The Sign of The Cross - Latin Lesson #1

Because Latin is the official language of the Roman Catholic Church (thus helping all who use it to remain obedient to the Church), and because it is not our native tongue (thus making present the mystery of God and prayer in the very words we use), the Red Cardigan Society has a wholly positive view of the moderate use of Latin in prayer and liturgy. For that reason, we will be posting Latin lessons from time to time, designed for the person who has no inclination to learn the proper grammatical procedures of Latin. Thus the mystery of Latin will not remain also inaccessible.

To begin with, the sign which begins all things:

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen

In is rather obvious. Nomine means name, like our word "nominal", which means "in name only", like "he is only nominally a Catholic". Patris is "of the father", coming from the word pater, where we get "paternity" and "patron". The "of the" part comes from the declension of the noun [the genitive case]. [It comes from pater, -is, which is betrayed as a third declension noun by the genitive -is]. "et" means and, as in "et cetera", meaning and the rest. "Filii" is son, from filius, where we get "filial". Spiritus Sancti means [literally "the breath/air/soul/life of the sacred/divine/holy", spiritus being in the nominative case, sancti in the genative, a la Whitaker's Words]. Sancti here is the same word used in the "Sanctus" or Holy sung at Mass. And "Amen" is exactly the same!


Perhaps a discourse on the great mystery of the Sign of The Cross is due on this blog, but for now, revel in the mystery of the Trinity which you can now invoke in this mysterious, but now access able, language.

Update

I appologize dear dedicated readers for being so negligent in my regular updates. I imagine you have been dying for a post.

I don't know how anyone can properly call Calculus work ... it's simply too fun (note the cool graph with all the arrows):

My literature class is done. I wrote a paper about God's paradoxical existence to finish it off... it really wasn't very good, so I won't post it. Well, I should clarify that: I could have never gotten away with such unsatisfactory logic and rhetoric in high school, where my teachers had Ph.Ds in philosophy and used them, but alas, since I arrived at college teachers are well-read hippies.

We are learning about options in interest theory. So, for instance, I am a corn farmer, and I make an agreement with you, a cereal maker, that if corn prices plumet, you pay me some money, and if corn prices skyrocket, I'll pay you some money. That way we both make off well. This is also the sort of stuff that causes people to lose billions of dollars speculating... the terminology of the buisness ought to warn you from the get go: "long naked call", "short covered put", "strangle", "straddle", "collar"... somehow "butterfly" got in there too.

Economics is sssslllloooowwww.

And accounting is unadaulterated boredom. I was hoping it'd pick up a bit, because we were going to be doing the same things we do in interest theory, but the book dumned it down to such a deplorable state that it was painful. I had to muster every ounce of self-control not to write a snarky comment about the improper use of the word "discount rate".

As Spring Nears

It seems like summer outside, and spring hasn't even started. In that spirit, here is a graph.

y=x^5-sin(y^2) with y=25*x^4

Incidentilly, if you look from the top down at all the places where the leg meets the seat, they are all circles. Observe:

No doubt there are easier ways to make chairs, but I was in the mood to use Sine tonight.

Unsolvable Problem

I'd bet money I was given an unsolvable problem. Now, there are plenty of problems in mathematics that aren't solved yet. For instance, nobody knows how to find a, b and c such that a^n + b^n = c^n for any n greater than 2. A guy named Fermat claimed he knew how, but its pretty sketchy: just before his death he wrote in the margin of a book that he found a "a truly marvelous proof that it is impossible", but "this margin is too narrow to contain it." Not exactly the way to mathematical progress, Pierre...

I'll save you the gory details and show you my Excel worksheet which I constructed after all else failed:

I apologize for the poor quality. At any rate, this is a bond amortization schedule. I was given the two numbers in bold, from which I calculated the i=9.53% you see in the side using a cool Excel function called "Goal Seek". The problem asked for me to return the book value at time=0, which I worked backwords to find $1528.62.

All was good, or so I thought. The problem also mentions that the bond is redeemable at $1,000 at the end of n years. That means that at some point the book value should equal $1,000. And this is precisely why my pencil and paper failed me: the book value never gets to 1,000. I cut out the middle stuff to show you the book value at 100, 500 and 1,000 years. As you can see, it isn't going to go any lower than 1258.89 (see the boxed cell)!

So on the one hand I got a seemingly legitimate answer by ignoring that sentence, but it has never seemed a very wise strategy to go about solving math problems by proving they contradict themselves. Class is in half an hour... hopefully that will shed some light on the subject.

Interest Schemes

So a few weeks ago I gave you this offer:

The effective annual interest rate is 4%. You pay me $300 today and I will pay you $0.50 a day forever - you'll make your money back in two years!

I told you I wouldn't do it, but I was wrong. Way wrong in fact - were talking trillions in 20 years...


So... I've got a new scheme for you and I'm pretty sure I'm not wrong on this one. I'll leave this one open ended and you can leave your opinion in the form of a comment.

Yes or No? - You pay me $2,000 today, and I'll pay you $50 three times a year until you die. The interest rate is 2.45%. You expect to live at least 30 more years.

Hint: find the atomic number of nickle. At this number of years the two plans are equal (the interest rate was choosen for such an outcome).

Week 4

Week 4 was a week of 4 exams. Hopefully that phoneomenon doesn't occur in the comming weeks (7 exams in week 7?!?). What with all those exams, the amount of new material covered was pretty limited (though that seems to be a reoccuring trend in these little entries)...

Calc III: we drew more pretty pictures... and still no real Calculus! My soul panneth for a double integral!

English: we are doing a research project for the rest of the semester, and are currently selecting our topics. I'm leaning twords Vatican II.

Interest Theory: nothing new. The class got murdered by a difficult test: my 83% was the 3rd highest score in the class. Our professor appologized profusely, saying that he lost a fair amount of sleep after he saw how poorly we did (he was scared we'd all drop out of the class. Nobody did). After steping away from the monster test I got a bit of a better grip on it. Here was one problem:

[insert politically correct name here] takes out a $100 loan from PayDay Loans and pays $115 in 2 weeks. If the $15 is understood to be interest convertible daily, how long would it take for a $100 loan to grow to $500,000 at that interest rate.

The answer: 853 days (about 2 years and 3 months)
The moral: stay away from PayDay Loans

Economics: *yawn*... *snooze*... -- those are the typical sounds heard in class. It's not that the material is boring (it's really intersting!), but it's being govered ssssoooo sssslllllooooowwwwwlllllyyyyy!

Accounting: were getting into managerial accounting, which deals with helping big wigs in buisness make decisions. To that end, we learned how to classify production costs...

What I Learned - Week 3

You didn't miss much last week: it was boring! But this week is particularily interesting!

It seems that Calculus III is Calc I and II in 3d, which makes for some cool pictures, and even more so makes me extremely thankful for computers! Imagine doing this by hand (you can see by the angled edges that the computer even had some troubles!):

This is the graph of the vector-valued function r(x)={cos(5x),sin(x),sin(6x)}.

In literature I wrote an essay about Nietzsche (famous for saying "God is dead", among other witty aphorisms), Aristotle (famous for saying "By nature, all men desire to know"), and the Catholic Church (popular culture doesn't seem to care what they say...) and the agreement between the three. You can see the difficulty: you got an atheist, a pagan who was philosopically very Christian, and the Church. You can read it here!

Interest theory is by far the coolest. We have been working with annuities, which is a fancy word for repeated payments. Would you take this deal (I would'nt!):

The effective annual interest rate is 4%. You pay me $300 today
and I will pay you $0.50 a day forever - you'll make your money back in two years!

And economics is boring. The subject is wildly interest, but the monotonous pace that it is taught at is as obnoxious as the immature freshman who occupy the class' seats... we have been talking about supply and demand for a week and a half now. I figured that was common sense.

And accounting really is boring, the subject that is. I'll spare you the gorey details, but this week we learned about various ratios to analyze a company's position in the short and long-term.

An Email from my RA

Our floor kinda stinks...

Hey Guys,
I don't know if you noticed, but our floor hasn't smelled the greatest lately. So...with that being said, I have a few suggestions that could help remedy that problem:

-Shower on a regular basis.-Don't let your dirty laundry sit around too long. If you still don't know how to use the washing machines downstairs, I would be happy to teach you.
-Throw away old food, especially if it's moldy or rotting. It doesn't hurt to clean out your fridge once in a while. You never know what you might find.
-Keep your door open. Our wing is pretty good about keeping the doors open, but let's make sure we keep that up.
-Open your windows once in a while. I know it's cold, but opening your window wide for ten minutes helps. Or opening your window slightly for an extended period of time helps, too.
-Don't keep garbage in your room that smells bad. Put it in the garbage chute by the drinking fountain.
-Flush the toilets after each assault on porcelain bay.

Now, I'm not saying you guys aren't doing these things. And I'm not even saying that it's our wing that's the problem. BUT, in all fairness, I just think it's best to send these reminders out to everyone. I hope your week is off to a good start. Any questions, comments, or concerns let me know.
David

Roommates

Nick was eating shredded squid that he brought back from China today. He offered me some an I politely declined...

We also moved his desk today. He decided to bunk his bed earlier this week, but his desk covered up the ladder, so he was climbing on furniture to get into bed, almost always kicking something off as he did. I asked him why he didn't move his desk several times, and eventually (he's far too nice) he said that he didn't want to move it because then his light would be right next to me and he'd keep me up. I assured him that I don't think it will be a problem, and that if it is I will simply turn the other direction.

The other night I came back from a friends room and he asked if I was talking about God (he's noticed that I really like to do that), and I said I did. And he said "why don't you talk about girls sometime", and I said that we did, on account of it being the feast day of St. Agatha. Today I was singing a hymn because I was in one of those moods where you have absolutely no reason to be frustrated but you are, and acting on your foolish feelings only leads you into them being actualized. And Nick asked me if I was happy about a girl. I told him I didn't care about girls and he repeated my styalized "girls" at least 5 times.

Exam Number 2

In the future a common theme for this blog will be the 9 exams one must take to become a certified actuary. I am currently preparing for number 2 (I haven't taken 1 yet - that's for next year). The second exam is about interest and introductory financial math (i.e. really weird schemes to try to make money... like derivities, and swaps, and who knows what else!).

My professor has supplied my class with 5 past exams. Now, in 2003 they changed the exam so many of the questions are unaplicable, but it is all still quite helpful. Like a true student actuary I made an excel table which has a box for me to check when I successfully answer each question, and also a little formula which calculates how many I've done. Right now I'm 2% way through, after answering 4 questions correctly. I don't know how to do the other 98% yet, but I still have 11.5 weeks of class left... My favorite one so far:


Mike receives cash flows of 100 today, 200 in one year, and 100 in two years. The
present value of these cash flows is 364.46 at an annual effective rate of interest i.
Calculate i.

The answer is about 13%.


A short side comment: it's interesting to note the names the exam uses: Mike, Bruce, Robbie. Not these PC names I'm used to seeing in text books. The world became a considerably weirder place when text books decided it was neccessary to have a Jamal and Carlos in every problem. I digress...

Leisure

Last night (Saturday) I was sitting on my bed doing my Interest Theory homework and Nick (my roommate) walked in and said "you do too much homework". I laughed a bit, because I didn't really think I was doing homework: it was fun! Homework should be drudgery. Boring, unbearable and taxing. But not mathmatics homework... oh no. On Friday I did 2 hours of Calculus homework (even though, to my extreme dismay, we have yet to do any Calculus yet!), and it was by far the highlight of my day.

Some might say that I'm weird, but I have Aristotle on my side:

Hence, ... those arts were discovered which had to do neither with pleasure nor with necessities, and this happened first in those places where men had leisure. That is why it was in Egypt that the mathematical sciences were first developed, for there leisure was available to the priestly caste.

Back at School

I think it might be a fun weekly post to tell you one problem I have encountered throught the week in each of my classes.

Calc III (bold letters are vectors): find the norm of a+b if a=<1,5> and b=<3,7>. Answer: 4*sqrt(10)

English 112: Write about something you did to illustarte your current understanding of what it means to be ethical. Describe what happened, what you did, the reasoning of your decision to act (or not act) at that time. Then go on to explain to your reader why it was thical or unethical. Answer

Interest Theory: Your great-great grandpa left you $100 on July 26, 1876. Assuming an effective annual rate of interest 5%, what is his gift worth on January 26, 2010. Answer: $67417.31

MicroEconomics: What is economics? (It is truely a principles course...) Answer:
Economics is a study of how society chooses to manage its scarce human and material resources which have alternative uses, to produce goods and services for present and future consumption.

Accounting: Prepare the StockHolders' Equity section of the balance sheet. Answer: I'll spare you the agony. I got to make a pretty Excel picture at least...