Yous

This is a word I find myself saying more and more. In current usage, the word you does not technically have a plural, but yous (and also you all) are becoming popular for that. I find myself saying it without thinking, and when I try not to say it, it sounds wrong. It's funny the way languages change.

I'm still not sure whether I want to try and stick with the more "correct" usage, or go with this new plural form. Generally I try and use proper grammar as much as possible, but there really isn't all that much point in casual usage. Words come in and out, meanings change, but sometimes it can be fun to go against that change. I still enjoy asking people, "Contemporary with what?" when they use the term contemporary to mean recent, because that's not its actual meaning. Most people don't even understand what I'm on about, sad as it may be. Ah well, I shouldn't spend too much time bemoaning this change, as I said, languages do change, and will keep changing.

Welcome To The Masquerade

I bought Thousand Foot Krutch's new album on Monday, and it's awesome! Wasn't even all that long I had to wait to be able to get it here after the US release, less than a week which is much better than the about 2 weeks I had to wait for The Flame In All Of Us (TFIAOS). I had really been looking forward to this, the promotion TFK did for it, the teasers and all really had me hooked, though it's much better hearing it as the entire album than the few songs they had released.

The album just works so nicely as an album, the songs fit together, the sound is fairly consistent without being all the same. And it's heavier, much heavier than TFIAOS, which I like. I'm not sure whether in ranks above Phenomenon as my favourite TFK album (and favourite album of any band), but if it doesn't it comes close.

My favourite song on it (at least for the moment) is E for Extinction. It has a great quiet - loud - quiet sound which is always good, and a good message to go along with it. I particularly like the lyric When we move we camouflage ourselves. We stand in the shadows waiting. Which really hit me. I also like the song The Part That Hurts The Most (Is Me). Which also sounds great and has some good, hard hitting lyrics which I think is a must. I can never get too into a song with poor lyrics.

So well done TFK, you did a great job making an excellent album! Now come back to NZ.

Laplace's Equation in 3D, polar coordinates

The title basically says it all. For a mere three marks (out of 50) in our take home test, we've been asked to Laplace's Equation in spherical coordinates. As you can see from that post it's a mission. I basically gave up around half an hour ago. It seems that I made a mistake when I was inverting the Jacobian (2 pages of working), which is a slightly different way from the linked article, but that's how we've been asked to do it. Tomorrow I suppose I'll go through it and find my error, which will be tedious. I did get maple to do it for me, so I know what I should get, and I was pretty close, but it appears I messed up one column.

The frustrating part is that even when I've inverted the matrix, I still need to do the ridiculous substitutions you see near the bottom of that page. I won't do them all at once like that, I'll be a bit smarter, but still, it's going to be tedious.

The thing that's really annoying is not that this is particularly hard - it isn't, it's just tedious and a huge amount of work. I won't be surprised if this question goes to 4+ pages. And it's not the kind of work you have to do by hand any. That's why people developed computer algebra systems, why we rely on the work of people who have gone before us, so we don't have to sit there doing tedious calculations. However, I do understand the point, so I'll strive to do it well, plus I want a good mark in this paper, and the test is worth 20% so it is fairly important. Maths Away!