Studying and a movie

After studying the entire long weekend, I treated myself to a movie this evening. I saw It's Complicated. I always enjoy anything that Meryl Streep plays in--she is such a wonderful actress. I watched her accept her Golden Globe for Julie & Julia last night and her speech was perfect. The movie theater is 5 minutes away from my house and they have student night on Tuesdays ($6.50 with a student ID and both popcorn and drinks are only $1.) That's quite different than the regular price so any movies I go see will be on Tuesdays from now on.

Everything I've read this weekend seems to be in a foreign language--Economics is in Accounting and I've always thought Accounting was foreign. It is so illogical to me. And the other two courses are in Greek. I don't see anything on this blog to allow special character inserts so I'll spell it out--lambdas, thetas, mus, alphas, betas, deltas, epsilons, and some I'm not sure of because they are small Greek letters I don't even remember! Everything has at least one subscript or some superscript notation and capital letters mean something different from lowercase letters, bold letters mean something different from those in a regular font. It is familiar, but only vaguely. I wonder how long it will take for it to really make sense again...

I have my first homework assignment: "For the two problems described below, code a simple Simulated Annealing to solve the problems. To do this you need to encode the problem, develop the definition of a neighborhood, define a move operator, select an annealing schedule and select a stopping criterion." And here is problem 1: "Fifteen departments are to be placed in 15 locations with 5 departments (columns) in three rows. The objective is to minimize flow costs between the placed departments. The flow cost is (flow * distance), where both flow and distance are symmetric between any given pair of departments. Below is the flow (lower half) between departments and rectilinear distance (upper half) between locations matrix. The optimal solution is 575 (or 1150 if you double the flows). " Unfortunately this sounds a lot like Greek to me too and I know that all of the words are English. Luckily I have until February 4 to have this completed. I'm hoping that in the next few days when the topic of the lecture is Simulated Annealing much of what I've been reading will become more clear.