Exams are coming along…yeah…just coming along. Music went good. Calc went average. Today is Statics and tomorrow is Algorithms. I don’t know how I could feel any better about them. I don’t feel like I can learn anything else. I’ll just have to hope I understand the questions that I get. Once the weekend hits, cram for Circuits, then after Monday’s circuits, cram for Wednesday’s Materials. Then I’ll be free…to pack and fly home. Not going to be the easiest week to get through, but then I get to take a break.

One more week then I get to see Lyle, April, Tim, Kas, Kyle, Andrea, Clint, Lukie, Natalie, and rest of NFO gang…

I was talking to my cousin last night and complaining about my studying to my calculus final to him. He’s a very bright guy, who is very interested in new topics, so I sent him one of the PDFs prepared for my class, one on Differential Equations and Newtonian Mechanics. I sent it to him with the hopes of scaring him a little, but he was interested and started asking questions. He first identified the parts that he could follow, then asked me about the topics and symbols he didn’t know. First was Leibniz notation, which he misinterpreted the d’s as distance instead of differentials (a word he probably never knew existed) and then second was Integral notation, which he said was a “forte minus the cross on the f”. He connected a topic he was familiar with, music, with mathematics in an attempt to interpret the symbols. I thought that was noteworthy. After I explained that is was an elongated ‘S’ for “sum” he seemed to have noted it in his mind for later. He made quite valid connections to mathematics from someone who’s never seen it before.

This continued for the sigma in Sigma notation, which he called an ‘E’ and complained how no one ever explained it to him (resulting in my just linking him to an article on MathWorld). The most curious of the questions he asked me went something like this “What is that small R beside that F? Is that some kind of subscript?” As I was answering, (“Yes it’s a subscript”) he asked “What do you do for that? Just multiply them?”. I had never even considered that question before. It’s so set in my mind that subscripts are just used to denote a different variable, usually of the same type or family, as the larger letter (which I explained to him). It’s interesting though to consider things that you’ve never known. If you see something for the first time, you try to associate it with something else you are familiar with. It’s all in the process of how the brain tries to make sense of the information that it is receiving. For my cousin, who had never seen subscripts really, he made a connection with similar mathematical operations in an attempt to try to extrapolate that purpose and operation that the foreign symbol had.

This leads into a bigger discussion that I’ve mentioned many times to my friends. I usually start by complaining about a specific detail of my past education that whenever I think of it, I just feel cheated. It’s in regards to integers. When you were in elementary school, in lower grades, you learned basic arithmetic. They told you then that you couldn’t subtract 4 from 3. you just couldn’t. Then one day they said “We lied. There are these new things called integers. Now just pretend they existed all along.” For years you learned that you couldn’t do something, and now you can. Same thing happens with square roots of negative numbers. Before you couldn’t do it, the mid high school…BAM…little ‘i’ comes along and you have complex numbers. You never knew about them before, but now they start popping up everywhere, like in circuits, and trigonometry. You were oblivious to their existence, and now that you know them, they open up new doors, and with the new door brings new concepts you are expected to learn. Ignorance really is Bliss!

This concept can be extended to any aspect of your life. You learn new things every day and expected to use them as if they had been there all along. Even if they don’t make physical sense (damn moments of inertia!). Frequently (and mostly because he forgets he’s told me about it many times), Mike brings up the topic of programming, software and languages. He talks about how you don’t know you want a functionality until you actually learn it. An example he used was howMaddox uses outdated scripts for his site, when he could be using one of the newer CMSs (like what I use). You don’t know you want, or even need the functionality until you go and actually get it. The other example he uses is with programming languages. People didn’t need the extra features of C++, and were content with C, until it came out. It happens often in the field.Paul Graham (who’s book I need to read…) has an essay called “Beating the Averages” in which he talks about a fictional language called Blub. He uses it to explain this ignorance to functionality of higher languages quite well. I suggest you read it.

Well, that’s just a thought that crossed my mind in the last day. Tomorrow brings another exam, so wish me luck. :)

Currently Listening to: “Just Like You” – Three Days Grace