miles davis

Exam 1 / old homework

Some of you asked for a recap of the topics we’ve covered that might be on the exam. 

What we’ve done:
– Mathematical induction
– Transpose of a matrix, symmetric matrices
– Section 1.2 (systems of linear equations)
– Section 1.3 (Markov chains, dynamic models)
– Section 1.4 (linear programming, underdetermined systems)
– Section 2.1 (matrices, vectors)
– Section 2.2 (matrix multiplication)
– Section 2.4 (matrix algebra)
– Section 2.5 (norms and bounds, eigenvalues and eigenvectors)
If you’d like to pick up your graded homework assignments, they are in three piles on three chairs outside my office. My office is Physics A-149, but you can most easily access it by taking the elevator in the Math building to the 1st floor, exiting right and walking toward the Physics building. The door to my office is past a doorway on the left just at the beginning of the walkway between the Math and Physics buildings.
Here’s that LCD Soundsystem/Miles Davis video I mentioned in class today. And this xxyyxx album was in the list of videos on the right so I figure I might as well link it, too. The dude made that record when he was 16. If you dig electronic music you should listen to all of the artists mentioned in the second paragraph of xxyyxx’s Wikipedia page. Okay, fine, I’ll just copy and paste it here. “His style was also likened to Clams Casino, Zomby, Burial, James Blake and The Weeknd.[4][8] His musical influences include Lapalux, Star Slinger, Disclosure and Shlohmo.”
And pretty much every artist on the Tri Angle label is worth a listen, too. I’ve also been bumping the Acid Arab collections lately. And old Julio Bashmore (his new track with Jessie Ware is aight). Okay I’ll stop now.
Wait one more thing — I meant to mention this on Tuesday but Schoolboy Q’s new album is out; it bumps.
 
Here’s a quick pintura negra by Goya to get things back on track. It’s called Riña a garrotazos, which translates, roughly, to “Boyfights with Baby Buster” 
Goya painted the Pinturas negras (Black Paintings) directly on the walls of his house outside of Madrid around 1819-1822, when he was in his 70s and just totally bummed out about the whole situation of like everything like Napoleon taking over and the Peninsular War and atrocities and stuff. They’re my favorite stuff of his, and in fact one of my favorite series of works by any artist; you can find them at the Prado in Madrid, to which they were transferred a while back (they’re on canvas now). 
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Homework things, mostly

Tomorrow I’ll be doing review for half the class, so if you have questions bring them in. Solutions to HW 1-3 are posted in the Assignments tab.

A couple of notes on HW 4, which is due tomorrow:

Don’t forget to do problem 9 of section 2.5 for both systems.

For problem 11 of section 2.5, note that in the problem c denotes the measured value, whereas in Example 5, to which the problem refers, c denotes the actual value. To reduce confusion I suggest using p to denote measured population and pA to denote actual population. Of course, if you’ve already used different notation, that’s fine; just make sure what you have makes sense.

Paco de Lucía died today. His most famous song was “Entre dos Aguas.” Here he is playing the Adagio from Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with a cor anglais solo by an unknown homie. I first heard Aranjuez in Miles Davis’s version from the latter’s great album Sketches of Spain.  “Entre dos Aguas” was in the Vicky Cristina Barcelona soundtrack, which has some pretty dope Spanish guitar music, including a couple of pieces from Isaac Albéniz’s tremendous Suite Española, which I’m pretty sure is my favorite piece of classical guitar music.

 

Clarifications / Exam 2

Yooooooooo,

Two things from class today:
1. The plural of wunderkind is, of course, wunderkinder. I realized as much right after class, (when I thought about the word kindergarten; I also remembered a sentence in a book I read long ago: “eine Schande für die Kinder” (or something like that), which a German woman says to her husband (in a pleasant way) when he is affectionate with her in front of their children. I don’t remember what the book was, though, and Google didn’t help, so if you happen to have the same weirdly specific memory and know whence that sentence comes, PLEASE let me know because it’s bugging me). Coincidentally, I was listening to the piano quintet in B minor by the German composer (and Beethoven chum) Ferdinand Ries when I realized wunderkinder was the right word. I suspect the Germanness of the piece helped me out quite a bit.
2. It’s “Rayleigh coefficient”, not “Raleigh”; I think I wrote the latter name on the board today. (Note: I put the previous sentence’s comma and semicolon outside the quotation marks, in the British style, because Lord Rayleigh was English (I also thinks it makes more sense to write that way)). Lord Rayleigh won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for discovering argon, but is perhaps better known for Rayleigh scattering, which explains why the sky is blue (it’s because it’s been listening to Miles Davis’s soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud).
Perhaps more importantly for you, the second exam will be 23 October 2013 (one week from this Wednesday) in class. It will cover chapter 3. I will be more precise with respect to what exactly you need to know sometime after this Wednesday’s class. Don’t forget to do the homework that is due this Wednesday.
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Robert Mapplethorpe was a hugely controversial photographer, but he also once took this lovely picture of bread: