wednesday was almost the most agonizing day ever. i spent the first half of it waiting with michelle in her tv/internetless apartment for ups to deliver her packages, then spent the second half in pat's tv/internetless apartment for the cable guy to show up. even if i'd wanted to ditch them, i couldn't, because my bike was still in the shop and hadn't even been looked at, though i'd dropped it off a week ago with the promise of it being looked at within 2 days. the only thing that saved the day was that night pat and michelle came over and we all hung out at my place and had fun.
first day of lectures today, and it was moderately painful. my chemistry professor spent the first half explaining why induction does not produce knowledge (or at least, no longer, as if it somehow did before), and then spent the rest of lecture talking about all the great things induction has taught us in chemistry. some good lines were "the best scientific theories are the ones that are disprovable; the more disprovable, the better" and "sure, we believe in gravity because every time we've dropped something it has fallen; but that doesn't mean that someday, it won't". this discussion arose because the first chapter is on the scientific method (observation -> hypothesis -> experimentation), and he wanted to point out how in modern times we use conjecture -> refutation -> (eventually, if not refuted) accepted. he really had two points: one was that induction doens't work (he used the typical - and flawed - "all swans are white" argument), and secondly that this new method doesn't use induction. however, it does; people don't conjecture arbitrarily; they conjecture based on observations (he even said this while explaining it); and the "refutation -> acceptance" phase is just experimentation and proof, only named illogically. so... he was dumb. but he speaks in a cool way, and since he doesn't apparently actually have a problem with induction (based on what he was teaching), it should work out ok. the other classes were uninteresting: in Optimization, the prof (who is heavily accented and appears to be a grad student) just read the handout with some basics. in Real Analysis, he did the same basic real number/set definitions and proofs the TA did the day before (though he also said "sets... are so basic a concept... they don't have definitions... only examples", then proceeded to define sets). in probability theory, the akwardly-spoken professor spent about 30 minutes building up to "so the definition of the probability p of an event is the number of event outcomes over the number of total outcomes" (properly qualified with neccessary assumptions,
ben).
