Sentient Insentience

While bed-ridden for few days due to viral fever, discovered that urge for creating PJ’s could sometimes be contagious too. So here’s one.

Steve Waugh, the Physics student, gives a Statistical Mechanics exam and while checking on his corrected answer-sheet founds that he has received zero marks for a certain problem (related to the entropy of a gas in grand-canonical ensemble). He walks to the instructor and inquires what’s wrong. Instructor goes through Steve’s solution, ponders for a few seconds and then replies,

“Mate, you have just dropped a Gibbs factor!”

“Which hostel is this one?? I want to go to the New Block”

(a person with bagpack outside Physics dept.)

When trying to type fast we often make mistakes. But these mistakes aren’t totally uncorrelated. Restrict to those mistakes where one has mistyped a letter for the correct one. For example, 1. `helo’ instead of `help’ (`o’ mistyped) 2. `systen’ instead of `system’ (`n’ mistyped). More often than not one would end up mistyping a letter which is proximate to the correct one on the keyboard.

If someone had time and energy, it would be interesting to collect large sample of mistakes from, say internet, and try to reproduce the keyboard modulo some group, say, reflection about the middle row. If one has the additional knowledge of the user being a right/left hander, one could keep this group size smaller.

Two integrals diverged in the problem, and I dropped the one less singular 🙂