Daily Update Thursday Nov. 6

1.     UW Update Thursday Nov. 6

a.     Woke up, read stuff for ed class. Went to physics tutorial. Arrived at tentative conclusion regarding rotational energy—I think I was initially right and extra rotation has to come from thermal energy, since the rotational energy of an object is a sum over all particles of each particle’s linear energy, which I’m pretty sure can’t increase. But I still need to think about this more.

b.     Went to CS section; talked more about recursive backtracking.

c.      Went to scholarship info session. Got some interesting info. I think my next step will be to set up an advising appointment with one of the people in the office of merit scholarships.

d.     Ate pizza for lunch in HUB.

e.     Studied in floor lounge. Ended up chatting with Chase and Eleanor; Eleanor told me about how her opera thesis was progressing, and we all discussed the weird evolutionary interpretations of how sexism developed in human populations. We were trying to explain the classic paradox that human females adorn themselves more than human males, while in almost all other species the males are the more adorned gender. One interesting argument as I interpreted it: in organized and stratified human societies, great reproductive advantages accrued to powerful men which did not accrue to powerful women (polygamy only goes one way: think Genghis Khan), which resulted in males filling positions of risk and power, which resulted in the eventual subjugation of females in many stratified societies. In the organized civilizations where monogamy became the norm, now women had to sell themselves to try to obtain the most powerful male protection, since powerful men could not support larger numbers of females and had to choose (for the most part) single females to support. This interpretation is consistent with the high gender equality present in most relatively small, unorganized and unstratified stratified hunter-gatherer groups. Keep in mind none of us were that well informed in the debate and this was just one train of reasoning—I think we all eventually concluded (at least I did) the subject merited more exploration.

f.      Did a CS extra credit assignment. I learned some interesting things about inheritance and solidified some basic concepts about reference semantics in some particular weird cases.

g.     Went to the Graphic Novel club. Designed a character and drew a short comic with the character.

h.     Went back to the dorm, ate leftover pizza for dinner, then went to film club and watched Memento with Jamie. Everything made much more sense this second time watching Memento.

i.       Returned to dorm, wrote post for ed class about how subjective assessments of both students and teachers, for example student assessments of teachers, deserve more attention and more research into how they can be made more objective and less biased. Read for physics, responded to email, wrote log, and went to bed.