The solution set to the Exam III review a.k.a. Homework 11 a.k.a. your favorite homework’s favorite homework is now up in the DOCUMENTS tab. (That was an accidental caps lock, but I’m leaving it.)
Exam III will cover all the material from the posted lecture notes, plus all the material from sections 4.2 and 5.3 in the textbook that we covered in class. If you weren’t in class, either get the lecture notes from someone or read all of each section to make sure you know everything you need to know.
You do NOT have to memorize the formulae for finding q and r in the regression model y = qx + r. Please don’t memorize them. That would be a colossal waste of time.
You should, however, know the formula for calculating q in the model y = qx, and also be able to derive it using the pseudoinverse.
I will hold my usual office hours tomorrow from 11-1 in my office. I will send out an email at some point with details about next week’s office hours.
If you do well on the final exam (i.e., better than your average for the first three exams), then it will count for 37% of your final grade (HW will be 20%, Exam I: 11%, Exam II: 16% and Exam III: 16%).
Most of the music I’ve talked about throughout the semester has been poppy or electronicky or opera-y, so if you’re into gnarly guitar riffs you may have been disappointed. But I aim to please, so here’s a video from Royal Blood, an English duo who make some pretty cool down-home bluesy garage rock. They just formed last year, and their EP Out of the Black came out here last month to good reviews, so they’re coming on pretty strongly. The dudes in Arctic Monkeys (if you watch those videos, watch them in order, as the first song is in the intro to the second video. It’s neato.) are fans, apparently. AM was one of my favorite records of last year, and one of the best rock records in a while. However, I don’t think anything they’ll ever do will surpass their début album, which is pretty much perfect. Back in high school I was into them to what in retrospect was probably a fairly annoying extent.
A lot of reviewers say Royal Blood sound like Queens of the Stone Age, but I’d say they’re nastier (maybe that song’s not the best to offer as comparison but I don’t know QOTSA well enough to pick out a more appropriate one and I don’t feel like hunting around like truffle pig to find one). Speaking of bands on Letterman, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, waiting for the right time to drop it into an email. Future Islands are a Baltimore band who’ve been around for a while and have been riding high as of late on the strength of their excellent new LP Singles and that track, “Seasons (Waiting on You)”. That Letterman performance was really one of the great TV performances by a band that I’ve ever seen. It’s hilarious and amazing and heartwarming and super chill. Also, Letterman’s reaction at the end is perfect. He’s digging it! You betcha!
Okay I can’t help it, I have to talk about dancey tunes too. Röyksopp and Robyn have a new single out and I was going to wait for the official video to drop, but what if it comes out after the semester is over? What then?! Anyway, here it is. Had to sneak it in there.
You know Rihanna’s given name is Robyn, right?
Speaking of J.M.W. Turner, that 19th century British artist was, pretty much indisputably, a master:
That work, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, was voted Britain’s favourite painting in a 2005 BBC Radio 4 poll. I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the nation, but I’m pretty sure Turner is well-loved by our former overlords. I mean, there’s a biopic coming out starring the guy who played Peter Pettigrew! More divisive is the Turner Prize, which is named after J.M.W.T., though the nominees and winners rarely seem to have much in common with the latter’s oeuvre. Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years A Slave won in 1999 for his video piece Deadpan, which recreated a famous, brilliant Buster Keaton sketch in which a house collapses around the central figure. More notorious that year was Tracey Emin’s entry My Bed, which was exactly that, plus assorted objects, both innocuous (e.g. slippers) and attention-grabbing (condoms) that Emin said were also in her bedroom when she decided to present it as a work of art. I think My Bed is all right, but I like her earlier piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 better:
Unfortunately, it burned in a 2004 warehouse fire that also destroyed works by Emin’s fellow Young British Artist, the even more controversial Damien Hirst, whom you may know from his stupid diamond-encrusted skull For the Love of God, a picture of which I was going to include but then I decided not to do because I didn’t want to besmirch my Blackboard page with his claptrap. I’ll link it, though, for the curious. I do rather like Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, though. It’s a big old tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde:
I don’t know if I’d have nearly as favorable an opinion of it if it didn’t have such a good title.
Less creatively titled is Martin Creed’s 2001 Turner Prize-winning installation Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which, yup, was just a room in which the lights periodically went on and off. You can recreate it in your home and annoy your roommates. I’m not crazy about the work, but I can’t say I dislike the controversey.
Not everyone was meant to be an artist:
“I remember how my Great Uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint.”
Prof. Prattle 