Imablog

Just a few days after moving to Charleston, I was in an oddly named grocery store called Publix (at the time I thought it was an odd name).

Walking to the checkout lines, I saw this girl wearing shorts. A fairly ordinary pair of shorts, except printed in great big letters was the word “COCKS”. Right on her butt. Pretty hard to miss.

“Wow, that’s pretty bold advertising” I thought. I mean really, it said “COCKS” in great big letters right on her ass. What else was a guy supposed to think?

It wasn’t until a few of weeks later, after getting a little more settled in and a little more familiar with the local vernacular that I realized her shorts must have referred to the USC Gamecock, and not the other thing I originally thought of.

Keeping track of – signs has always been the bane of my attempts at math. Somehow I always manage to lose track of at least one – sign during the course of working out a problem.

On one notable occasion working on a homework assignment for a boundary value problems class (partial differential equations galore), one question evolved into 13 pages of math scribblings. Eventually I decided it was far too ugly to be any kind of correct, so I pitched it all and started over. I found my mistake in a single – sign on the second page and wrote the solution up in 4 pages.

20 years later, things haven’t changed. Still making the same mistakes with – signs or other silly little math errors. On the BioE 846 quiz I got back today, one of the easier questions I ended up getting wrong because of an off-by-1 mistake.

One positive: with the additional years of experience, I’m at least catching most of my stupid little mistakes earlier.