Sanj's Blog - 2old2play

End of Exams

At last, I have finally finished university forever. My exams seemed to drag on for ages but theyre over now and it feels pretty good. The bad news is that I now have to find a job. My degree was in Aeronautical engineering so I have been applying to lots of defense companies. I have had some positive replies and have been invited to an assessment centre on the 20th June for the Ministry of Defence. Im really pleases about that but it seems like quite an intense day. I have to prepare a ten minute technical presentation in advance and Im not really sure what to do it on. They havent given much guidance on what sort of topics they are looking for but Ill have to feel fairly confident on the subject as they have an expert asking you questions about it for 20 minutes afterwards.

Anyway, until then Im quite bored. I thought it would be awesome when I finished my exams but I dont really have anything to do, except play Halo 2 of course. I dont have any money to go anywhere so Im stuck in Glasgow not doing very much. The good news however is that my flatmate has just bought an electric drum kit. It get delivers this friday and then hes going away for a week so Im going to teach myself to play the drums. Cant wait. In fact, Im going to scour the internet for drum lessons. Later

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Six Nations

Most of the people on this site probably wont be aware of the Six Nations Rugby tournament, but its underway right now and is looking like one of the closest tournaments in recent years.

The Six Nations is an annual tournament consisting of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France and Italy. Each team plays each other once over a period of about 6 weeks. The tournament is a round robin with the team with the most points at the end taking the championship (no knock outs).

Being Scottish and an avid rugby fan, Im particularly excited this year as Scotland have turned their team around with a new coach and are looking like possible conteners for the title. Three games have been played by each team with only two remaining and the league couldnt be closer. France, England, Ireland and Wales are all sitting on four points, with Wales on 2 and Italy on 0. Only points difference separate the top four.

In previous years, Scotland have underperformed, with a poor coach and lack of confidence. They started off this years tournament with a surprise victory over France, arguably the favourites to take the tournament. After a defeat to last years winners Wales, they went on to beat World Champions England in one of the greatest defensive displays in rugby history. It was awesome and Edinburgh was drunk dry through celebration.

Tomorrow sees Scotland travelling to Dublin to take on Ireland. Its a huge game for us and the whole country is behind them. I cant wait as Im sure it will be a cracking game. If they win, they better have stocked up on beer in the bars as it will get messy. In fact even if we lose it will be messy, but lets not think about that. Cmon the Scots.

http://www.sixnations.com/index_scotland.htm

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Squares and Triangles

Sanjs blog, stardate 63... wait a minute. Thought I may as well put my geekiness out there right from the start, no point hidng from it. This is the first entry of my blog and I thought Id start out with some maths. Seems like a bit of a strange choice but let me explain a little bit.

I recently read this book by Simon Singh called Fermats Last Theorem which is basically a true story about this British mathematician who solved one of the oldest problems in mathematics. Its a great read (honestly) and I can highly recommend it if youre into that kind of thing. The thing I liked most about it though was that it went through the history of maths from the Greeks right through to the modern day. He talked about a lot of mathematicians and what their contribution to this problem, and their contribution to maths in general, was. As an engineering student a lot of these guys names were familiar to me (their equations however have long since been forgotten). There is some great stories in this book and some of these mathematicians are truly inspirational.

However, there was one part of the book which stayed with me and I want to share it. It is the proof of Pythagoras Theorem. Now Im sure I learnt this in high school but I didnt remember it. I found it so incredibly simple, yet so powerful at the same time. Maybe its because al ot of the maths I see these days is quite complicated that I had forgotten how simple it can be sometimes, but I thought it was really cool, so here it is.

For those of you that dont remember what Pythagoras Theorem is; it says that for a right angled triangle, the square of the long side (hypoteneuse) is the sum of the square of the other two sides.

A^2+B^2=C^2

Now heres how to prove it. If we take a square and draw four equal right angled triangles inside it (see diagram). Then we can use the basic rules about the area of a triangle to calculate the area of the larger equation.

So the area of the square can be calculated by (a+b)*(a+b) denoted (a+b)^2. We can also calculate it as the smaller square (C^2) plus the area of the four triangles (4*(1/2*a*b) = 2ab
We than get the equation (a+b)^2 = C^2 + 2ab. When we multiply out (a+b)^2 we get a^2 +b^2 +2ab = C^2 +2ab
2ab cancels out on each side of the equation and we are left with A^2 + B^2 = C^2. Thats it, simple yet impossible to refute. Thanks for reading.

Sanj

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