week of Feb. 15th

This week has been a bit stressful. We have a project do Sunday that describes the way they vote down under. It's a pretty cool project but it was completed under a great deal of duress. I had to fight off two bears...a couple of old ladies wanted hugs, but I told them I was too busy with my project. However, I'm making good progress and the forecast bodes well for the coming fortnight.

Weekly blog for week of Feb. 9th

We had a test this week. Hindsight being 20/20, the test was not terribly difficult and was moderately representative, as representative as a test can be considering the short length(time-wise) of an exam that sought to measure the comprehension of a substantial (an entire book) amount of material as well as measure a nascent ability to program in the introduced programming language python. On the subject of the book, I confess that I found the book a bit dry and terribly elementary. I admit that I may have read the book with an attitude one would adopt when assuming a more critical perspective, but I do not think that my inherent bias could sufficiently render my experience a totally local one. I have heard the testimonies of several peers and the general consensus on the book is one of dissatisfaction bordering on mindlessly inundating.

To start with, the language of the book is entirely inappropriate to communicate what is essentially a topic of epistemological importance(The topic of development philosophy that attempts to precisely define a strategem in terms of developmental actions, vis a vis development philosophy that focuses on the form/function of a system, is so profound that it certainly deserves a more formal discussion than what I believe these authours are capable of delivering). It was as if the authors were children trying to explain what differential equations are. Now I admit that I probably can't eloquently explain what differential equations are, but that is besides the point.(I am clearly not a child because no child would admit that he/she can't do something...as Donald Draper says, "...the young don't know anything...especially that they're young") Suffice it to say that the book was filled with too much anecdotal evidence. "Anecdotal evidence" is probably a bit too pedantic of a word...a better way of saying it: the book was filled with church-lady like gossip stories about stan and sue and other such clever characters. I think it should have been a bit more professional and should have strove to communicate its important ideas in a more organized and precise manner. Before writing a 2nd edition, I think it would behove the authors to first enroll in a freshman composition course. I did like the pictures though.

Last week we covered some of the more advanced list operation available in python. It seems to me that the operations are more than "syntactic sugar." I suspect that like Matlab, the functions allow for faster computations than the more naive semantics expressed with java-like syntax. I am anxious to begin working on our large project. Web development seems like a good skill to know. I'm curious to find out exactly how much SQL we are going to learn.