Someone--an undergraduate--asked me today for some kind of add code, or something, to take my integral calculus course this summer. I didn't know what that was, so instead I took an online quiz to find out which American city I was. (Chris "The Virtual Stoa" Brooke was Boston.) And--mirabile dictu! as the Romans might say, or blow me! in the manner of the English--I turned out to be Seattle. Which is where I live. And I wasn't even trying. Is that convenient, or what?
Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"
Seattle
Your dark exterior masks a caffeine driven activism. You'll take up a cause and you'll get ugly to advance it.
All this administrative stuff, with 'codes' and 'forms' and 'grades'...I don't know a flaming thing about any of it. How do you add a class? Damned if I know. Overloading? Couldn't tell you. What's the departmental policy on blah blah blah oh sorry were you asking a question I was miles away who are you again and what are you doing in my bedroom? I did successfully give grades to my linear algebra students, but that's only because someone stuck a sheaf of bubble-forms into my mailbox with very simple instructions typed in a large, bold font, and someone in the office took care of the difficult parts like getting these 'grades' to the people who keep track of such things. I suppose they must have a building, somewhere. Maybe a cavern, underground, filled with legion upon legion of little gnomes scanning bubbled forms and playing tinkling crystal flutes that sound like falling water. I hope they get paid well. Can you pay gnomes in radishes, or am I thinking of something else? Undergraduate graders, maybe?
It's all too confusing; I shall have to have a lie-down.
UPDATE: Wound up reading about alternative voting systems today and came across a family of them whose basic idea is apparently due to Ramon Llull, the combinatorial-disks chap whom I first heard of when reading up on Giordano Bruno, I think in this book here. Six Degrees of Giordano Bruno, anyone? Condorcet methods sound like graph theory to me.
Posted by aloysius at June 17, 2004 04:47 PM | TrackBack |