Thoughts

I’m marking a first-year engineering assignment where students had to design a device to separate egg yolks from their whites and shells.

At least a quarter of the students have cited their mother in their references.

I also worry about the guy who cited a tape ruler, a ruler, soft drink bottles, a soap container, solder, plastic boxes, and a spoon knife.

An interesting thing about Direct Connect is that everybody’s searches are broadcast to every other user. So for a few weeks, I’ve been sitting on the local university hub 24/7 collecting search data.

Unsurprisingly, the data follows Zipf’s law pretty tightly—maybe I can get a paper out of this…

Last year, during honours, we played a lot of Quake 3 Arena and kept all of the stats (more important to some than others). In total, we played 794 games (over 200 hours), an average of 2.8 per day; here’s how they were distributed over the year:

Where the blue areas indicate when we had lectures, green during exams, and red when we had no other work but our honours (“It is intended to give you an uninterrupted stretch of time dedicated to project work. The due date for all major pieces of work associated with Honours papers will be scheduled to avoid this period.”).

Although marking student essays is laborious and boring, it’s almost worth it for the few gems you get, like these:

“The average running life of a LED is around 7 years which means they virtually never need to be replaced.”

“It is the creation of engineering brains.”

“Human’s development could be worse than now without the ideas of engineers.”

“Also there is some also some carbon produced, commonly known as burnt toast.”