It’s hard to take ratemyprofessors.com seriously
August 25, 2009 at 8:33 am | Posted in Life in America, Teaching | 6 CommentsMy two most recent reviews on my ratemyprofessors.com profile (a hugely biased sample of four students out of about 150).
Simply he’z a great teacher. he makes Calculus as an easy material you ever expected. Just study for review study and you’ll do fine. An A is acheivable since his exams is a pretty easy.
I sincerely hope that this student speaks English as a second language.
Martin is a mathematical genius. His stories of kangaroos killing people are funny too. The class is tough, tests are tricky, study and an A is achievable. Good teacher!
I don’t recall telling any stories of kangaroos killing people.
Also, if any readers want to add fake reviews (are those two above fake?) I’d appreciate one of those little chili pepper icons saying i’m ‘hot’.
Dbacks commentators
August 16, 2009 at 8:46 am | Posted in Baseball, Life in America | 1 CommentOr: And you thought the channel 9 commentary team was bad…
Inspired by a comment on an amusing post from David Barry saying “Dodgers-DBacks coverage just started. The host has an excruciatingly slow voice. I hope he’s not the main game caller….” I need to vent my frustration with the two idiots that I have to put up with whenever I watch baseball.
But first, I should probably answer Dave’s question:
- If you were listening to the Dodgers’ feed* you heard Vin Scully. He does speak painfully slowly but is beloved in LA and the entire country. He’s been calling Dodgers games since they were the Brooklyn Dodgers in the ’50s.
*baseball games all have two feeds, one home and one away. And even if you pay to be able to watch every feed in the country you are blacked out of the other feeds for teams playing against the team(s) that you are in the home territory of. So I have to watch 150 games a year on Fox Sports Net Arizona. It’s horrible.
- If you got the AZ feed then the two main guys were away on Saturday (Mark Grace was on a nationwide Fox game and Daron Sutton was calling a high school game I think) so you got 2 of the backups. Last night it was Matt Williams and Greg Schulte. Matt Williams is also very slow and boring so it might have been him you heard.
But what really grinds my gears is the “Gracie and Sutt show” that the Dbacks broadcast often becomes. It’s a bunch of catchphrase based humour, out-and-out lies, forced hokiness and ignorant comments. Examples:
- Catchphrases: “that’s big league!”, “let’s get some runs!”, “big John Rauch”, “Jonathon Broxton, the biggest man in the world”, “big Adam Dunn”, “give that man a contract” (when a fan catches a ball), “car” (when there’s a break in play), “gas”, “we need more signs”, “right down broadway”, “letting it travel like Andruw Jones”, “that play hasn’t worked since Edner Doubleday was a boy”,
- sponsorship: the Aflac trivia question, the Qwest high speed internet high speed pitch, the Brown and Brown Chevrolet key to the game, the Taco Bell free tacos
- claiming that a players nickname is ‘shoes’ when it really isn’t
- the kidcaster
- When the trivia question is asked either Sutton just looks up the answer on his laptop and ruins it for everyone or they spend about 10 minutes pretending to receive text messages from former dbacks players with horrible guesses in them
- arguing about which mascots are the best*
- mark grace saying that tacos with arms freak him out
- mark grace saying he prefers soft tacos
*actually this is quite interesting. I like Mr Met: he’s just a man with a giant baseball for a head.
It’s like Roy and HG but they’re serious and it’s not very funny.
CFTPA
July 26, 2009 at 11:54 pm | Posted in Life in America, live music | 1 CommentI haven’t been to a gig for a while due mainly to my laziness and the lack of acts I’ve heard of visiting Tucson. But tonight Owen Ashworth (alias Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) was in town. So I gathered a friend of mine who wears rather indie-looking glasses and headed over to Solar Culture – an art gallery cum music venue.
CFTPA in a red jacket
The rest of the evening in dotpoints:
- when we got there shortly after the opening time of 9pm the guy taking the money at the door had no change (the tickets were $7 each). But thankfully after about 4 minutes of standing in the entrance someone turned up with some.
- the gallery had lots of wacky art on the wall, including what seemed to be a painting of a woman in sexual congress with a swordfish.
- the first act (later revealed to be the brother of the main act) played one 20 minute song; lyricless, just a wall of ambient electronic sound. Not really my style.
- By the time CFTPA started his set, the crowd had swelled to about 30 people. But what they lacked in number they made up for in large glasses and ironic t-shirts.
- Casiotone informed us that he had had a migraine that day but would solidier on. He did give a fairly sedate set so perhaps it affected him a little.
- The set was split between songs off the new album and crowd requests for old stuff. The crowd managed to create a somewhat embarrassing situation by requesting about four songs that have almost exactly the same tune and drum machine backing, just different lyrics.
- When Hot Boys was requested, it was explained (possibly jokingly) that playing that song would be a copyright violation.
- Some song characters were switched around: Holly Hobby and Bobby Malone became Hobby Bobby and Holly Malone respectively. You’d probably go mad singing the same lyrics every day for a month so fair enough.
-When Love Connection was requested, Owen said that the new deal with that song was that he would play it but only if someone else would sing it. So two young girls sitting down the front got up on stage. They were passable singers but I was just impressed that they remembered the lyrics.
- The gig ended at about 11:00, no encore. Just how I like it – short and sweet.
Titan II
July 12, 2009 at 8:40 pm | Posted in Life in America | 3 CommentsSo I went with a few of my fellow mathematics students yesterday to the Titan Missile Museum. This is a decommissioned missile silo that once held a Titan II missile with a 9 megaton warhead aimed at an unspecified target in the USSR.
The red one contains the launch keys
I don’t have a whole lot to say about it that isn’t in the wiki page but if you’re in Tucson it’s certainly worth a look to see what it would have been like to destroy the world.
The highlight: our guide and a small red headed boy on the tour turned the keys and we began a simulated launch. 58 seconds later the missile left and we contemplated our future. We were stuck in the desert with only 10 days of air sealed into our silo and our only orders were to await further instruction. If there weren’t any then we’d just have to leave the silo and try to make our way in this post apocalyptic world.
A boring story, part of which should be of interest to one occasional reader*
June 15, 2009 at 12:11 pm | Posted in Life in America | 4 Comments*For the rest of you, I recommend reading Joe Posnanski’s discussion of the Comfort Wipe instead.
I went to the mall to visit Old Navy in search of crewneck undershirts, size medium, colour black or white. Although I quickly found the correct section there were none to be found: there was grey in medium and black and white in small and extra large. I asked the helpful shop worker but after searching she informed that they had none and they were changing the style so there wouldn’t be any more.
Having failed in my quest I had a look around Borders to find something worth buying. Having failed in this I purchased a Subway sandwich and went home.
My students think I’m a pot smoking hippy
June 12, 2009 at 5:13 pm | Posted in Life in America, Mathematics, Teaching | 1 CommentA link one of my students sent me
In his defense, I did spend one class just plotting wacky parametric equations.
A story
June 6, 2009 at 11:57 am | Posted in Cricket, Life in America, Teaching | 2 CommentsI received an email from a student who wanted me to add them to my class roster above the 35 person limit. Normally I refuse such requests summarily but I’m the only person teaching this class in summer session II so I agreed. Over a series of emails I organized to meet this person at 1:00 on Friday to go over the paperwork – this should have given me time to watch England play the Netherlands in the T20 world cup.
Unfortunately rain delayed the game so I was forced to set my DVR to record the last 6 overs with the game delicately balanced and left my house at 12:40. I deliberately didn’t take my computer so I wouldn’t be tempted to check the result. I arrived at my office at about 12:50 and waited for the student to arrive, attempting to read a paper on expander codes.
When there was no sight of of my student at 1:30 I left a message on the door and went to a computer lab to check my email. There I received an email sent at 12:30 explaining that the student had managed to enrol through the online system and didn’t need to meet me. Somewhat annoyed with this turn of events I walked home.
There I turned on my computer and unconsciously, automatically, horrifically, went to cricinfo.com. The Netherlands had won.
A new kind of pornography
May 13, 2009 at 11:37 am | Posted in Life in America | 2 CommentsMy latest hobby is looking at pictures of Australian biscuits. This page at “Simply Australian” is very exciting to me.
I’m also considering whether it’s worth paying $123 to get two dozen meat pies packed in ice and overnighted from the Australian Bakery in Georgia.
Summertime
May 8, 2009 at 5:12 pm | Posted in Life in America | 3 CommentsIt’s hot:
Also, the semester is nearly over.
Softball Thoughts
March 31, 2009 at 7:09 pm | Posted in Life in America, sport | 1 CommentDivision by Zero’s spring softball season started last night with a 12-5 (or something close to that) loss. I don’t think our team has improved so it might be another long season (metaphorically anyway, it’s actually a really short season and we only play once a week).
The spring league has the interesting feature of pitching to your own team. You only get three pitches no matter where they are, so you really have to hack away. For example in my first at bat last night I had three pitches (I don’t want to blame our pitcher – he was good for the rest of the game – but this is how I saw it):
- first one was short so I left it thinking I’d get something better.
- second pitch was a bit inside and was called flat (it’s slow pitch softball so you have to get the ball above 6 feet) just as I fought it off over second base for what probably would have been a double.
- third pitch was low and away and I hit it down the first base line where it took a right turn at the base and went foul.
Then I was out! What a ridiculous game. In a real game I would have been 2-1 and feeling good.
My second time up was better – I hit a double into right center and took third on the (inevitable) throwing error. The next batter up drove me in.
My fielding still needs work. I was playing third base and made one good putout at first. But I was out of position a few times – backing up the shortstop on a ball to his right and then watching the ball instead of getting back to my base. I also have no lateral range but I don’t have a lot of hope for improving on this.
Anyway I’m hopeful that we can win a game this season but not that confident to be honest.
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