I love little children.

A few days ago I was not praying about one of the biggest stresses in my life at the moment. Teaching music at BMC has been a good learning experience and I'm enjoying it more all the time, getting the music around at such a late hour has been a problem. You have to research who holds the copyright, call around, try to get a hold of the right person, and then when it comes to big companies like Word, it can be very frustrating. So I committed this thing to prayer a few days ago and already two of the songs that were in limbo have been taken care of, for free even. There's stilll a couple I'd like to get out of the way, but it is exciting to see it happen, nonetheless.

I love my Engineering Econ teacher. He is miles beyond being self-conscious as he lectures, which is more than you can say for a lot of teachers. Most teachers seem comfortable speaking in front of the class, but that's not to say that they're not inhibited in their expression. This guy is pure "himself." Today he shut the door to the classroom 6 times within the first 30 minutes. He'd see the door open as he was expounding on some point and he'd ramble over there and shut it, talking all the while. But as he'd turn his back on the door, it would swing open again. Then 5 minutes later, he'd see it again and repeat the process.

I wanted to talk to him after class, but there were too many people in line. So this may be a misunderstanding, but I'll say it anyway.

There's this thing called calculus, and one of its fundamental concepts is the limit. For instance, if you have (1/x) and you let x get infinitely large, the idea of a limit says that you can let the expression (1/x) "go to zero." Basically you can consider it to be zero. Think about it, if you have 1 divided by a gazillion, the resulting number is going to be very, very tiny, and if you say that x is going to infinity, you can consider the expression to be zero.

With that in mind, let's look at a circle. A circle is round, obviously. It's a curve. But what if you zoom in on a part of that circle? If you zoom in enough, that curve begins to look awfully straight. This convenience is used in other areas of calculus and it's even been used in one of my classes this term in relation to forecasting.

The reason I bring this up is because my Econ teacher basically said that this idea is an outdated concept, which I have a hard time believing. Like I said I may have misunderstood him, but he was making the point that the world is not a linear place. We do all these simple applications that involve linearity, but he says in the real world it's much more complex than that. I agree there, it's just that I still think zooming in on the curve and assuming a straight line gives us a wonderful approximation of that curve over a short distance.