Okay, now we’re only jumping back in time to Monday, June 12. So long ago that was! The main news story was Trump’s bizarre Cabinet meeting. Ah, the good old days. Anyway… *bleep bloop blorp*
After a nice, relaxing weekend, I was ready for Monday morning, even though it brought the remaining sections of the Series and Limits chapter. I was a little worried, but it ended up being not nearly as strenuous as the first part of the chapter. What a relief! I got to practice convergence/divergence tests and practice taking limits. I finished pretty early in the morning and had plenty of time for my lunch break. Which ended up being most of the day, as I decided to make a layer cake for my boyfriend. It was delicious and time consuming! And I didn’t return to my studying until late in the evening. But that’s the joy of setting my own hours!
Of course, if I had known how long my physics section would take, perhaps I would have not been so determined to finish. I had assigned myself three more chapters on E&M: Electric Potential, Electrostatic Energy and Capacitance, and Electric Current and Direct-Current Circuits. They weren’t overly difficult, but by 10 PM I was having trouble concentrating. But even if I had to read some of the paragraphs a few times before I really read them, I did get through it!
I got a lot of flashbacks to the first time I went through this material, back in my Electricity and Magnetism I class my sophomore year of college. Our instructor was the most cliched version of a physics professor, with the big gray/white afro and same 2 ties in rotation and so many bad jokes about the subject matter. He always called one the “loneliest number” (a reference I didn’t get until years later) and referred to hippopotami that carried charges between the plates of a capacitor (an analogy that never made sense, but I guess it worked since I still remember it over ten years later!). Ah, Professor Korman. Hope he’s still puzzling the kids and telling bad physics jokes over at USNA.
Today’s fun “new” fact: Another math one today, but I couldn’t resist. I actually exclaimed out loud when I saw “L’Hôpital’s rule!” Because it’s so fun to say, of course, and because I had totally forgotten about it. It’s a simple and wonderful trick that allows you to take a limit of functions that tend to 0/0 or ∞/∞. You just take their derivatives and voila! It’s like magic. Except it’s math.
Photo by Papa November / CC BY-SA 3.0