How Incredibly Keen We All Are

Follow-up on Textbooks

One of the disadvantages of getting second-hand textbooks is that they sometimes do not have the glossy, colourful pages of the newer ones, hence causing frustration to their readers.

Observe page 47 of my Econ book: “The blue arrows in the upper half of Figure 2.9 indicate the flow of labour… the red outer arrows represent [blah blah blah]” Great, my Figure 2.9 is black and white and filled with grey arrows of different shades *sulks*.

In other news, the $12 book I ordered from Powellbooks.com got here in one piece. This hardcover on a Civil War battle looks like it has began to turn yellow from sitting in the warehouse for too long – what an exciting item to receive the first time I buy something online! (That’s sarcasm, by the way).

Lyryx Labs

Speaking of Econ 101, Lyryx labs are slowly becoming the bane of my existence! We get unlimited tries on these online quizzes, and Lyryx just records and sends in our highest score. It took me 5 tries and 3 hours to get 64/64 on the first lab (okay, maybe I should’ve read the chapter BEFORE attempting the question, lesson learned). From the data Prof. Lemche showed us, an upward of 800 students took the quiz, with an average of 96%+ on most questions. The average attempt number was four.

Can you imagine the scores for a quiz like this (worth 1% of final mark) in high school? No doubt most students would’ve been happy with an 80% and wouldn’t even bother retrying. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that as much as my peers announce how we should skip lectures, we are all secretly working our butts off trying to get a high mark.  Academia is an awesome thing. Almost makes my daily two hours pole-dancing-on-the-bus commute to UBC worth it!

VIDEO LA LA LA

On a completely unrelated note, here’s a short video. It’ll make you smile, I promise (if not just watch it again). TURN ON SPEAKERS.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRH3iTQPrk[/youtube]

Cheers.

Read 12 comments

  1. @ Eastwood – The best line in that article is “Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China!” Awesome. We’re all one big happy family (except the American middle class who just got screwed over by their government)

  2. Unrelated… check your name on Google again… you are creeping to the top. It’s amazing what the .ubc.ca domain can do for Search Engine optimization (my old .ubc.ca blog still ranks higher than my current one on Windows Live Search).

  3. @Eastwood – the blogs set up through UBC doesn’t let us 1) tweak the theme codes hence no meta tags 2) add javascript to the widgets hence no tracking system. I’ll use the webmaster tools though.

    Oh and rule of thumb: e before o EXCEPT after ph hehe ^^

  4. Pingback: End of Term Wrap Up — UBC Years - Phoebe Yu

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