that as you get really far along the series, the individual numbers you are adding have to eventually get so small that they're effectively zero. For instance, if you're adding numbers that keep getting smaller, but never get smaller than, say, 1, then you're still going to end up with infinity.
So in my class we've learned various techniques to determine whether a given series goes to infinity or not and Monday we learned one called the root test, which involves a bunch of stuff you care about even less than this long, stupid math post. And we were given the following extra credit problem:
And we have to find out whether it converges to a real number or diverges to infinity. And we all puzzled over it and tried to do complicated integrations and did crazy tests and then driving home it occured to me that, duh, this series doesn't even past the first rule; this series has numbers that are getting bigger, not smaller.
Flashback to algebra. E is a constant number, about 2.7 something, and it is raised to a negative exponent, which means that you make a fraction, and put it in the denominator and make the exponent positive. Here's a picture because math doesn't mix with plain text:
Now, we know with fractions that the bigger the denominator is, the smaller the total value of the fraction is, right? 1/4 is smaller than 1/2. And in our series, n is getting bigger and bigger. So e^n is getting really big, really fast. So the fraction 1/e^n is getting really small.
So back to the original equation we were working on. We are subtracting 1/e^n from 1. So we are subtracting ever smaller numbers from 1. So therefore, the total value of 1 minus 1/e^n is increasing. To illustrate in case you're lost (or even reading anymore), let's try some values of n. Like, 1 and 2. So if n=1 then we have (1-1/e^1)^1. Plug that into my calculator and I get about .63. Then with n=2, we have (1-1/e^2)^2 which is about .75.
So the numbers are getting ever bigger, thus breaking the very first and most basic condition of infinite series converging to a real number.
We had an exciting saga with the electric company today.
Boyfriend and I woke up around 10:45, and as we were getting ready to face the day, the power went out. We went outside and looked around, and some of our neighbors still had their outdoor lights on. I asked one of the neighbors if his power was on and he said yes.
So I called the electric company. The lady didn't know what was going on but submitted a ticket for us. I had to go to work, so I left my boyfriend to deal with the issue.
A few hours later he calls with an update: electric company says it's not their problem. We need to talk to the property maintenance and they should fix it. So he goes over to the rental office and they submit an emergency maintenance ticket.
A few hours after that, he calls with another update: maintenance hasn't been by yet because they're working another "emergency". Somebody's A/C is broken and clearly this is far more important than our power being out which, by the way, includes A/C. And dudes, it's a 75 degree day! Open your fucking windows and quit crying! And turn our power back on because we have food that'll spoil, dammit.
They turned off the power to the wrong property.
They meant to turn off the empty unit next to ours. Not us. So my boyfriend bitches to the electric company and they in effect say, "Whatever dude, we've got 800 people without power in Podunk, we'll get to you when we get to you."
Hooooooold up there, parter. You shut off the wrong apartment. You are responsible for our power being out for going on 7 hours. You get your asses out here and turn our power back on.
So I called the electric company figuring that since I'm the account holder, they'll be more responsive. And they were; the lady was very friendly and empathetic and said she'd send out an ASAP notice to the techs. And now our power is apparently back on. Thanks, AEP. It only took you 8 hours to turn off the right apartment. You rule.
This composition page is very shiny. Lovely shadows on the buttons. It dimmed the entire page and told me that it wasn't compatible with Safari, but it's letting me motor on anyway. I wonder if this will work. What concerns me is that my blog main page appears to show my first and last name, which I thought it said it wouldn't do. But then, I can't tell whether it's showing me a "public" view or a "private" view. There doesn't seem to be a way to toggle between them. Yeah, and if you're using Safari you totally shouldn't try composing an entry. Trying to put in line breaks causes things to be very weird. For instance, I just hit return, and it gave me an error noise, and then wouldn't let me type until I backspaced a few times at which point the cursor jumped to a random part of the entry I'd already written and started deleting. Weird. Now to try to submit this and see if it goes through. This is irritating. I really don't like using Firefox.
