Qualification

August 21, 2008 at 10:17 am | In Uni | 4 Comments

I passed my quals. Hooray. You can see my picture has moved up a slot here.

What I’ve been up to

August 19, 2008 at 1:19 pm | In Life in America, Mathematics | 2 Comments

I’ve moved house to an undisclosed location just a bit south of the university (click the link and you can see some pictures on google street view). It’s very nice (although a bit old) with hardwood floors and air conditioning.

I have DirecTV (satellite television) with every baseball game on it in High Definition. I also get cricket games from Australia, Sri Lanka and the West Indies and also AFL, NRL and tri nations through Setanta sports (although not in HD). It’s pretty awesome.

I did my quals and am awaiting results. Algebra I’m very confident of doing well (about the only thing I couldn’t do was show the uniqueness of a positive definite symmetric square root of a positive definite symmetric matrix). Analysis I got about 3.5 questions right out of 6 but I think that’s kind of what everybody else got (the questions were things like: for which a and b is x^a cos(x^b) of bounded variation. Ugh.) Topology/geometry was long and I didn’t get everything (for example: true/false? An invertible smooth function is always a diffeomorphism) but I did alright.

So I feel like the required 2 high passes and one regular pass are possible but certainly not guaranteed.

My softball team did not win a game all season.

On those questions you get when you forget your password

August 19, 2008 at 12:59 pm | In Internet | Leave a Comment

Recently I was trying to get into a certain password protected website where the user name is a number. I hadn’t been there in a while but thought I knew my number and password. So I tried a few times but unfortunately failed.

Thus I went to the ‘forgot your password’ link. I input my number and got the question “when did argentina win there first world cup”.

This is the stupidest piece of security I’ve ever seen. I answered this question by looking it up on wikipedia. However my plan of hacking this guys account was foiled by not knowing his father’s middle name (it wasn’t the same as my father’s middle name).

Where are the rest of the Gold Medals going to come from?

August 19, 2008 at 12:54 pm | In sport | 3 Comments

I’m a little worried that Australia might not win any more gold at this olympics. Our chances seem to be the following, most of which are long shots. Is there anything else we might win?

Craig Mottram (5000m)
Steven Hooker (Pole Vault)
Jane Saville (20km walk)

BMX biking?

Ky Hurst (10k swim)

Women’s Basketball
Men’s Hockey
Softball
Women’s Water Polo

Women’s Sailboard
Tornado

This is pretty serious. I didn’t know what kind of boat Tornado was until yesterday but we better win it.

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