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Page 2

Monday January 10, 2011 6:30 am Lethbridge

This page last updated on: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 3:38 PM

B. Actual Learning Activities

7:30 am

Introduction to Linear Algebra (2009)

Gilbert Strang

I completed Problem Set 1.1 yesterday. Now to have a close look at section 1.2 .

Chapter 1 Introduction to Vectors

1.2 Lengths and Dot Products

Lengths and Unit Vectors
Notes on Computing
Review of the Key Ideas
Worked Examples
Problem Set 1.2

Lengths and Unit Vectors

One difficulty will be to use conventional notation while making these notes. Hopefully my version of MathType 5 will do the job without too much hassle.

• key terms and concepts
  • dot product (inner product) of two vectors
  • dot product of zero implies perpendicularity
  • examples of dot products
    • engineering (balance beams)
    • business (balance sheets)
  • dot product of a vector with itself
    • square root of dot product gives the length of the vector
    • evaluate dot product of a vector with itself using APL

    Good. I can do this. The "trick" is to transpose the vector into a column vector and then use the inner product operator +.x

    

• Here is the same idea in conventional notation (using MathType):

  

• a unit vector is a vector whose length is 1.

Time 8:30 am This has been a good start. I am presently working in three environments: textbook notation (aka handwriting), APL notation, and MathType notation. That is, I have one idea, the length of a vector (which is not a difficult idea) and three different ways of expressing this idea. And textbook notation actually involves both a symbolic form and a geometric form. One weakness with APL is that it does not actually draw the vectors. I suspect that Mathematica could do this, but that would add another dimension to my learning. The next step is to obtain a clear idea of the relationship between unit vectors and trigonometry.

 

3:00 PM

I spent a couple of hours this morning working with my Ship It! files. Once again I thought I had it working but when I tried placing the cars on the layout I noticed problems - one car was supposed to be in two different locations. This turned out to be caused by having the car listed twice. The software is strange in that it can catch some very subtle errors and miss some very obvious ones.

I then decided to take a break from this and see if I could determine what was causing my windows xp system on the mac to fail to connect to the internet. After looking at a few parameters for about an hour I realized that I had no hope of solving the problem and decided to contact Parallels and see if they could help. This turned into one of the most frustrating experiences of my technological activities over the last 40 or so years. The details are not important. I was not able to navigate my way through the Parallels web site to obtain a support person without first buying an account for $20. Then I couldn't figure out my options on the touch tone telephone. I finally did reach a technician who asked me to open the control panel in windows and then drill down through 4 levels of options to something called a device manager which had a subfile with a yellow caution symbol over it. At that moment the phone connection broke. I have no idea if I used up my $20. account and I wasn't going to get another one to find out.

Back on my own, I tried clicking on the subfile and received an option to update this file. I clicked on that and about 20 seconds later I was connected to the internet. I did send the company a customer feedback form indicating my frustration with their service.

It then spent another couple of hours with Ship It! and corrected a few more problems involving a few cars that I had removed from the layout and then re-inserted them. This turns out to not be a straight forward process and it was causing problems within the system.

At the moment I still do not have a working Ship It! system, again. But my internet connectivity is still working within windows xp.

Here is the sequence of levels as I drilled from the Windows xp control panel:

• control panel
  • system
    • system properties
      • hardware tools
        • device manager
          • realtek ethernet adapter

10:00 PM

I was able to get a little late night reading with "Freedom". I am enjoying it.

Summary

Description	Done
Technology: APLX
Technology: Lessons 4 & 5 of "Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 Classroom in a Book"
Technology: correct problem with internet connectivity in windows xp	Yes
Mathematics: Chap. 1 of "Introduction to Linear Algebra" by Gilbert Strang	Yes
Model Trains: Set up cars for Session 1	Yes
Continue reading "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen	Yes

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