SHE walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One ray the more, one shade the less
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow
So soft, so calm yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow
But tell of days in goodness spent
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

Lord Byron, (George Gordon)

Unknown Bold - 16 years, 1 month, 9 days ago

The very first day of class they are there in their booths, issuing credit cards to students who are only working a handful of hours a week and don’t have the money to make payments.

The credit card companies make a killing on these students, of course, and pay universities millions of dollars so that they can put the university’s name on the credit card.It’s not unheard of for college students to commit suicide over their credit card bills. Mothers of two students who committed suicide told their stories in the documentary and I was reduced to tears. They spoke before congress to try to pass a bill that would have prevented credit card companies from preying on college kids.

Did congress listen to them? Nope. Executives from all the major credit card companies were there to make sure that didn’t happen.

You’ll learn about how creditors make money even when loans go into default.

And you’ll hear from a Harvard professor who was invited to speak to a group of executives at a credit card company about bankruptcy. She explained that if they carefully screened the weakest customers before they became customers then bankruptcies would decline by 50 percent.

Sounds good, right? Apparently not. The head honco eventually spoke up and said they make almost all their money from the weakest customers so they won’t be making any changes.


Unknown Bold - 16 years, 1 month, 9 days ago

HAPPY PI DAY 3-14


How many celebrations are there in your math class? Each year on March 14th many classrooms break from their usual routines to observe the festivities of "Pi [] Day" because the digits in this date correspond with the first three digits of (3.14).

Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it was a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8 (3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and much harder to work with. For more, see A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset Press).
The modern symbol for pi [] was first used in our modern sense in 1706 by William Jones, who wrote:


There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particular Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as for instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 - 4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + ... = 3.14159... = (see A History of Mathematical Notation by Florian Cajori).
Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosen as the letter to represent the number 3.141592... because the letter [] in Greek, pronounced like our letter 'p', stands for 'perimeter'.

About Pi
Pi is an infinite decimal. Unlike numbers such as 3, 9.876, and 4.5, which have finitely many nonzero numbers to the right of the decimal place, pi has infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point.
If you write pi down in decimal form, the numbers to the right of the 0 never repeat in a pattern. Some infinite decimals do have patterns - for instance, the infinite decimal .3333333... has all 3's to the right of the decimal point, and in the number .123456789123456789123456789... the sequence 123456789 is repeated. However, although many mathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has been discovered - in fact, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved that there cannot be any such repeating pattern.

As a number that cannot be written as a repeating decimal or a finite decimal (you can never get to the end of it) pi is irrational: it cannot be written as a fraction (the ratio of two integers).

Pi shows up in some unexpected places like probability, and the 'famous five' equation connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics, 0, 1, e, pi, and i: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.

Computers have calculated pi to many decimal places. Here are 50,000 of them and you can find many more from Roy Williams' Pi Page.



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Unknown Bold - 16 years, 2 months, 7 days ago

teacher noticed that a little boy at the back of the class was squirming around,
scratching his crotch, and not paying attention. She went back to find out what
was going on. He was quite embarrassed and whispered that he had just recently
Been circumcised and he was quite itchy.

The teacher told him to go down to the principal's office. He was to telephone his
mother and ask her what he should do about it. He did and returned to his class.

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the back of the room. She went back to
investigate only to find him sitting at his desk with his 'private part' hanging out.
'I thought I told you to call your mom!' she said. 'I did,' he said, 'And she told me
that if I could stick it out till noon, she'd come and pick me up from school.'
Unknown Bold - 16 years, 2 months, 8 days ago

know the heartbreaks that sometimes alight on you when you least expect them. Expected or not, they hurt. But even when you feel your heart is breaking, you do know that troubles melt away, and that, relatively speaking, your worst trouble is always the present one. Even in the moment of heartache, you know that your seeming cause isn’t really all that bad. You’ve had as bad or worse, and you know that there are many in the world who would be glad to have your troubles. Maybe what hurts your heart isn’t worthy of all the attention and woe you pour on it.
What if this recent unhappy thing that happened is actually a good thing? What if you heard something you needed to hear? You didn’t want to hear it, yet, right or wrong, it could still be something good for you to hear. At the very least, it puts you now at a stepping-off place. Turning a corner is not a bad thing. A deep change in your perception may be hard for you, yet it can still be good.

You are finding out the mettle you are made of. You are made of stronger stuff than you knew. Your backbone is straightened. When you let go of your sense of dismalness, you will know you have climbed a mountain. You were in the valley. Now you can climb another mountain and rise to a higher peak from where you can see further and more clearly.

You are really all right. Your feelings matter to you very much, of course, but the extent to which you let your feelings matter may not be necessary. Holding feelings that damage you or another certainly isn’t what you want.

Often in life, the thing to do is to simply shrug your shoulders and keep on walking along.


Unknown Bold - 16 years, 2 months, 8 days ago