Moving on
The new paint’s drying still, but it’s part of something I hope to expand upon. I finally set it up in a fashion that is more easily extended, and did so from scratch.
The new paint’s drying still, but it’s part of something I hope to expand upon. I finally set it up in a fashion that is more easily extended, and did so from scratch.
Herewith, a short list of things I’m expecting this summer to achieve this summer.
More later.
I’m nearing the end of two years comprised of managing a new house with lots of familial objects (i.e., The Wife and the Ranch-hands), while working full-time, and attending university part-time. The courseload has steadily increased, both in the amount of work to be done and its relative difficulty.
This scholastic year, for instance, I have struggled to find a relatively optimum time to work on mathematical proofs. Even at the undergraduate level, working on results that have long been known, this amounts to essays in logic more than numerical cookbookery. Their competent completion relies on a nice mix of logical vision, speedy recollection of the various axioms and their implications, and the on-deck brain performance to weave them into a cogent result.
It should be no surprise that 3:43 a.m. is not quite the sweet spot for such cogitation.
I have experimented with staying up, starting the work around 10:00 p.m., one advantage of which is that I’m already awake and chugging along. However, as the evening ages, I inevitably become more easily distracted, and each hour spent earns diminishing returns.
I have also experimented, in the last couple of months, with getting to bed earlier (like, 10:00) and waking up at 4:00 a.m. The angle here is to put fresher braintime against the problems. However, the warm-up time can be significant; and I’ve found my brain is quite capable of justifying lying down and waiting for the coffee to brew.
I am more eagerly awaiting the close of the next two weeks than I can recall ever having been. Quality is slipping, my retention is slipping, and my body is not defending itself particularly well from normal wear and tear. Sleeping has become more difficult therefrom, and this then requires more time spent doing the work. A vicious cycle.
I haven’t lost sight, though, of how fortunate I am to have this opportunity. I might prefer a few things to happen differently, but there are so many things conspiring toward serendipity that I can’t get too lost in the minutiae.
…except at 3:42 a.m.
Hijacking a comment I made that sounded eerily like sanity.
Kind-hearted people perpetuate some notion of okayness, but despite their intentions, okayness is counterproductive. We either progress toward our goals or we don’t; an affirmational pat on the back almost surrogates our goal with validation, which is (arguably) far more vapid and less worth our time.
I was so concerned that I had wasted almost six hours on sleep, when there was so much homework yet to do.
I can’t wait for summer.
I should’ve seen it coming, but I didn’t. Bill Mahr is a stand-up comic. I’m not one to buy wholesale into categorization as a reflection of essence, so I don’t think that means much. I gather, though, it does to Bill Mahr. It’s the likeliest explanation for 101 minutes of pedestrian comedy masquerading poorly as bad documentary.
It’s been a week now. Except for the few hours of sleep I lace together each night, I’ve been in moderate or severe-moderate pain. I have learned, in these few days, a few things, or taken them more deeply for the experience.
Nurture > nature. That aforementioned disinclination extends to a building of a useful metaphor between “life” and calculus, but I really want to relate the importance in calculus of a metric defined on a set, which creates a metric space. A metric is just a standard for measuring distance, and different standards even applied to the same collection of things can produce interestingly varying results.
Consider the distance traveled by car between two buildings in an urban grid of one-way streets; and compare that to the same grid and buildings but replace the one-way streets with two-way streets. In the first case, your path has to follow more restrictive rules than in the second. This makes the for noticeably different experiences.
You might also take a chess set, and rewrite all the rules about which pieces can move in which ways (e.g., Chess 960). The effect is similar.
Well, the point here is that getting out of bed when your body likes you enough not to hurt is not quite the same endeavor as coaxing an aggravated spine to flex enough so you can tumble off the mattress. Pain makes for a different metric, and this brings into greater focus how some elderly, for instance, live in not in our world but in one made of the same points of interest set against a much less forgiving metric.
There’s a lot to work with there. We could talk about racism, health issues, sexual prejudice, disabilities, and any other differentiation that results in what we can loosely call different metrics. With any luck, we will.
It's all random below.
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