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March 01, 2005
Coloured Chalk and Washing Machines
With my vast expanse of knowledge I have gleaned from a month and a half of observation in South Africa, I have come to some conclusions. Although UWC is rather far behind HWS in a plethra of areas, the university does have a few key advancements over the colleges back home. First of all, my professor broke out the coloured chalk today in math class, and I was astounded not by the proof he was drawing on the board (although it was a rather nifty proof), but rather by the fact that the coloured chalk erased just as cleanly as the regular chalk! It is a phenomenon that I have never seen in the United States, and something that seems to me to be rather desirable.
Second of all, even though you have to pay for your plastic bags at every major grocery store you go to, laundry at the university is completely free! I am not as excited about this as I probably should be, because it means that I have less of an excuse for not doing laundry, but I am very pleased that I don't have to hunt down the right number of coins before I can cleanse my not-so-clean clothing. It's going to be strange to have to pay to wash my clothes again when I get back to Geneva.
So, the other day in class, my professor asked us to go home and write a Pascal program that generated a series of numbers using an algorithm we had just implemented in a proof. Since I am not a Computer Science major and not at all familiar with Pascal, I told the professor that I couldn't do the exercise. He told me to stop by his office yesterday so that he could give me another problem instead. I walked into his office right after class, and the first thing he did was apologize for the fact that the class is moving so slowly and that I look so bored. I explained that I was used to it, and he then proceeded to give me an introduction to graph threory. So now I have all these complicated graphs to make and no really solid idea of how to go about doing so. I'm going to have to go and see him on Thursday to make sure that he's really asking me to design a graph with 56 vertices and several hundred edges...
Posted by rgutwin at March 1, 2005 07:07 AM
Comments
(1) You put a "u" in "Colored." Oh no! You are getting sucked in!
(2) Colored chalk is awesome.
(3) Can't you purchase canvas bags at the grocery store and reuse them, instead of paying for plastic each time? That's what I hear.
Posted by: Diana at March 1, 2005 08:31 AM
3) Yes, canvas bags are possible; however, in my case, they are not entirely practical.
Posted by: Rebecca at March 1, 2005 08:35 AM
2) Reality check: Colored chalk is interesting; graph theory is awesome.
Posted by: Paul Gutwin at March 1, 2005 10:09 AM
Counterpoint: Graph theory does not help struggling calculus students to understand what is going on; colored chalk does. That, in my opinion, is awesome.
Posted by: Diana at March 1, 2005 10:26 AM
I'll tell you what's not awesome... Pascal is not awesome. It's crufty and antiquated. If I was in your position I would refuse to write in Pascal as a matter of principle.
Posted by: Karl at March 1, 2005 10:58 AM
That's what I've heard. Some of the students wanted to write the program in Java instead, but the professor refused probably because Pascal is what he learned on and is most familiar with. I'm telling you, these computer scientists... Nothing but trouble.
Posted by: Rebecca at March 1, 2005 11:02 AM
Herump! While it may be verbose and pedantic, syntactially correct pascal is *readable* unlike the fragil gibberish pooped out by countless I-want-it-now-my-way CS students. Worse by far are Perl, Tcl, Java (shudder), and spawn of devil itself, C. You kids simply don't appreciate strongly typed languages. It's a dream come true for large projects and professors trying to grade student projects.
Having said that, I'd refuse to write in Pascal at this point simply because it takes so long...
Posted by: Paul Gutwin at March 2, 2005 09:35 AM