Week 11

I have had little experience with Microsoft Excel so I knew today's tutorial task was going to be more difficult then last weeks task with word. Sure enough within exercise two I encountered my first problem. However, this was not completely my fault. In the tutorial manual it says that to calculate gains/losses write the formula =IF(F2>0,$Gain$,$Loss$). However, whenever I wrote this formula I kept getting an error message. The message advised me to click on the function key next to the formula which I did. A screen then popped up which told me I was entering an invalid code for both gains and losses. I deleted the $ signs and just wrote gains and losses. This worked and the formula appeared in the boxes just like described.

The advanced exercise with the Macros was an absolute nightmare for me. I followed the instructions, or so I thought, exactly as written but in the end my buttons did not produce the Gain/Loss lines like they should. Wait let me correct that, the GainsandLosses button produced something but not gains and losses, only gains. The other two buttons didn't work at all. I decided to go back to the beginning and try it again, see if I just accidentally skipped over something. I repeated the instructions again exactly and the same thing happened.

I asked Adam what was going wrong because I was getting extremely frustrated with this program. After explaining what was happening I discovered there was an unusual quirk with the macros. If you show the losses first, the gains will disappear. However, they don't later reappear when you try to click on the losses and gains. You have to go in order from gains and losses, to gain, to losses in order for all of the correct graphs to appear.

Extremely Annoying

Todays lecture was extremely interesting. It really changed my view of what a hacker was. The media always uses the word hacker to describe when a virus gets sent or information gets stolen. Because of this I had an extremely negative impression of hackers. To me they were extremely smart computer geeks who like to break into computer systems to cause havoc or for monetary gain. To think that Hackers are important to democracy on the internet would have seemed laughable to me.

However, my favorite part of the lecture was the physics lesson. Having never taken physics I only knew the absolute basics. I never realized how interesting this topic was. Steve explained the theory of relativity in such simple terms that it makes such absolute sense now, when before it seemed completely incomprehensible. I am still a bit confused about Black Holes, but I'm really interested about reading up on them now. I know the gravity would crush the human body so we couldn't survive, and I understand that time is eternity in a black hole. What I don't get is that the lecture notes say that at the center of a black hole space and time do literally have boundaries you can cross. Does this mean that light and atoms that go in the black hole, if they eventually get to the center, time travel? Do they exist in different times? Wouldn't that create extra mass that would be measurable by scientists? So many questions.

Almost wish I had taken physics now.

Primer is going to be an interesting movie. Though it is very understandable now, time travel movies can get extremely complicated. The movie has an interesting concept, but is very slow and the dialogue is rough and doesn't flow easily for the audience to understand. The movie introduces all these different concepts about computers and physics, but never really explains them. Unless you were very knowledgeable about those concepts, they can be very difficult to follow. Steve's warning at the end of class to research as much information as possible about the movie seemed a bit ominous. If Steve thinks its wild and hard to understand, I can just imagine how the rest of us will be feeling.