kakostacbhp’s Blog

Only one class and a blog post. Wow.

As we’ve progressed in class and in our reading, I’ve decided that C++ syntax is confusing. I can understand what everything is supposed to be doing, but it all looks so darn messy. Now I know why my dad’s favorite language is Fortran. I’m sure time will solve that ill, but in the interval I reserve the right to be grumpy.

Anyways, expressions and statements aren’t anything new, just the way they’re treated. I’m curious as to how you would put together an if statement in C++ that would be pretty simple in Fortran. It’s the way things evaluate that confuses me.

TTFN

A new meaning for short term memory has arrived. I found this neat little article that talks about “trace memories,” which are held on a single brain cell for up to a minute. (One of the researchers compares it to RAM, interestingly enough.) Most memories are formed by systems of brain cells that reorganize and strengthen their connections, but these trace memories are formed by a “signaling cascade” with calcium to hold the traces. This process is called metabotropic glutamate transmission.

It seems that mouthful is related to drug addiction in that it stops functioning during addiction, overloaded by massive amounts of dopamine. It is also one of the first parts of the brain to be affected by alcohol and noisy distractions. So the researchers who discovered this are hoping to create drugs that would help addicts regain that ability and be able to consider negative consequences of possible actions before making a decision.

A mathematician at Drexel University, Andrew Hicks, has designed several new mirrors. A friend had complained about the rearview mirror on his bike, saying that the convex curve, though it provided a larger field of view, distorted the reflection too much. So Hicks set about making a better one.

Using what I would assume to be very complicated math (it took him 8 years), he designed a mirror that has the same wide field of view as a regular convex mirror, but is curved in such a way that the reflection is not distorted at all. He also designed several other unique mirrors… none of which are meant to be mounted on a bike. He even made one that reflects not a mirror image, but a translation – so that if you held a newspaper up to it, you would see it correctly in the mirror.

The first design could be used for car rearview mirrors in Europe (American regulations would prevent its use here), and one set of mirrors are highly suited to surveillance. I don’t know all that much about mirror applications, so I can’t say what kinds of things these new mirrors could be used for, but the possibilities seem incredible.

As Jaclyn said, right now we seem to be feeling out the differences between Fortran and C++. I’m trying to keep up with the reading and exercises, but I don’t have much to say yet. I’m cautiously optimistic for the moment.

I found the extra article very interesting. The author makes a good point about the uses of “Apps Hungarian,” especially since you can rename functions to reflect the prefixes of the variables that should go into them. I liked his idea of using the system as a means of error checking. I suspect this will come in handy when we get around to the final project.

After reading Lindsay’s post, I wondered… If my brain stopped constantly reviewing the fact that I hate tomatoes, would I start to like them?

~

Since I was little, I’ve never had a problem passing tests and the like because memorization was very easy for me. But that’s not really learning, and in CBH, at least, it’s not enough to get by on. But, also aince I was little, I’ve loved reading. And I think that’s how I learn best. (My dad jokes that it’s because he read his geology textbooks to me before I was born.) When I get really enthusiastic about learning something, I tend to read about it. Extensively, and from different sources, comparing and making connections. Unfortunately, I rarely do that for school-related learning.

But there are some things that I just can’t learn by reading about them – even things as simple as learning to make a pot of coffee. Whenever my dad asked me to make him a pot of coffee, I would get one of my sisters to do it, until they finally got fed up with me and made me do it while they supervised. After actually doing it, I found that it wasn’t so hard.

Usually when I’ve learned something even the least bit interesting, I want to talk to someone about it. That tends to mean my sisters, so I often have to explain what I’ve just learned before we can talk. I think that explaining a concept to someone else is a decent way to figure out if you’ve learned it yourself. Another way to figure out how much you’ve learned is to find out what you don’t know yet.