During a recent visit to the vault* of unshared musings, I discovered the pen-sketched framework of what I expound on here. It is common, I’m sure, when examining for the first time in years an artifact of one’s own creation, to be cognizant of a mild and sustained excitement that results from experiencing the fragments…
If you pour a cup of tomato sauce into a 50 lb bag of chili powder and thoroughly mix, the spiciness of the combination will be very nearly equal to the spiciness of chili powder alone. This exemplifies one of three regimes which, together, I believe, account for all action–>effect pairs. I’ll call these regimes…
Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight. Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between…
What better way to follow up a post involving the acronym RIP than to write about murder? Consider the Venn diagram below. The blue circle is the likelihood that I’ll be murdered. The orange circle is the likelihood that I’ll become a serial killer. That I’ve made each circle the same size is purely for…
I’ve written several times of my interest in becoming a certified EMT, the intrinsic rush of pulling a damaged body away from the alluring blankets of effortless death that would smother and asphyxiate. I would also like to substitute teach high school math and physics. In anticipation of the inevitable lament “When are we ever…
1. Why does waiting a few days to check email result in a confidence that when it is checked, there will be something good to read? Basic odds, I guess. More junk but also higher likelihood of receiving something of interest. It’s a curious, sad, and funny phenomena. 2. Why, when looking at a digital…
When you’ve got some pebbles, in an arbitrary arrangement, between the sole of your shoe and the sidewalk, and there is no contact between your sole and the sidewalk, then your weight is distributed roughly equally to all pebbles and from them to the ground. The fewer the number of pebbles under your sole, the…
I’ve finished the mathematics requirement for a BSEE. It also turns out that I’ve got enough math behind me for a math minor. I had a lot of fun with diffeque, it’s tempting to continue in that direction with either applied analysis, numerical analysis, or intro to complex analysis. 3.5 years till graduation.
I recommend taking linear algebra regardless of whether or not it’s a degree requirement of yours. It’s a course that will, to use metaphor, break frames that’ve been built up around you. With respect to calculus and other math courses, the material in linear algebra is very new, maybe 100 years old, hence the ease…
I took a fundamental concepts of math course in Boston. It dealt a lot with proofs and how to formally write a proof and different ways of proving different statements. One of the things I found most interesting was when we covered what are called distance functions. In 95% of mathematics only one distance function…
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