tooth soup

This is a bitchy post, but quite frankly I don’t give a shit what you think. If you’re reading this then you’re probably one of my friends and can put up with it. Read on and keep in mind that every single character posted here was not merely typed but forcibly imprinted on the screen by a stabbing finger of one type or another.

The SDA exam was this morning. I say exam but it was more like a group of people hanging around for some indeterminate period of time to complete an exercise that may or may not have been a test of knowledge making up some appreciable portion of the year’s mark. I arrived at university at 8:00am in expectation for the examination to start at 9:00am. While I was sitting in the studio it was brought to my attention that someone had managed to get the exam off the server the night before. This would be completely inexcusable if it weren’t for the fact that this particular exam required the exclusive use of a data file that was corrupt and hence couldn’t be obtained by said person. However, this person was still able to prepare a document and a skeleton program structure to make things very damn easy for her during the exam period. In any case the exam started at around about 9:30am, then stopped again for ten minutes while the aforementioned data file was reloaded on the server, then restarted once that had been done.

So far, so good. I can make allowances for administration errors when the lecturer is Brendan McGann AKA God. But God damnit I can’t make excuses for the exam itself. It was shit-hard. James and I, arguably people that are pretty clued up on everything that is IDL had incredible trouble getting anything solid out of it. For those that are statistically inclined, all the previous exams had some variant of a harmonic oscillator – usually two or more sine/cosine signals overlayed – that we had to pull the frequencies, phase angles, amplitudes, etc. out of and basically recreate the signal. This year’s exam we were just given a signal which had about three tonnes of noisy Gaussian shit scattered across it and asked to pull all the aforementioned data out of it. Now to a hardened veteran of signal processing I’m sure this is a very easy task. To a student who hasn’t really got the firmest grasp on how to pull signal from noise past doing a FFT or smoothing the signal with a moving average/binomial smoother, it’s damn near fucking impossible. I worked out during the exam that an autocorrelation is an indication of the signal-to-noise and that formed the basis of my answer to that, but pulling the phase and the frequencies of the signal out of an FFT full of Gaussian frequencies was past me.

OH! Anyone who has been in the common room will have heard James and myself bitching about this Indian guy in our SDA class. The crux of the problem lies within the fact that he sometimes doesn’t know what he’s doing and relies on other people to explain difficult concepts. ‘That’s not so bad’, says you, the fair reader. Yeah, it’s great, when the people he asks for help are people that actually know him. I’m sitting there doing my own work with earphones very obviously on (for those people who have seen my earphones you’ll know this is definitely something you can’t miss). I get a tap on my shoulder by a quizzical Indian guy. I figure I’ve probably got my music up too loud and it’s distracting him, since he’s sitting right behind me. I give him a ‘sorry’ and turn down the volume and turn back to my work. I get another tap on the shoulder so I turn around and take my headphones off and ask him a very gentle and nice ‘What’s up?’

A pause results that seems to echo on for eternity, before he takes a small, inconspicuous breath and launches himself head on into a veritable hailstorm of words.

“HiyesexcusemeIwaswonderingifyoucouldhelpmewiththisquestionseemyfriendherehasdonetheworksheetandhasputthiscodehereandhereandIwaswonderingifyouknowwhatthismeansandifyoudocouldyoupleaseexplaintomewhatitmeansbecauseIdonotknowwhatitmeans.”

There are three facts to consider here:
(1)At this point I have absolutely no idea who this guy is
(2)He is copying off someone else’s worksheet, down to the very last piece of code
(3)Not only is he copying it, but he is asking other people to aid and abet him in committing the act of plagiarism

All these facts combined give my next action something approaching a saintly aura. I look at his code, look at his face again to make sure I was correct in my previous observation that I have absolutely no idea who he is, and proceed to help him out. Later on, when I have finished explaining why we need to introduce a lag variable into an auto-correlation routine for the fifth fucking time, I would be kicking myself for even meeting his stupid gaze.

Time to finish writing up Nanochem.
p.

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