Goodbye, UCLA

I have an announcement to make.  I am graduating from UCLA!  Woooo!  Graduation!

This means that I'm leaving many things behind.  I'm leaving the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularist.  I'm leaving whatever queer student groups I was involved in.  I'm leaving symphonic band.  I'm leaving friends.  I'm leaving Los Angeles altogether.

Next year, I'm going to grad school in physics.  Where, you ask?  Berkeley!  Tentatively, I want to study condensed matter theory, but it's not fixed at this point.

I want to get involved in student groups again at Berkeley, but you know what they say about grad students dropping extracurriculars to focus on their career.  We'll see.

A time traveler's anecdote

5:00 PM, the dining hall

Me: "You know what? I just remembered..."

Suddenly, in the past...

9:30 AM, my room

Roommate: "Just so you know, Sarah is coming by later today. She's going to invite us to the group dinner."

Me: "Okay."

Meanwhile, in the future

5:00 PM, the dining hall

Me: "We forgot about Sarah. She was going to come over."

Roommate: "What about Sarah?"

Me: "Remember? You're the one who told me!"

Roommate: "I did?"

Me: "Yeah, we were going to eat dinner, but we forgot about it. And now, here we are, eating dinner."

Roommate: "Dude, it's lunch."

Time skips backwards

11:30 AM, the dining hall

Me: "Oh."

Me: "I have a poor sense of time."

Loosely based on a true story

On grading curves

According to the powers that be, one of the lab classes I'm currently taking is graded on a curve. This means that a person's grade is determined by how well the class as a whole scores. Whatever the average score, whether it is high or low, it is assigned a B.

The lab notebook makes an odd suggestion that grading curves are justified because the laws of statistics are the "laws of common sense". It also suggests that the grading curve is an excellent example of an application of statistics. So let's analyze it!

The equation for a student's gpa* is as follows:
gpa = 3 + (x-m)/σ
Where x = the student's score
m = the average score of the entire class
σ = the standard deviation of the class's scores, a measure of how variable the scores are

Luckily, they gave us the mathematical tools to know exactly how accurate a grading curve is. If we have a class of 20 students, then the uncertainty of m is equal to σ/sqrt(20). That comes out to an uncertainty in gpa of about 0.22. That's almost a third of a letter grade!

If you're a student like me, the words "grading curve" inspire a nebulous fear--what will happen if the whole class is above average? Now, I can tell precisely how inaccurate my grade is. Thanks, statistics!

Another justification they used is that this how real life works. Maybe so, but I'm betting that real life has a sampling size larger than 20.

*gpa is the grade point average. A gpa of 4 is an A, a gpa of 3 is a B, and a gpa of 2 is a C.

An odd experience

I just had the oddest experience. When I was asleep, suddenly my roommates started talking about science. They quickly moved through cosmology, onto metaphysics, and into philosophy and religion. It was rather surreal, and not just because I was half-asleep.

I guess I have this expectation whenever "normal" people talk that the subject will always be about daily life, entertainment, or sports (my mind edits out the last category for me). I guess it took me by surprise that anyone would start talking about other topics of their own accord. I was turning incredulously in my sleep.

Am I the only person who experiences a disconnect between the internet and real life?