Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective

"My dear boy, it's dangerous---"

A low laugh cut short the further speech of
Mr. Elliston.

"I supposed you knew me too well, Harper,
to imagine that danger ever
deterred Dyke Darrel from doing his duty."

"Of course; but this is a different case.
'Tis said that four men were
engaged in the foul work, and
that they belong to a league of
desperate ruffians, as hard to deal
with as ever the James and Younger
brothers. Better leave it to the
Chicago and St. Louis force, Dyke. I
should hate to see you made the
victim of these scoundrels."

Mr. Elliston laid his hand on the
detective's arm in a friendly way,
and seemed deeply anxious.

"Harper, are you aware that the
murdered messenger was my friend?"

"Was he?"

"Certainly. I would be less than
human did I refuse to take the trail
of his vile assassins. You make me
blush when you insinuate that
danger should deter me from doing my duty."

And thus that daring detective Dyke Darrel and his whole barrel full of alliterations takes off on his adventure.

I am sorry. That quote was just too good not to share. I have been poking around Project Gutenberg under the P's these past couple days and finding amusing books such as Dorothy Dale, a girl of today which was a series started by that great syndicate that wrote Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I almost think Dyke Darrel could be another one of those, except it seems the characters are not young teens like I might expect. But then, I have not looked up the author yet, nor even finished the first chapter. But Project Gutenberg states the author's name is a pseudonym, so perhaps it is a series written by some other person in his own right.

What would you think if you spent over two hundred dollars for an hour in which you could walk around with sore feet shaking sweaty hands and dodging people?
Well, that is what I did with the consummation being this afternoon.
Okay, I did not spend two hundred dollars just for one hour. But the one hour was the beginning.

I went to my campus's career fair today. Twas interesting to say the least.
Here is a picture of me in my suit after coming back:




















I did not actually realize my shirt had fallen out until after I came home.
Here is a picture of the things I collected:

Is that not a lovely picture? I am sorry to say I did not take the binoculars handed out at one company. I am regretting that now. But now I have nifty little lunch bag that says "Engineered for Life" on it which makes it cooler than Jo's.

The Quote of Wednesday

Look! it's Wednesday again!
But I am tired.
I had a physics exam today. And it went very long. I mean, I needed longer than the hour they gave. But so did most everybody else.

So I do not want to give you a physics equation as a quote for today. But I must still find something. Unfortunately, my roommates have all been under stress, so I have no inspiration from something they have said or written recently.

Too bad, I guess you will all (or none) have to be quoteless today.
Perhaps I shall find something interesting tomorrow.
Then it will be the Quote of Thursday Which Ought to Have Been On Wednesday.

The Quote of Wednesday

My quote for today is actually a link to The Two Sisters:

The Quote of Wednesday

Please go read it.

Equations again

Apparently some people find my excitement about equations to be amusing.
I really do not know what is so amusing about liking equations. If there were no equations or no people who enjoyed them, where would we all be?
We would be lacking large bridges, cars, trucks, airplanes, computers, dishwashers, economics, space shuttles, cell phones, cannons, cleaning chemicals, vacuum cleaners, diving boards, and many other things. You could even say food recipes were a sort of equation, so we wouldn't even have those.
Now do you see what excellent and amazing things equations are?

Of course, some equations look horrid and are horrid to solve, but others are absolutely beautiful and simple. Those are the most fun and sometimes even the most important. And those are the sort I like to share with everybody.

I have a story instead of a license

Yes, I failed my first road test because I got too nervous and forgot everything I had learned. Really! Diff Eq exams are much easier than road tests!
But I have failed one, and that will be something interesting anyway. I have the little receipt they print up for you telling you what you did wrong. I am going to scrapbook it for fun.
And the moral is:
-Make sure you take care of yourself so you don't catch a cold the night before a road test.
-Convince your dad to let you practice parallel parking much more in advance to a road test.
-Look out for hidden stop signs which could be lurking at any corner.
-Even if your car has a sharp turning radius, they still want three point turns instead of u-turns.

So there you have it. Now you can take your road test with no fear of failing.
If you do happen to fail, get something good to eat instead and walk to class thinking about how wonderful your feet are and how economical you are being.
And scrapbook your receipt so you can always remember the occasion.

Equations!

I have more equations for all the people who (don't) read this!
I love equations, especially if I can use them.

So, there are three equations for three cases of finding solutions for differential equations. This is not going to be an explanation of differential equations and how to find their solutions, so just ignore that if you don't know what they are. The important thing is that I have three new equations that I like and that I have memorized because I have been doing so many problems with them and I would like to share them with everyone.

The three equations are as follows:

I am sorry they are so small. If you click on the picture, you can see them better. I have to figure out how to get alphas and betas in a blogger post still. Anyway, the first equation is for case 1 where you find the roots of a quadratic equation and the roots turn out to be nice ordinary ones (this is just more mathematical jumble, so if you don't understand it, don't worry about it). The second equation is for case 2 where the roots turn out to be one repeated root. The third equation is for complex roots. Those are the roots that get imaginary numbers in them.
And I think these equations are so fun. They save a lot of work.