Week #32

I know you're all anxious about how you did on the exam, and I'll do my best to get the exam back to you this week. As always, if you have a personal grading question, you should see me during office hours as soon as you possibly can. The answers are posted in the right sidebar and you should take a look to see how I did the problems (report any errors to me and I'll give you credit). If you're curious to see another college's exam, you might want to see what a freshman calculus exam at MIT looks like, it's given after only six 50 minute lectures (i.e. three weeks of a regular thirteen week academic semester). I have a good deal of faith that many of you could do this exam too, but I'm not sure if you'd find it fair, since we did not do the transcendental functions involving Euler's number (but it was mentioned).

As you know, this week was without homework, mainly because I did not want to burden you with related rate word problems while studying for exam #1. But now that's over, and I want to give you some homework to think over:

• Section 3.8: page 195: problems 5 - 19 odd, 29, and 34.
  
• Section 3.9: page 202: problems 3, 5, 9, 13, and 25.
  

Although I've reviewed the concepts of translating English words into algebraic equation -- especially as it relates to related-rate word problems -- I think many of you will struggle with setting up the proper algebraic equation, however, once you get the proper algebraic equation you're just steps away from answering the question. So please, carefully look at problems 3 and 5 from section 3.9, and then try to imitate what we did in class on problems 9, 13, and 25. Also, although obvious, you should read the textbook, it will help greatly.

CAUTION, PERSONAL ANECDOTE ABOUT THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Life is funny, but from an early age I started to realize that our world is in serious trouble. The older I get, the more I see that our ability to reason around simple issues is seriously flawed. We lack (myself included) the framework (small cells that have localized self-interest) required, and have become totalitarian (dualistic about controlling interest outside our frameworks) as a result. Really, our minds are quite parochial in scope, but we've started to think outside our parochial worlds without having a solid foundation to do so.

In America we've been drifting towards mob rule (controlling outside our framework) for some time now, and next week you'll see two massive mobs gathering for an election, and the ugly faces of the unreasoned-mind will push America towards bigger government no matter who wins. Right now, the U.S. Government is even more colossal in size than even Stalin/Mao could have hoped for. It (U.S. Government) controls almost 50% of our collective labor and its people believe that government is the answer to whatever ails them.

What's the point? An interesting study was done in the 1960s by an American sociologist, Daniel Bell, that described a systematic destruction of the single most important connection in any culture (parent child, a parochial framework) has. The Khmer Rouge did the same, but with little regard to 'political correctness', as did most other totalitarian regimes. In America though, we hardly saw it happen.

May You Live in Interesting Times?