After the rain

It’s a beautiful, cloudy morning here in Provo, and we just got a bunch of rain. It’s been hot and dry and hazy for quite a while now, and this rain is very refreshing. The pleasant “after the rain” smell, one of my very favorite aromas, is distinctly noticeable. What a great day!

In case you are interested, this smell is often caused by bacteria spores released into the air when the soil becomes wet following a long dry period. Read more about this on howstuffworks.com.

Look, Marvin (BYU’s Eyring Science Center unofficial weather center) even has a webcam now!

Mathematicians joke

I had linear algebra coming out my ears today (I probably studied for five or six hours), but I found some pretty funny math jokes. The first one I thought up as Enoch and I were doing our homework. The other was one a door of one of the math professors upstairs in the Talmage Building.

Argument
Two linear algebraists are arguing about a complex problem.

First mathematician: That plane is not an inner product space. Surely you can see that.
Second mathematician: R²
First: R₀
Second: R² –your vector is just a subspace anyway.
First: All right, all right. Why must you be so orthogonal?

Okay, so it’s not really that funny. The part I thought of while doing homework was the third and fourth lines.

Limits
Anybody who’s studied a little calculus can appreciate this one:

Mercado’s going to Chile!!

I’m so excited for him! So far he’s the only 7th Floorer that I recall who will be speaking a language he already knew. (I and two others took German in high school, and we’ll will be learning Dutch, Mandarin, and Spanish. Another guy knew French and got sent Spanish-speaking. And so forth…)

Anyway. I hope I’m not stealing his thunder, but I just wanted to write something about it.

Belgium and the Netherlands

I thought it would be good to compile some information about Belgium and the Netherlands, as I will be traveling there in four or five months on a mission. So here’s what I came up with:

The combined areas of Belgium and the Netherlands is only slightly larger than the size of Washington state. The climate (sometimes called marine west coast) is comparable to that of western Washington–rainy and humid most of the time with mild temperatures year-round.

General facts (all from the CIA World Factbook):

• Population
  • Belgium: ~10 million
  • Netherlands: ~16 million
• Official languages
  • Belgium: 60% Dutch, 40% French, <1% German
  • Netherlands: Dutch, Frisian
• GDP per captia
  • Both: ~$32,000
• Currency
  • Both: Euro
• Literacy rate
  • Both: 99%

More information:

• CIA World Factbook: Belgium | Netherlands
• Wikipedia: Belgium | Netherlands
• Info on Washington state: Wikipedia article | Average temperatures

(By the way, I made the graphic myself with OpenOffice.org Draw, in case anybody was wondering. It’s a pretty cool program to do vector graphics and such, although exporting to image files is quite a pain.)