Quotes from Spring 1993

Instructor quotes

• Relax. You've got to be relaxed to have fun. 1-15-93

• Now you've got more than one rho, but life's not simple. 1-20-93

• Was I meant to hear that yawn or not? 1-22-93

• Alright, so we can write the equations for the forces on a current loop. Besides being fun, is it important? 1-25-93

• We're at quite a momentous occasion here. 1-27-93

• Remember these guys didn't cook these equations up over a weekend party. 2-1-93

• I won't be responsible for signs or factors of two. 2-5-93

• Zero mean as opposed to very mean. That's the best I can do today. 2-15-93

• If you were Egyptian you'd know the answer to this. But you're Greek. Egyptians did trigonometry, Greeks did algebra, Newton did calculus. 2-15-93

• I'm not feeling very good today. I think it's the fact that I haven't eaten today. 2-17-93

• You're probably familiar with the situation where you're here, but you feel like you're somewhere else. That's the way I feel today. I'm here, but I'm not even listening to what I am saying. So I'm going to have to get myself interested in this amazing property of the covariance matrix. Ahhh. This really is amazing. It's almost enough to pull me out from where I am. That probably is the way Edgar Allan Poe felt before he died. 2-17-93

• We're doing methods not tricks,... the trick is... 2-17-93

• Are there any non-EE's here? ... Shoot them. 1-11-93

• There's a mathematician sitting in the black box plugging away. 1-11-93

• RLC circuits behave just like mathematicians. 1-11-93

• This result is like a cultural thing. 1-13-93

• exp(At) is called a matrix exponential. No prizes for guessing how it got its name. 1-22-93

• Alright, IQ of 165 for everybody. 1-27-93

• You say, this is rather inconvenient (having to play by the rules). 1-29-93

• You can take this as a rabbit out of a hat. Well, you can always verify that it's a rabbit. 2-1-93

• Let's call this equation 1--our favorite number for equations. 2-3-93

• Just a fancy name for a rule. It means nothing. 2-5-93

• Diagonalizable--a good word for Star Trek. '.... beam up .... diagonalizable.' 2-8-93

• The only problem with a proof is, do you have enough resolution in your mind to tell between right and wrong. 2-10-93

• It's always tangential to its whatchamacallit, right? 2-15-93

• Guy leaves in middle of class --> "See ya." 2-15-93

• Square root of the natural log of x? Wow! 2-15-93

• We are implicitly implying... 2-15-93

• In general, everything is pathological, only in special cases do things work. 2-17-93

• How can I do this? Because I have read ahead a chapter. 2-24-93

• Ah, gotcha there, didn't I. 2-26-93

• Let's try and get this straight ASAP. 3-1-93

• It's subtle to say the least. I don't know what to say the most. 3-1-93

• Every time, all around the world, people make this mistake. It's embedded in your genes or something. 3-1-93

• Aren't you glad you're not a graduate student in consumer science. 3-3-93

• Now apply a little bit of magic. 3-15-93

• I'm not sure what was in Professor DeCarlo's mind when he did it this way. 3-15-93

• Man, is this neat or what? 3-19-93

• I thought 6 - 1 = 5, but 6 - 1 = 4. 3-19-93

• Let me finish this exciting final sentence. 3-19-93

• In other words, you now know how to do everything. 3-19-93

• A test is supposed to be a time of showing off. 3-22-93

• Admittedly, a test question is going to be easy, and often trivial. 3-22-93

• Here is our mathematical thing for this stuff. 3-26-93

• You should be able to recite this in you dreams. 3-26-93

• People have been struggling with that for centuries, now they just say it's not well defined. 3-29-93

• Now how do you remember that? Well, a negative means shift to the right. How do you remember that? Well, it makes sense that negative shifts to the left, then apply Murphy's Law and we're done. 3-29-93

• I've never computed either of these in practice. I don't know anyone who does. 4-5-93

• The book says with a simple change of variable, unfortunately I couldn't get it. We will prove it later. It takes a substantial amount of work--about five pages. 4-7-93

• How nice because immediately, all kinds of things are going to happen to us now. 4-9-93

• In a test, if it's easy, overkill it. Don't just say "This is easy, I'm not going to do it." 4-14-93

• Remember there's more than corn in Indiana. There's Indiana Beach. 4-14-93

• It's not controllable, it's just called the Kalman Controllable form. 4-14-93

• This is for people who have been out of school and forgotten everything. 1-11-93

• We've studied what we've studied. 1-11-93

• Why don't you just say I'm wrong next time, rather than trying to be so polite. It wastes time. 2-17-93

• I guess you people in TV land can't see me pointing, but just pretend you did. 2-22-93

• So what's the point? The point is...well, maybe there isn't one. 2-26-93

• Most of that is readable. 3-17-93

• Sorry this stuff is dry, but this stuff tends to be dry. 3-17-93

• So what does that mean? ... Well, ... who knows? 3-19-93

• Any questions about anything except what I did last time, because I really messed that up. 3-29-93

• Since Linear Algebra gives me headaches we're going to skip over some of this chapter. 3-31-93

• Time may not be the best word, but I've already written it down and don't feel like scribbling it out. 4-2-93

• We have slightly different things, meaning slightly different things. 4-2-93

• I think it's really neat stuff, which means most students don't like it. 4-9-93

• Anything that gets a name, you know it's important. 4-9-93

• Does anyone hear music playing in the background? It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't such annoying music. 4-12-93

• I guess I'd better add some continuity to the lecture. 4-19-93

• These results we will pound to death next class. 4-19-93

• y_{k+1|k} = F_k y_{k|k}, P_{k+1|k} = F_k P_{k|K} F^H_k + G_k Q_k G^H_k, So now it's clear why this is so useful. 4-21-93

Textbook quotes

• Of course, we unceremoniously omit further rigor.

• This joint distribution describes the experiment consisting of Mother Nature's draw of theta = theta_i followed by Father Nature's draw of x from the distribution F_theta_i (x).

• If Mother Nature is perverse, she will select a prior distribution that makes (even) a Bayesian look bad. Anticipating this, we might try to design a detector that a perverse Mother Nature cannot defeat. The game is this: We know that Mother Nature is trying to make us look bad, so we are going to try to neutralize her attempts.

Student quotes

• Since I had a schedule change, and had to take the first week's lab late, I had much less time to prepare for the 2nd lab than other students in the Tuesday lab. This increased my feeling of disorientation and confusion; this, on top of adding another class which caused my schedule change in the first place, left me with additional work in the added class to catch up before preparing for the 2nd lab! Therefore please excuse the lab for being only one hour late, and please don't deduct. I've had a hard enough time catching up altogether.--[Name deleted] 1-22-93

• It was easier to see an analog meter more than to see the numbers flick in and out of you face. [Unedited] 1-30-93

• I've got to get off the drugs. This is just too much. 2-4-93

• The VOM measurements are way off. The percent error was 34900%, which is just unreasonable. 2-15-93

• I'm realizing now that we goofed, but I'm hoping for brownie points for being honest and not fudging my data (as would be very easy in open lab after the TA's aren't around to check what we did in lab). 3-18-93

• Section 3.2 That answer is way off but I am sorry, I am only human.
  Section 3.3 Ta-Dah! (-4.84%) error, let's throw a party.
  Section 3.4 Well it didn't get better.... All I can ask is be gentle Chris, if we don't know and the TA's don't what can you do. 4-2-93

  Conclusions: The best EE207 T.A. I've ever had, Chris Taylor, kindly measured and then informed us that for the oscilloscope, the input resistance was 1.0 megaohms and its capacitance was 42 pF. As if this wasn't already enough, he also found the output resistance of the function generator to be 50 ohms. 4-4-93

  I'm sorry for the sloppiness of this report. I am writting this in a van on the ride back from Washington, DC where I participated in a rugby tournament. 4-4-93

  This method of making resistors is so inaccurate it's childish! 4-8-93

  I got to go take some pills, I'll be back soon. 4-15-93

Overheard quotes

• How do we get out of here. Fall '92

• Hey, we're on the second floor. Fall '92

• I only missed 4 so I got an A. I was so excited I almost threw up. 2-3-93

• Hey John, I thought you quit this recitation. I haven't seen you since the first week. 2-3-93

• I'm dying. 2-12-93

• Is there, like, an alcohol center around here? 2-18-93

• It's a .... circle, you idiot! 2-18-93

• We should get an A just for finding the classroom. 2-25-93

• I want this week to be over. I want this week to be over now! 3-24-93

• Ooohhh (whine). Did you get a run? [In your nylons] 4-13-93

• Smile Rosie, you'll live longer. 4-16-93

• Huh. Don't hit me. 4-19-93