Category: Angst

Today, Maria is taking all her exams for every class. On the same day. Most of these exams consist of looking at red-and-pink blobs with some white on them, and then answering questions like

Is this slide: (circle one or maybe two, we’re not telling)

  • The maxillonervous mandiflore splay
  • The mandillomaxous floresplay nerve (inverted)
  • The florimandillous splayinerve max
  • Dog puke (HA HA JUST KIDDING) (OR ARE WE)
  • The pukiflorimous nervedog mandisplay

Now, pay attention. The standard reward for students who survive this kind of hell-day is that, to “make up” for not having classes at the same time as exams, they get extra classes and labs every day this week. So the students have a choice of beginning / upping amphetamine regimens, or collapsing and missing twice as much information as usual.

The University of Louisville Medical School

“We have to let them teach. We can’t let them practice on humans.”

Argh.

COMPUTER SCIENCE IS HARD.

I’m trying to grasp the math involved in Fermat’s Little Theorem as an end to understanding the proof of PRIMES Is In P, so okay, more precisely math is hard. So this is really the same complaint I’ve been making since fourth grade. I’m doing it in the interest of my CS education, though, so that’s really that about which I feel the need to complain.

See, grammar is easy.*

Anyway, I wasted like half an hour looking up that thing in the popup text over “Fermat’s Little Theorem,” so I guess I should get back to work.

* Grammar may not actually be easy.

On the principle that I’ll try anything twice, I went to a hair-cutting establishment similar to where I got my last bad haircut and, shockingly, got exactly the same haircut.

Pros of this haircut:

  • My hair doesn’t get in my ears anymore.
  • I look–just the littlest, tiniest bit–like a badass.

Cons of this haircut:

  • No I don’t.
  • AND I DON’T HAVE ANY HAIR.

I learned something, though: watching in mute horror as great hunks of my head fell away, I discovered myself to be in possession of a lot of gray hair. I could seriously be all gray by the time I’m 30. You can’t tell in the Idiotcam©, because it’s almost all in the back. But as Mister Sadistic Barber drew his Nazi Razor (Nazor) over my skull again and again, the air around me was a dark snowstorm, filled with the pale detritus of eight years spent learning computer science.

Kentucky: home to Davy Crockett, birthplace to Abraham Lincoln.

Kentucky: where rests the body of Secretariat, greatest athlete of all time.

Kentucky: where you can work in an office building filled entirely with grownups and walk into a bathroom to find the stall-door assertion that “Tom is A Asshole.”

I just got through my third project-based all-nighter this semester. I’m astoundingly stupid for doing this again, but on the other hand, I’m turning into a fucking Java monster.

Variations on state-space search in the Eights Puzzle, if you were wondering.