Tuesday, October 19, 2010

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Class was canceled on Tuesday due to the temperature of the classroom, and on Thursday we just didn’t have class so heres three hundred words from Wikipedia about numbers … A number is a mathematical object used in counting and measuring. A notational symbol which represents a number is called a numeral, but in common usage the word number is used for both the abstract object and the symbol, as well as for the word for the number. In addition to their use in counting and measuring, numerals are often used for labels (telephone numbers), for ordering (serial numbers), and for codes (e.g., ISBNs). In mathematics, the definition of number has been extended over the years to include such numbers as zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers.Certain procedures which take one or more numbers as input and produce a number as output are called numerical operations. Unary operations take a single input number and produce a single output number. For example, the successor operation adds one to an integer, thus the successor of 4 is 5. More common are binary operations which take two input numbers and produce a single output number. Examples of binary operations include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation. The study of numerical operations is called arithmetic.
The most familiar numbers are the natural numbers or counting numbers: one, two, three, and so on. Traditionally, the sequence of natural numbers started with 1 (0 was not even considered a number for the Ancient Greeks.) However, in the 19th century, set theorists and other mathematicians started the convention of including 0 (cardinality of the empty set, i.e. 0 elements, where 0 is thus the smallest cardinal number) in the set of natural numbers. The mathematical symbol for the set of all natural numbers is N, also written \scriptstyle \mathbb{N}.

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I recently had to reimage my computer, and I happened to misplace my cameras software… therefore I can’t really upload any images… but. I’m kind of behind on these blog posts so this is for class two weeks ago. At the beginning of class our teacher Amy Fichter made us all tape our drawing implements to something long in order to draw while standing far away from the paper. Holding the tool at the very end with your arm extended allows you to get away from your drawing. Also this allows you to stand as your subject is standing… or at least imagine what muscles they are using to stand/sit the way that they are. I liked this distanced approach to life drawing. At first I was kind of shaky and kept inching down towards the tip of my charcoal. But after a little practice I got more and more used to it. I liked how with this technique, since you are already standing away from your drawing you are able to see how the marks you have made relate to each other and to the model. And I like to lean back and forth when im drawing… just to move around a bit. Im not sure but I think that we had a lecture about the rib cage. This was a very useful lecture because the ribs (in my opinion) can make a drawing “cool” or crappy… I have always been interested in drawing bones, and the curve and intricacies of the ribs seem like a lot of fun to draw