Wrong Room

Tuesday is the first day of class and, whether you've had the carpet pulled out from under you (damn last minute Axess updates) or you're just oblivious (drinking while scheduling, smudged your sticky note, etc.) you are going to walk into the wrong room at least once. What then separates the sheep from the goats will be how long it takes you to realize your error.

If you're fortunate enough to be late, you'll be the subject of somewhere between 20 and 200 inquisitive gazes. The room has thus granted the shrewd arrivee a small window of opportunity to survey the distribution of a few critical demographic features of the class population at large, and from this determine whether to get comfy or awkwardly about face and book it for the nearest Bulletin.

There are several dimensions over which you might modulate your visual search:




...or perhaps not by the faces themselves but the things in front of the faces:



If the student conglomerate fails to be conclusive, a glance at the composition of the instructor's jacket may swing your running mental probabilities:

It can prove fruitful to consider things like the density of visible body modifications (a preponderance implicates Art History), average muscle mass, proportion of intentionally coordinated outfits, and ambient smell.

With a solid combination of quick and dirty heuristics, you're almost sure to save yourself the mortification of leaping up and bolting 15 minutes into lecture when the syllabus with a surprise course title is handed out.

Physics Triumphs Once Again

Thank you, Abel, for finding something more fun to do on a Sunday afternoon than a first-order logic problem set. The traer particle system physics engine, developed by our friends at Princeton, is a package for the Processing programming language that abstracts much of the gross minutiae of the force-modeling process behind a clever object oriented API.

I extended the concept behind one of the example applets to include a *few* more particles. It's sort of fun to play with:





Here's the source. Also, the default picture I used when writing the thing. In accord with the lore of one physics instructor Tom Haff, we find it appropriate to remark, "PTOA!"