Thursday, February 10, 2011
Jerry Sloan = retired. End of an era.
The subject line just about says it all. I have mixed feelings. Jerry Sloan's coaching style (along with John Stockton and Karl Malone, of course) is a dominant reason why I became an *NBA* fan, not to mention a Utah Jazz fan. On the other hand, a coach's main job (so it seems to me) is to get the most out of the player personnel that you have, and over the past few months it seems like that hasn't been happening.
In other news, assistant coach Phil Johnson decided to join Sloan in retirement, passing up literally millions of dollars by turning down the head coaching job.
And so the head coaching job gets passed on to Tyrone Corbin. Best of luck to the Milk Man! (I still remember those commercials he made when he was a player here in Utah.)
In other news, assistant coach Phil Johnson decided to join Sloan in retirement, passing up literally millions of dollars by turning down the head coaching job.
And so the head coaching job gets passed on to Tyrone Corbin. Best of luck to the Milk Man! (I still remember those commercials he made when he was a player here in Utah.)
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Have I gotten dumber?
I'm teaching Physics 581 (Solid State Physics) this semester for the first time. I'm looking back a lot over the notes I took when I was a student and when I was a TA for the equivalent class at Berkeley. Twice now I've run across work that I did back then, that I don't think I'd be able to do now.
1) One of the problems I solved as a student involved integrating along a two-dimensional curve, as opposed to doing a regular integral which take place along a straight line. No way I'd be able to do that now without serious review! To add insult to injury, that wasn't even a required part of the problem... I just decided to do it for the heck of it, to double-check my previous answer.
2) One of the problems I solved as a TA involved solving a complicated (but more traditional) integral. In the homework solutions I handed out to the class, my notes said: "I could look up this integral in an integral table, but just for kicks, let me solve it by using Laplace transforms." I barely remember what Laplace transforms are now, and I certainly couldn't use any to solve integrals! Mathematica does all my integrals for me now.
On the plus side, I think I do know lots of OTHER things that I didn't know then. :-) But it does make me a little sad to know how much I've forgotten.
As a side note, my old textbook's introduction to the problem referred to in point #2 above, it said, "If you have access to a microcomputer...". Made me laugh!
1) One of the problems I solved as a student involved integrating along a two-dimensional curve, as opposed to doing a regular integral which take place along a straight line. No way I'd be able to do that now without serious review! To add insult to injury, that wasn't even a required part of the problem... I just decided to do it for the heck of it, to double-check my previous answer.
2) One of the problems I solved as a TA involved solving a complicated (but more traditional) integral. In the homework solutions I handed out to the class, my notes said: "I could look up this integral in an integral table, but just for kicks, let me solve it by using Laplace transforms." I barely remember what Laplace transforms are now, and I certainly couldn't use any to solve integrals! Mathematica does all my integrals for me now.
On the plus side, I think I do know lots of OTHER things that I didn't know then. :-) But it does make me a little sad to know how much I've forgotten.
As a side note, my old textbook's introduction to the problem referred to in point #2 above, it said, "If you have access to a microcomputer...". Made me laugh!
