subsequently my lectures were error prone. for some reason i kept missing little details like negative signs and forgetting to change sines into cosines after differentiation.
maybe calculus and research don't mix very well .. at least, if it's calculus on a euclidean space! q-:
also, i think my students think i'm quite weird. today, while discussing damped oscillations for springs, i may have said the following things:
"so imagine that you have a chocolate chip cookie, dangling from a spring, bouncing up and down, in a tantalizing manner .."
"damping forces are caused by setting the spring-mass apparatus into an ambient fluid. as an example, if you took that chocolate chip cookie with spring and dipped it completely into a vat of melted chocolate, then subsequently the periodic motion would slow down .."
"it may happen that there are other external forces. for example, suppose you have little elves, say in scuba gear, swimming in the vat of chocolate and constantly pushing the cookie this way and that, for maximum chocolatey effect .."
admittedly, i was thinking of E.L. Fudge cookies and commercials with the Keebler elves. my students, however, gave me the strangest looks.
later, during office hours, one student admitted that he couldn't take it anymore. after class, he immediately went, bought, and devoured a chocolate chip cookie.
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