Stubborn Idealism
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Too Much Math
Date: Tue 4 October 2005
Time: 12:44 AM EDT
Been feeling really crappy all weekend, so I haven't gone out much (not that I normally do). I've been spending a lot of time working through my old Calculus 1 book.
If you've ever been addicted to Tetris, then you'll be able to relate to this. You close your eyes, and you see a Tetris board with pieces falling in to it. And you're not just seeing it, you're actively participating in it. You rotate the pieces, figure out where they're supposed to go, and more or less keep track of the changing state of the board in your mind as you play through it. This goes on with no effort on your part, and it usually happens as you drift off to sleep and right as you wake up.
Now, imagine that instead of playing Tetris in your head, you're manipulating algebraic expressions, deriving general formulas for physical phenomena, setting up integration problems and solving them, finding roots of polynomail functions, exploring trigonometric identities, and so on. This is what it's been like for me. I guess it's random synaptic noise stimulating the neural sub-networks in my brain that have been getting a lot of use lately.
For all this mental activity, I don't feel any smarter though. My mind still shies away from the thought of working on my alife project.
Dull, bored, lonely
Date: Sun 2 October 2005
Time: 8:17 PM EDT
Do some math exercises, eat some poptarts, play around on the cumputer, eat some poptarts, read a book, eat some chicken wings, do some math exercises, take a nap, use the bathroom, eat some poptarts, play around on the computer, go to bed. That's Friday. Repeat for Saturday and Sunday.
A New Hobby
Date: Sat 24 September 2005
Time: 3:36 PM EDT
I've decided to take up another hobby: becoming an amateur mathematician.
Yesterday I was working on my alife project, and after an hour and very little progress, I thought back to how I was when I was 20. I would have worked on the project any chance I could, only breaking for food, bathroom, and sleep, until it was done. Nowadays, I have to force myself to sit down and work on it, and I get discouraged after about half an hour because of lack of progress.
So I thought about how, starting in 1999, I suddenly seemed to get very stupid. 1999 also happened to be right after I graduated college, and spent 7 or 8 months doing nothing but playing video games. I think I got stupid because I wasn't using my brain very much.
I still have my college text books from Calculus 1, 2, and 3. I'm going to try to take a couple hours out of each day that I'm off to work through them, doing all the exercises at the end of each section. Today I got most of the way through the first section of the first book, and my brain is fried. Tomorrow, I'll pick up where I left off.
Once I finish with them, I'll see if I can find a book on Trigonometry, since I never did very well with that (too many identities to learn!).
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