Return to the Point of Origin
Ok, so I have been a bit quiet. Perhaps too quiet, but lets leave that to the internet tough guy for a final judgment (which coincidentally, by definition, not matter). Last time on this blog, we saw that I was accepted to UCLA, waiting for AP scores and commenting on neurobiology. In the period of null, I graduated high school, worked as an intern at CK12 and at NASA Ames, began networking with the college crowd, completed my first quarter at the University of California, Los Angeles, attended a business party at CommerceNet, celebrated Christmas and New Years at home, then returned to UCLA for quarter two.
This first week has been ok, despite the fact that the chemistry professor has been away on business and will not return to teach until next week, thus allowing the first weeks schedule to show itself to be lighter than normal. Anthropology 7, on the evolution of humans, is so far proving interesting in the reading, with the lectures being based solely off of the reading. Math 31B is going to be a bear, since the professor likes to revise his train of thought midway through the lecture. Since he lacks a microphone (I hear he will get one next week) he speaks like his voice box has a weak capacitor - he starts out loud then becomes very quiet, ramping back up to vocal clarity before fading away, yet again. But so far I've found if I rewrite my notes in front of the math book, I resolve any "data dropouts" that were written into the notes. On friday, at lecture, he put up an example problem - find the derivative of y=ln(x) and asked for the first step, testing all of us. I raised my hand and motioned that he should raise both sides to base e, so that it became e^y=x -> e^y y' = 1 -> y'=1/(e^y) -> y'=1/x. His reaction was to write "Suggestion by Ben" to it before solving it, then showed us what the book wanted us to do. To be frank, the books method was a warped chain rule (implicit differentiation versus chain rule; implicit differentiation wins for simplicities sake).
Psych 19 (Fiat lux on color vision) is an undisputably awesome course - we read scientific papers on vision (biology, chemistry, etc) and discuss the implications of the research and how that contributes to the greater understanding of sight as a whole. The professor, in my opinion, is awesome because he doesn't cater to entertaining the students and instead wants us to discuss the science like one does at a conference. Since he was a graduate of UC Berkeley, I am certain he was trained in the "old school"-style of science, a style I find most different from my other profs (not saying anything, just saying).
So far, so good.