You did it, Katy! Congrats on getting your Master’s in Mathematics (I don’t know if those words should be capitalized, but they seem important enough to be capitalized) by passing a ridiculously rigorous, stressful and difficult oral exam! I knew you could do it. Whether or not you decide to get your Ph.D., you’ll always be the best math solver that I know.
Gaelic style: May your equations always add up, your integrands always integrate, and your proofs always prove. May the LaTeX be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the variables fall soft upon your pages and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Clue style: Katy Micek, at the University of Minnesota, with a pencil.
The more I have learned and grown as a world citizen and the more the seeds of a liberal arts education have germinated within my brain, the more I have realized the incredible gift of a democratic government that we have here in the United States. That’s not to say my ignorance of the election system isn’t shocking — in fact, today I read through the Wikipedia article about Super Tuesday to understand what, exactly, happens on this day:
In the United States, Super Tuesday commonly refers to the Tuesday in early February or March of a presidential election year when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates to national conventions at which each party’s presidential candidates are officially nominated. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other single day of the primary calendar, and accordingly, candidates seeking the presidency traditionally must do well on this day to secure their party’s nomination. In 2008, Super Tuesday is February 5; 24 states will hold primaries or caucuses on this date, with 52 percent of all pledged Democratic Party delegates and 41 percent of the total Republican Party delegates at stake.
Super Tuesday is tomorrow. To avoid a premature, misinformed, unfocused political debate, I will not venture the current candidate I favor at this time. Later this year, however, I promise we will get to have a good tumbledry political discussion. Focus is the key.
The main message here, though: get out and participate in your political system by reading about presidential candidates tonight, and caucusing for one of them tomorrow, on Super Tuesday. Please.
I just found out at The Blue Shallow that John passed his boards. Congratulations, John!
I found out in the middle of last week that I PASSED the National Boards I took late last year. So what does this mean? Provided I graduate in May, I can practice as early as the first business day after graduation. The National Boards say whether or not I will have a License to practice Veterinary Medicine. And now I can.
Let’s speak metaphorically for a second and say I own a rock labeled “faith in humanity” — well, an event today is responsible for taking a sharp chisel and hammering off a large chunk from said rock. Here’s what happened.
The search box in Firefox pulls results from something called “Google Suggest”. Here’s a description of the feature from Google (emphasis mine):
Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.
So, what’s happening here is this: as you type, Google attempts to guess what you are searching for by offering a list of popular search phrases that are related to the one you are typing. I was searching for “is gzip compression turned on” because I was looking for this useful tool, which can tell you if your website is utilizing compression. I finished typing “is ” (the space is important), and paused… then this list of suggestions came up:
is obama muslim
is obama a muslim
is barack obama a muslim
is barack obama muslim
is bronchitis contagious
is this love lyrics
is limewire legal
is limewire illegal
is singles contagious
is it love
I stared at the first 4 suggestions for probably about 15 seconds. Then I entered in “is ” again, to see if I had made a mistake. Same result. That can only mean one thing: a popular query on Google is there because hundreds of thousands of people are judging a presidential candidate based solely on the color of his skin and the arrangement of the characters in his name.
