renrenren3: (SPN * not drunk enough)
2010-11-09 08:41 pm

Boring entry about real life, sorry :(

Long, long day. Due to a malfunctioning ticket machine and a very rude member of staff, I'm now about to personally test the efficiency of the trains' complaint forms. Frankly I'm not expecting much, or anything at all, but I really needed some way to vent or I'd have gone postal on the man. I really didn't need that in my day. Anyway.

I FINALLY HAVE A SUBJECT FOR MY THESIS! I also have a professor who will follow my work, but I have no idea of what to call him in English. Meep.
For those who might be interested, it's about numerical methods for approximating multi-dimensional integrals. And it's a mouthful but it's really much easier than it sounds, I'm going to read a couple of books on the subject, summarize the main existing methods and then write a program to implement one or more of them. Meaning that yes, I went the applied maths way. Blasphemy, but pure mathematicians don't do well in the real world and I have no intention of staying in academia.

It didn't even take me much to decide on a subject, the professor I had an appointment with asked me if I already had something in mind and we went over everything covered during his course. I told him integrals and he said "you could study these methods a bit more in depth, maybe since the course was just about one-dimensional integrals study the methods for more dimensions?" and I said okay and I'm going back next week to get more info and books to read.

Since I was in the building already I tried to see the other professor whose exam I need to take this month or the next, but he wasn't around. And he still hasn't replied to my mails. I later learned that he's got a story of going MIA. Derp derp.
Classmate of mine who lives closer to uni will try to get a hold of him tomorrow morning when he's got classes.

And. In more exciting news. I had tea with Paola after this whole ordeal and it came out that she's planning to go to London for a month after graduation too! My plan was to stay for the 4-5 months between graduation and the start of autumn semester (May to September), get a temp job and all, and it'd be great to go together with the group of April graduates. Now that's some good motivation for me to get all exams and thesis done in time.
renrenren3: (SPN * Castiel)
2010-10-23 08:46 pm

In which there is some very important scientific research among the disjointed babble

I wish I had a DW icon. Castiel is still the most relevant thing that I have. And I refuse to use the drunk!Dean icon because whatever anyone says this is srs bsns.

I don't exactly know why, but after dinner I was attempting an experiment to measure just how big the human field of vision is. Or rather, my own field of vision. I might not be an ideal test subject, my vision is less than perfect and I wasn't working under optimal circumstances.

Anyway, my sister (who always gets roped into this kind of things because she's too nice to say no and my brother always says no) suggested a practical (kind of) use for this: we can now determine the minimum number of humans (or humanoids) required to fend off an attack of the Weeping Angels. Of course, you could just get with your back into a corner and wait to be rescued, but that's not effective at all. Four people can cover all of the surroundings and move around, getting themselves to a place of safety. This excludes the possibility of flying Angels ninjaing you from above, so actually you'd need to be in a team made by eight people to be certain of survival. Provided that none of them blinks.

So, eight people, my sister reckons the Doctor would never manage that unless he went on a massive recruitment spree. Then I suggested he teams up with Torchwood, it's just five people but they have a Pterodactyl! (We're very big on Terry, me and my sister. We have an ongoing graph of character popularity and she's always in the #1 spot. It's a thing of beauty, that graph.) So with the Doctor, one companion, five people from Torchwood and a Pterodactyl, they can take on the Angels no problem.

Except that my sister pointed out that Pterodactyls maybe can't see right in front of them, so here goes my foolproof plan. We needed an alternative. What wouldn't work is setting up a CCTV system, because if you watch the angels through a screen you're not actually watching the Angels, you're watching a series of frozen images, and in the interval between the frames the Angel would so get you and send you to some awful place before the invention of the Internet.

Then an alternative plan was suggested. It involves setting up mirrors in strategical positions. The only unknown factor here is whether watching angels reflected in a mirror would still work, but I think the answer to that is positive. I even wrote some equations to prove my point, confirming that the Angels do indeed move at a speed that's strictly less than the speed of light, but I won't add them here because I'm about to watch the episode with Georgia Moffett, and also I'm not sure I got the units of measure right. That's why I hate physics.

Well, whatever, now we're fully equipped to face an Angel attack. This post was brought to you by spare time, that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon tells Leonard "You know what's the problem with Time Travel?" and the fact that my sister refused to continue our conversation. But I'll need to remember the details of this for when I update TvTropes debunking the theory that the viewer counts in deciding whether the Angels are being watched or not.