I love him more and more as time goes on.

Well it’s not that I want to live my life not knowing how to integrate
It’s just that sometimes integrals are hard to evaluate
Integration by parts should be a good start, so I’m looking for all the clues
I got the “I don’t know what to choose for u, so I can’t integrate” blues

Don’t think that I’m the studious type, I ain’t one of them girls
How is it, then, that calculus became the center of my world?
Pick u and dv, find du and v, but it gets me sort of all confused
I got the “I don’t know what to choose for u, so I can’t integrate” blues

I don’t have time to eat
I don’t have time to sleep
I spend all night integrating away
Oh, I wish you could explain!

It’s not that I expect it’s easy but I’m unhappy when it takes all night
It’s just that those pesky homework assignments often put up a really big fight
Sometimes I want to take those math brain cells and just drown ‘em with a lot of booze
I got the “I don’t know what to choose for u, so I can’t integrate” blues

Logarithmic?
Inverse? Polynomial?
Exponential?
Trigonometric? Oh, hell!

It’s not that I think that it’s gonna be the last class to ever give me grief
There’s going to be more, I know it for sure, but tonight I need some relief
So just for now could I use Wolfram Alpha and maybe I could manage to lose
The “I don’t know what to choose for u, so I can’t integrate – I just can’t integrate – ooooooo, I can’t integrate” blues

...

This. This is why I take drugs. Once the refrain popped into my head, my brain wouldn't let me sleep, study, work, or do anything else productive until I wrote the rest of the lyrics.

OK brain, we did your thing -- now you're gonna shut up, do your calculus homework, and LIKE IT.

If Neal's goal is to look like Hugh Jackman in time for the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2, then I suppose my goal should be to look good in skintight black leather, right? Because I already have a similar cut and color as Jean Gray in X-Men 2. Then Neal and I can go home after the movie premiere and act out all those naughty fanfiction stories.

Tomorrow I'm going to add some strength-training exercises to my workout. Not sure yet if I want to follow the Sexy Female Training program or just use the machines in the gym or what. I'm not very comfortable using the free weights area of the UNLV gym because it's always full of intimidatingly fit 20-year-old guys and I doubt that they'd appreciate a fat older woman getting in their way.

At least I know that my metabolism is through the roof right now.  I am eating all the time.  I'm guessing at least six meals a day and I am generally following the eating guidelines I made in the previous post but I am drinking a lot of skim milk for calories.  I do have cheat days on the weekends where I eat whatever I want as long as it fits in about the same amount of calories.

Ideally I want to be at about 210 pounds and 12% body fat.  I am probably in the 22% body fat range now and at 205 pounds.  (I need to go get this tested)  I think this will take at least a year of continuous lifting.  My rotator cuff is feeling better, and my knees feel great.  I went to the doctor for a three week ear infection that won't go away and they've got me on a bunch of garbage.  I plan on hitting the gym this Saturday for weights and Sunday for cardio.

My ultimate goal is to pass for Wolverine on Marvel movie nights.  I'd like to be able to pull that off, kind of a bigger version of Hugh Jackman.

Thursday night I stopped by the Freakin Frog to have a beer with the Beer and Blog group while game seven of the NBA finals was on.  I had a good time and it was good to see a group that I haven't seen in a while.  My friends Jeff and Reef have been in town so we went to Ditch Friday at the Palms pool on Friday and then out to play poker at the Aria casino that night. On Saturday we went to the Flamingo pool and back to Aria for poker. Zach and Brian came along and luckily we didn't ruin Zach's pool party.

Friday night I saw a lot of good friends that I hadn't seen in a while at Aria and it made me really happy. The World Series of Poker is going on now so a lot of players are in town and I got to meet up with quite a few of my friends. The Aria poker room is great. The games are soft, the poker room is right beside the garage, and the games are soft... wait I said that already. My only complaint is that the waiting list can be a bit long on the weekends, but that is to be expected. Next time I go I will be sure to call ahead to get myself on the waiting list.

I had to take a week off from lifting weights because my right shoulder is screwed up from moving furniture incorrectly one day. (I one-hand overhead carried a bookcase because I was irritated) It felt fine until the next day and I knew I did something wrong. Everything I've read online about shoulders says don't push through it and give it some time off or you will regret it. So I'm going to take it slow. My plan right now is to do the stepmill until my shoulder is back to feeling good.

We went grocery shopping and I got my meals for the week. I am currently planning on eating the following meal breakdown:

• Time Food
• 0830 Eggs + Peppers
• 1130 Bean and Cheese Burrito
• 1500 Steak/Fish + Sweet Potato
• 1930 Salad
• 2130 Whey + Skim Milk
• 2359 Cottage Cheese + Peanut Butter

This equals out to about 2500-3k calories a day. This is a bit low but since I am not lifting I don't want to overdo it. When I'm lifting I try to get in 3k-3500 calories a day for maintenance. I plan to drink 16oz of water with each meal. Typically my meals have looked like this during the weekdays for the last month and it has done well. I have not lost any weight (not my goal) but I have lost about two inches off of my waistline and actually gained three pounds . I was drinking half a gallon of skim milk along with this when I am lifting.

Well that was a longer than usual post so here are the cliff notes:

1. I was busy last week
2. ...am looking at grad schools and gmat prep
3. ...hung out with friends at the pool all weekend and played poker
4. ...shoulder hurt, doing stepmill instead of weights for 1-2 weeks
5. ...we went grocery shopping, I planned meals

A confluence of factors at work and school has sparked my interest in systems thinking and systems dynamics. A lot of it seems like "well, duh" common sense, but elucidated in such a way as to clear up one's own thinking as well as suggest a broad range of applications. As an attention-deficit voracious reader and compulsive internet surfer, I've had a shallow exposure to a wide range of fields and thus had already noticed that similar ideas pop up again and again under different names in different disciplines. So I agree with the premise that most of the world can be analyzed through a common set of systems analysis concepts and tools, and was excited to discover that there's actually a formal field of study of "how it all fits together."

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows provides a well-written, clear, concise, broad overview of systems thinking and its applications for a lay audience, without delving into technical material like mathematics or computer modeling. It got me excited enough about the subject to order another book, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, which I hope to read later this week (if I have time). At first glance the second book appears to be a more technical and mathematical text, so I hope that I can still follow along. I'm also thinking about working my way through MIT's online self-study course Road Maps: A Guide to Learning System Dynamics. Anyone know of any other good introductory resources on the topic?

I wonder how one breaks into the field of systems dynamics? Now that UNLV's Informatics program has been cut, I'm at a loss for what to do after I complete my MBA. I'd still like to get a PhD and become a professor, but I'm not sure where or in what. Systems dynamics seems like it could be a good field for a dilettante like me...

Neither one of us like to clean, but a maid is pointless until we get everything organized and get pretty close to finished with remodeling.  Today I'm going to try to tackle some of the disaster.  I'm thinking of just doing it room by room.  Currently our biggest problem in the house is that we have boxes and boxes of stuff with no place for it (we don't have a garage).  I'm thinking of putting it all in a spare bedroom and just forgetting that the bedroom exists until I can tackle that.  After the boxes we have paper everywhere that needs to be sorted and filed and then it is just dishes, vacuuming, dusting, etc...

What we really need is better organization.  The cleaning isn't bad and if we needed we could get a maid to come in every other week or so when we are both busy like we are right now... but we really have to get the organization down first or it is pointless.  Does anyone have any tips on home organization?  Specifically boxes (the large Rubbermaid type), paper, mail, books, dogs.  What do you do to keep your house clean and organized?

So, in lieu of more interesting content, here's a taste of what's been occupying me:

"A plane flying horizontally at an altitude of 1/2 km and a speed of 200 km/h passes directly over a radar station. Find the rate at which the distance from the plane to the station is increasing when it is 2 km away from the station."

"A street torch is mounted atop a 12 ft pole. A 6 ft woman strolls away from the pole with the speed of 1 ft/s along a straight path. How fast is the tip of her shadow moving when she is 7 ft away from the pole?"

"A spotlight on the ground shines on the wall 8 m away. If a child 1 m tall walks from the spotlight toward the wall at the speed of 0.9 m/s, how fast is the length of her shadow on the wall decreasing when she is at the halfway point?"

"Sand is being dumped from a conveyor belt and forms a conical pile. Assuming that the height of this cone is always exactly 3 times the size of the radius of its base, and that the sand is added at the rate of 10 m^3/min, how fast is the height increasing when the pile is 15 m high?"

"The length of a rectangle is increasing at a rate of 8 cm/s and its width is increasing at a rate of 3 cm/s. When the length is 20 cm and the width is 10 cm, how fast is the area of the rectangle increasing?"

"If a snowball melts so that its surface area decreases at a rate of 1 cm^2/min, find the rate at which the diameter decreases when the diameter is 10 cm."

"At noon, ship A is 150 km west of ship B. Ship A is sailing east at 35 km/h and ship B is sailing north at 25 km/h. How fast is the distance between the ships changing at 4:00 PM?"

"Two cars start moving from the same point. One travels south at 60 mi/h and the other travels west at 25 mi/h. At what rate is the distance between the cars increasing two hours later?"

"A boat is pulled into a dock by a rope attached to the bow of the boat and passing through a pulley on the dock that is 1 m higher than the bow of the boat. If the rope is pulled in at a rate of 1 m/s, how fast is the boat approaching the dock when it is 8 m from the dock?"

The challenge of these related rates problems is thinking carefully about all the functions and variables involved. It's not like the relatively straightforward numerical problems, which can always just be plugged into Wolfram Alpha to check answers or see the steps to solve the problem when stuck. (Hat tip to my classmate Peter for showing me how to use Wolfram Alpha -- it's a great resource for math students!)

Enjoy working your way through those problems. I'll report back next week about how I do on my exam.