Did you make sproingies from the tear-off side strips of the printer paper, though? That was the best bit. :P

Was this professionally or in school? I still did this in an EE program 15 years ago and I can't imagine things have changed since then. I think kids still have to do lots of ugly math in EE classes.

I just recently got my Computer Engineering degree which is the modern Electronics Engineering and we had a whole class on transforms. We had to do it on paper, but that professor at Cal State LA knew what the heck she was doing. We learned it good.

No worries, as a self proclaimed youngster I didn't manage to understand Fourier in 2 days and never bothered again. Also had no other prior knowledge to algebra so maybe that's why I struggled. Never perceived algebra as useful in anything programming related, will continue to do so as most problems are solvable without it. I'll let the degree havers do all that stuff.

Just for reference, in case you find yourself in an optimization under uncertainty situation again: The decision-theoretic right way to do this is generate a bayesian posterior over true ranking given ranking count and a prior on true rankings, add a loss function (it can just be the difference between the true rating of the selected item and the true rating of the non-selected item for simplicity) then choose your option to minimize the expected loss. This produces exactly the correct answer.

I always assume that all the ratings are fake when there is a low count of ratings since it is easy for the seller to place a bunch of game orders when they are starting out.

While this is a good idea, I think it's unrelated to the Laplace transform except that they're named after the same dude?

You know that if you have the Laplace transform, you can just insert s = iω and then you have the Fourier transform, right? :-P

(Or jω, if you prefer that notation)

Probably that's why we are learning about it in the "Control Theory" classes at university. :-)

Jokes aside, I graduated as "Computer Engineer" (BSc) and then also did a "Master in Computer Science"; I was (young and) angry at the universe why soooo many classical engineering classes and then theory I had to sit through (Control theory, Electrical engineering, Physics), and we never learned about the cool design patterns etc etc.

Today I see that those formative years helped me a lot with how I develop intuition when looking at large (software) systems, and I also understand that those ever changing best design patterns I can (could have) just look up, learn, and practice in my free time.

I wish a today-me would have told my yesterday-me all this.

My control theory professor (who was also my physics advisor -- it was a small college) explained it like this: Physicists like Fourier transforms because they go from minus to plus infinity, like the universe. Control engineers like Laplace transforms because they start at zero, and a control system also has a starting point.

True dat. But you see there's this thing called 'Engineering Maths'. Apparently it's really bad for real mathematicians' blood pressure.

> really just a misnomer

No. Things acquire different names if they are independently discovered by different communities.

Native Americans called Indians. Lol! what was that.