User:Zjp3
About Me
Quick Takes:
- Home town: Old Brookville (Long Island), New York
- Number of siblings: 1. Younger brother.
- Intended major: Mechanical Engineering & Economics
- Intended career: Investment Banking
- 2nd choice college: Wash U
- Dream job: Luxury car company CEO. I'd design the cars and then run the daily business workings of the firm.
- Hobbies: Programming, DJing, Driving/Racing
- Favourite...
- Food (healthy): Filet Mignon & Crab Cakes
- Dessert: Rainbow Cookies
- Historical figure: No idea.
- Animal: Monkeys
- Board Game: Monopoly? Board games kinda suck. You can just play cards. Spit, Kent, and Poker are all much better then any board games.
- TV show: 24
- Song: A** on the Floor (Zedd Remix) by P.Diddy
- Movie: Inside Man
The $50 Dollar Lesson
In light of the myriad of recent conventions, I thought I'd share this little anecdote I read yesterday...
I recently asked my friend's daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?"
She replied!, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." Her parents beamed.
"Wow...what a worthy goal." I told her, "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my floors, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?" I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party."
Her parents still aren't speaking to me.
Original Image: http://imgur.com/r/pics/hXdsM
Assignment 1 (1.6.2)
Getting Solar Off the Ground, Lee Billings, Seed Magazine, updated 28 July 2009, accessed 7 September 2012 (Grand Challenge)
Assignment 2 (2.4)
My favorite Matlab demonstration was actually the Traveling Salesman. In addition to actually showing how MATLAB can be used to create solutions or models to complex problems and questions, it was a great demonstration on how this can be created alongside a friendly and helpful user interface, such as the one displayed in the demo. In the figure window, the script allowed for variable input (not a ton of input, but some nontheless) so the user could customize the solution to his or her needs and a stunning visual output to relay info back to the user. I am truely taken aback at how much you can actually display visually in order to get your solution across to the user. Very powerful tools here and with the variabity in the code the possibilities are practically endless. My favorite part though was how the program could be used not only to display the solution back to the user, but to display the progress and show the user visually what was going on as the computer continually improved on the solution, which in this case was the salesman's circuit.
