Musings, including the semi-mathematical

 

Usual Thursday handbells today.   I knew both Gemma and Colin were coming (and Niall of course—he's not only our mad despot, he's the one with the bells) so we'd be ringing bob major.  I should be able to do bob major in my sleep* so I worked on SHADOWS right up to the last possible minute before tossing startled hellhounds into the back of Wolfgang and bolting back to the cottage to let people in before they got soaked through.**

            And then I couldn't ring at all.  Bob what?  What major?  What?  It was pretty embarrassing.***  I did settle down eventually and recall my down dodges from my making seconds, but it was bad while it lasted.  By the end of the evening and after, I admit, several false starts, we even got through a plain course of Grandsire Triples with me on an inside pair, which Doesn't Happen.

           I could say that I'm old and crumbly and that I find it difficult to climb out of one obsessive activity and into another . . . and all of these things are true.†  But it's also true that I've always tended to get stuck on whatever I'm doing†† and have trouble shifting location, focus, and lobe of brain to something else.  Stuff that you have to pull out of you, like writing stories from of the infuriating and contradictory mishmash that the Story Council has sent you, is a special and particular drain, but in my case all of the brain-energy sectors are like this.  Which is yet another way that the standard educational paradigms let down both teachers and students:  I was (and am) a student who needs to learn in or to a rhythm that doesn't divide up into standard classroom slots very well—and not all subjects or teaching styles do either. †††  

           I can't help going on thinking about this kind of thing because of the almighty shock to the system the last couple of months of cramming maths and physics has been and continues to be—continues to be chiefly, I think, because in fact I am getting something out of it, invisible to either the naked or the scientific eye as it probably is.  Whoa.  Wait a minute.  Smell of burning circuits.  Although the circuits are as much about self-imposed, or at any rate self-maintained, limitations as they are about over-stressing a system that was never meant to understand the origins of turbulence.‡  And I find it interesting where the worst mental scar tissue is.  The physics stuff I'm trying to tease out into something I can (sort of) understand is all new—none of this was available to the hoi polloi forty-plus years ago when I was trying to find ways of not taking any hard science in school.  And so while it (mostly) makes me feel dumb as a post, I don't mind all that much.  I don't love being dumb as a post, but it's not crucial to my life or my self-respect that I perfectly comprehend the origins of turbulence.‡‡

            But maths . . . zowie.  In spite of fabulous Penelope Windsor Curry and lovely Mr X, maths still pretty much scares me to death.  And if I want to take one or two tentative steps farther into the intrigues of physics I need a few basic maths.  But this means I have to stop throwing up any time anyone says 'equations' to me.  Which may be the next challenge.  Several of you have done a beautiful job on the forum illuminating Caitlin's square rectangle from Tuesday night's blog. ‡‡‡  And I didn't throw up or anything.§  Perhaps progress is possible. 

* * *

* And, arguably, have, since I often, and worse lately, am trying to squeeze One More Thing into yesterday while dawn is trying to come up on tomorrow.^  I have this theory that lying down comfortably^^ in bed counts.  You don't actually have to sleep.  And in my case, frequently don't, except when I'm trying to learn a handbell method or hack my way through another paragraph or two of the thickets of WHAT IS MATHEMATICS?^^^ 

^ Cheez crums but I hate this time of year in terms of daylight:  dawn isn't till after eight and sunset is before four o'clock.+  

+ I may still be eating lunch at four o'clock.  Okay, I'm a slow eater.  Also I work through meals—waste that time?  You want to CHAT?  Are you KIDDING?—and during long pauses of frenzied thought I forget to chew.  

^^ Six pillows.  Although sometimes only five are necessary. 

^^^ Which is too hard.  Even if that nice Mr Stewart+ did the revising. 

            Although speaking of hard, my tiny stumbling forays into areas too arcane for me have resulted in an interesting new parabola++ of recommendations from the tireless amazon.  Today they sent me a come-on for Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz.  What?  So I went on line and checked it out.  It gets five stars from all five of its reviewers, who say things like it is perfectly clear and understandable so long as you're up on your calculus and your twelfth-dimensional Trigoflippingtropy.

            Having established to my own complete satisfaction that I'd rather have my toenails pulled out by hot guppies, I went back to SHADOWS.  But my apparent interest lashed amazon into new spasms of incitement.  This evening they are suggesting Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers (Oxford Texts in Applied and Engineering Mathematics) by Dominic Jordan and Peter Smith.  I don't even want to know.+++  

+ of HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES and CABINET OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES, mentioned previously in these virtual pages as excellent bathtub reading, fame. 

++ I like parabolas.  They're a good example of how a nice simple pure clean graceful swooping line that would be right at home in some William Morris wallpaper and which never asked anything of anyone except perhaps a little aesthetic appreciation can be turned instantly into a ravening beast out of your worst nightmares by the addition of a few equations.  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Parabola.html 

+++ Down at the bottom of my recs page are the vampire, werewolf, mostly-unspecified demon and knitting books.  It's good to have eclectic tastes. 

** I could do without the exciting weather.  Yes, lying in bed listening to the wind trying to rip your roof off while the rain chisels away under the eaves is cozy^, but us hellhound owners are worrying about the next hurtle.  We managed (mostly) to dodge among the raindrops this morning but tonight was another Tortured Hellhound occasion.  Darkness, who can almost pass for a grown-up upon occasion, forged stoically on.  Chaos kept trying to hide under my raincoat, the lees of walls, blades of grass, and when this did not work, reverted to standard Lump of Misery paralysis.  You know Mongo doesn't mind a little rain.  Mongo is a normal dog.^^ 

^ Speaking of cozy under your eaves, I have to learn this, right? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbB1zx0-we4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTRpvbFUwbE

^^ Well okay, maybe not normal.  

*** This didn't stop Niall from trying to talk me into ringing handbells with Titus on Sunday.  Guilt.  Guilt.   I don't have tiiiiiiiiiiime. 

† Especially the 'crumbly'. 

†† Well, assuming interest and engagement with the subject. 

††† Although it's not like this is even a simple comprehensive theory let alone the impossibility of any practical implementation of something like it out there in the real world of schools and grades and university degrees and CVs.  Because lots of people function on schedules and are happy that way.  Yeep.  My husband, for example.  Peter is a time lord.  Peter does things that begin and end at specific times.  He's spent twenty years asking me when I'm going to be finished doing x or ready to do y.  He's got used to the standard answer of I don't knooooooooow but he's never learnt to like it. 

‡ Which is the bit of CHAOS I'm re-listening to right now.^ 

^ Hannah hasn't started yet.  I feel so superior.  

‡‡ Or all the equations oppressing that poor parabola.  

‡‡‡ And Aaron further explained why you can't solve it by adding something and dividing it by something. 

§ Yes, I asked.  And I was going to talk more about it tonight only I seem to have written kind of a lot already. . . .