Livin' the SLOG Life

Hello readers! Today I'd like to talk about folding paper. Don't get too excited though, we didn't make or study any  hexaflexagons ; that would be way too complicated. We used a simple model and contemplated on the predictive power of its patterns. What I'm talking about is the interesting activity we did last class. It involved folding a simple strip of paper and the main point of the activity was to provide an opportunity to use the methods for approaching a problem. We were asked to fold a strip of paper in half as many times as possible, always folding the left end onto the right end. After each fold we would then unfold the strip to record the direction of the resulting crease, which either went up or down. The question was to find a way to predict the direction of the creases, in relation to how many folds were made. At first, the problem seemed very simple, until the actual results of the creases were recorded. Rather than a straightforward repeating pat...

Hi everyone! I hope all of you guys have had a nice week so far, today I'd like to write a short post on what we learned in class recently! Today I'd like to talk about this nifty thing we learned in class called vacuous truth . Sounds complicated or abstract at first right? How can a truth be empty? Vacuous truth is this interesting concept that in an implication, where A implies B, if A is never True, then you can never say that A doesn't imply B! Let's first look at a 'real-life' example: If a person were to say, "If your apple turns into a banana when submerged under water, then the apple must have grown upside down in the ancient tombs of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs," you would have no means of proving that person wrong, since you would first have to find an apple that turned into a banana when submerged under water! Therefore what this person has said is vacuously true. Now let's look at an example dealing a little more with math:...

Hello readers! You have stumbled upon a small undergraduate student's (my) courSe LOG (SLOG), where, for the next few months, I will be posting about all things CSC165. The full name of this course is Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science. Quite a mouthful, is it not? However, so far it's been very interesting, since I have always wanted to test to what extent my own logic is capable of. Since this is my first blog post, I will be just doing some first impressions on the course and the material we've covered so far. First off, I would like to say that I have never taken any course like this before, so this material is all very  foreign to me. From the emphasis on precise wording to the mystical venn diagrams that contained the universe, not to mention the new notation that I needed to learn, this seemed all very new and uncertain. After about a week of worrying about not being able to keep up with the coursework, I decided to buckle down and just en...