HP Series (un petit mot)/(a short note)

je viens de lire le dernier tome de Harry Potter. j'ai quelques choses à dire sur les livres.
le premier c'est que les premiers deux ne sont guère intéressant que les suivants. les deux ne sont pas écrits avec l'habileté que les autres. mon ami m'a dit qu'il pense que quelqu'un d'autre les a écrits. mais je vais dire qu'elle est meilleure que quand elle a commencé.
Mais, au derners tome, je croix qu'elle a tué trop de gens. en commençant avec le quatrième elle a tué une personne importante dans chaque tome, mais dans ce tome-ci elle tue quelqu-un d'importance avec chaque centaine de pages. je croix que c'est le style à la mode. c'est ce qu'ils ont fait avec 24 et Lost, et tous les deux sont très populaires. quand Harry marche vers son propre meurtre, elle veut qu'on pense, 'elle a vraiment cassé la tête! elle ne rigole pas! elle va tuer le pauvre gars!' mais je ne peux pas être faché parce que le seul meurtre dans ce livre qui m'a fait malcontent a une bonne raison (pour le plupart) (je croix que je peux dire (seulment dans la message française) que la seule personne dont la meurte m'a fait facher c'était Dobby...le pauvre elfe de maison). Mais je dois dire qu'elle est vraiment un bon auteur; il y avait beaucoup de petites choses qui se dépendent. et le dernier mot est 'jours'.

I just finished reading the last Harry Potter book. I have just a few things to say about the books.
First, I want to say that the first two books weren't nearly as interesting as the following books. They didn't seem to be written with the same skill as the others. A friend of mine tells me that it seems that someone else wrote the others, but I will say that she just became a better author than when she started out.
But with the final book, I think she killed too many people. Beginning with the last 4 she killed one important person with each book, but in this book she killed someone important basically every 100 pages. I think it's the new writing style. That's what they do with both 24 and Lost (so I'm told about Lost) and they are both very popular television shows. In any case, when Harry is marching towards his death I think she wants you to thing, "She's truly nuts! She's not kidding around! She's straight gonna kill this kid!" But I guess I can't really be too upset cuz the only person whose death made me upset had a mostly acceptable reason (read the French version of this blog entry to know who it was). And I guess I should also say that Rowling really is a good author. There were lots of little things that happened and they all in the end seemed to depend on eachother, so that was fun. Ohh and the last word was "jours".

The (my) Mind

In general, the way the brain works is very interesting. How it processes information how we remember things, how we recall things, how we discover things. But what's more interesting (well for me in particular) is how my brain works. It would be nice to know what types of things work better for me. I have certain strategies (that would probably be super boring to most people) that I use in trying to memorize and learn things. Whether or not they are the most well suited to my brain in particular is debatable. Actually, I personally don't greatly enjoy memorizing things (even though I do sit down specifically to memorize stuff from time to time), possibly because it seems like such a low level activity.
Anyway, lately I've been thinking a lot about memorization. Recently I realized that I don't think I have a very vivid imagination, or at least that my brain doesn't create very vivid mental pictures. Here's an example. Possibly because I'm a goober, possibly because I have a boring life, but from time to time when I'm laying in bed waiting for sleep to overcome me I do various mental activities. One thing that I do is mentally practice typing on my phone. I realize that it is not a very important skill, but I guess that time from laying down to sleeping is not always the most valuable time anyway. My phone of course uses predictive text (or T9, you can read about them on wikipedia if you don't know what that means.) So I, of course, imagine a keypad, but all I see is an array of 4x3 (or 3x4 depending if you are a mathematician or a computer scientist) of boxes. Each box of course represents a key, but I don't see any of the letters on them; I can't see any of the letters on them. To be more precise I can't even make myself see the numbers on the keys. Then as I mentally type the words I see the boxes light up. Now when I first started doing this I don't even know if I realized that I wasn't seeing the numbers on the keys, but I've become more aware that it's just the grid.
This reminds me of back when I was memorizing the digits of pi (I sadly never memorized a significant percentage of the digits). I made part of pi my password and occasionally added more numbers. At some point I was up to at least 30 or 35 digits (really not an amazing feat). I realized whenever I would tell them to someone I would feel compelled (or even need) to mock type them as I spoke them.
Anyway both of these are interesting to me because they are either some sort of memorized motion or they at least have motor activity very closely associated to them. And this is interesting because movement seems to me to be a much more basic activity than speaking and words. Makes me wonder if there is some way to associate motion to other types of memorization...

Tangentially related next activity: Write a program to teach myself 10 notes to then associate them with the digits and see if I can memorize strings of numbers as "songs"...if only we used a base 5 or 3 numbering system...

Bhagavad Gita

Today I was walking to the library and there was a sudden gust of wind that blew my hood to my sweatshirt strangely. As I moved it, I saw some guy walking towards me. I think he thought that I was waving at him. Anyway, for whatever reason, he stopped and I was obligated to talk to him. He was wearing a large coat, a backpack, and a large burlap bag over his shoulder. He asked me if I was intelligent, and began pulling a book out of his bag. I indicated that I wasn't exceptional or anything and noticed that the book he was pulling out was a book called "Bhagavad-Gita As It Is". I really don't know much about Hinduism (except that the Bhagavad-Gita is Hindu), so this peeked piqued my interest.
-"Ohh, good. Well do you meditate?"
There are things that I do that one could call meditate, but I don't call it meditation, so I said, "Well, no not really." Maybe I should have given him more information, but I didn't.
Then he began his canvass. He explained to me how people today try to find happiness through Hedonism. Specifically he mentioned: drugs, alcohol, and sex. He showed me the pretty pictures from the book of unhappy cartoon people with turbans hoarding money. He said this was lacking because our bodies are temporary and so these things can only give us temporary happiness. He then said there was a better way. He turned to a picture of people of various ages (one a skeleton) with sunbursts over their chests and light beams connecting the sunbursts. I figured this represented souls or something. He started talking about how everyone is connected or something. Then he said, "Our souls are connected. You know about eternal souls, right?" He looked at me expectantly.
Here I should mention that when I was canvassing one of the first things that I was taught was to find common ground. Search for something that you and the person you're talking to have in common. Then branch out from there. So I'm sure he was trying to get a foothold onto me here. The only problem, is that Adventists (and I) don't believe in souls per se. Again, I could have given him more information or mentioned something else that would give him a chance to find a new foothold, but I just said, "I don't believe in an immortal soul."
He was clearly thrown aback, and was quiet for a second. He then asked, "Why not?"
This question was a bit odd to me, because it seems that for supernatural things the burden of proof is on the believer not the nonbeliever. That is, I think a better question is for me to ask "Why do you believe in a soul?" Well I instead just said, "I don't see a reason to believe in a soul."
So he said, "Well if you don't see a reason to believe in a soul then you don't see a reason not to believe in a soul." I ignored this bad logic. He then asked, "Wouldn't it be better to believe in a soul?"
WHAT?!? But I think I said, "I don't follow."
"Well a positive is better than a negative. It is a positive to believe in something and a negative to disbelieve."
I thought about this for a second. The problem is that I believe not having a soul is a positive thing. So I said, "Well it depends on what you think is a positive."
"Having a soul is a positive."
"Not necessarily, what's the consequence?"
"Eternal happiness if you accept it"
"And if you don't?"
"Suffering"
"Well there's the negative in it."
He thought for a second. Then he said, "Well if you don't believe in a soul then life is temporary and the only purpose you see in life is hedonism." I didn't quite agree with him, because I don't believe in a soul, but I also believe in eternal life of some sort (just not eternal damnation...maybe it's complicated.) He never did get around to the point of having a soul. Then he asked, "What do you think the purpose of life is?"
I thought for a few seconds. I thought of the various common Christian answers to such a question. Then I went with, "Well I don't really think about that much."
Then he put his book back in his bag, said "ok", and walked away. That was weird. So now upon reflection I wish I'd answered some of his questions differently. If he were giving away his book, I'd like to have a copy of it. I'd like to know more about Hinduism and it had a bunch of stuff in Hindi Sanskrit, which would be cool to look at (I can't read it). Ohh well, maybe next time...

Dreams

I listened to this wonderful episode of Radio Lab about sleeping. It was super interesting. It talked about why we sleep. How our sleeping is different than other animals. In particular, with many animals only half their brains are asleep at a given time. Anyway, it made me want to try to use sleeping to figure out some homework problems that I'd been working on lately. So for my last two waking hours I immersed myself in my complex analysis and particularly this problem that I'd been wanting to solve. Then I went to bed. I definitely had dreams about the problem and sporadically I woke up with a possible answer to the problem. Turns out each attempt was garbage. So I just ended up with a bad night's sleep and a lot of failed attempts at a complex analysis problem.

I also read a news article about how people who grew up watching black and white TV were more likely to have black and white dreams, even today. While people who grew up with color TV were more likely to have color dreams So basically black and white TV completely changed our dreams and now color TV is sending us back into the stone age dream-wise.

So, the next couple nights I had bizarre dreams. The first night I had a dream that there was this rampant new canine disease. I gave dogs the ability to stretch and change shape (much like one of the superheros in the fantastic four). It had a downside though that it caused the dogs to want to each little children. There also was this particularly bad dog named Studs Turkel (he's apparently the father of the modern radio interview...and in the dream the name may have been Stubs). Well, Studs was well known for stretching such that he looked like a jungle gym and waiting for the unsuspecting child. There was also some old lady in the dream who was housing and hiding these diseased animals in her house that looked just like Sirius Black's house from the Harry Potter movies. Interestingly enough this dream was very cartoony.

Here's a drawing of Studs Turkel:



I forgot the dream that I had the next night, but pretend that story was followed by another particularly weird dream.

Stupid Hypocritical Number

So the other day I was reading one of my political blogs. I forget the topic of the day (or hour maybe), but at the top there was an advertisement that caught my eye. There was an advertisement for a shirt that basically looked like this:



I shouldn't explain this, but I have to because it angers me. Sure at first glance it's cute, or intelligent or whatever. You see a rational number is a fraction of integers (integers are whole numbers like 1,2,3,...), and Pi is not a rational number (an irrational number). So i is telling Pi to be rational. On the other hand i is an imaginary number (if you don't know what that means then just nod your head, or screen). Thus Pi is telling i to be real. This is all fine and dandy except that Pi being a real number has a place to tell i to be real. BUT i isn't rational!?! At best i is an algebraic integer (I'm sure everyone wants to know that) or just algebraic. The point is that while i could tell Pi to be algebraic, it i has no place telling Pi to be rational! Hence it is a stupid hypocritical number!

Note: I realize that there are ways that i can be considered "rational". For example the set Q[i] is called the Gaussian rationals, hence any element of Q[i] is a Gaussian rational. Thus i is a Gaussian rational. The problem with this is that if you want to use an extended definition of rational we can just as easily say that Pi is R-rational and hence rational. In this case i is no longer hypocritical, but just bigoted.

Algebraists

So sure I'm a mathematician, but more precisely (yet not as precisely as possible) I'm an algebraist. (Even more precisely I'm probably going to be a computational algebraic geometer, but that's too much information.) This means that I've taken a large number of algebra classes (I know you're tempted to say something like, "I took algebra in high school", but I warn you that that joke is old. If you do say something about your high school algebra, then your originality will be brought into question and no one wants to be deemed an owner of suspect originality.) So in the course of these many algebra classes, I've observed a lot of algebraists. I've noticed a common thread among the vast majority of these algebraists. They are all at least a little bit obsessive compulsive (or for lack of a better word anal.) My first abstract algebra teacher has the most beautiful and uniform handwriting that I've ever seen, and he rarely ever used logic symbols (like => instead of therefore). Then my graduate algebra teacher would write out everything that he would say beforehand on paper. I agree, this in and of itself is probably good teaching practice, but he would keep these papers and whenever he made changes he would tape an addendum onto this paper. I remember going to his office to ask him questions and he would grab his folder and pull out his lecture notes from the day in question, which was actually four or five quarters or fifths of paper all taped together. In my opinion, just slightly overboard. Then there's my adviser. This guy is awesome! We share so much in common when it comes to mathematical interest, and he is so easy to get along with (I hear that is a great thing to have). Well, there are occasional times when I'll be in his office and we'll both be trying to think of how to write a particular piece of code. Whenever there is any creative downtime, he'll save the file 4 or 5 times in quick succession. Backing up your data is a great thing, but wouldn't one consider the latter 3 or 4 saves somewhat superfluous? Finally the winner is my commutative algebra teacher. Every class period she would get to class 10 to 15 minutes early and clean the board with wet wipes until that sucker shined (I'm being completely honest here!). Occasionally one of the students would ask if they could help and of course she had to do it on her own.
Now I don't mean to deride these individuals in any way. I highly respect their knowledge and mathematical abilities. Furthermore if a little bit of OCD is their biggest flaw then they've really got their acts together. I guess it's time to admit that they are not really the point of this entry. It's my blog, so of course I'm the focus ( :) ). The thing is that in the last couple years more and more I've been accused of being anal. For the most part I've come to accept this, but I'm still slightly in denial. So what if when I make myself sandwiches I put effort into making them look pretty even though another piece of bread will go on top. Is it such a bad thing to add a little work for transient aesthetic pleasure? So what if I can't stand it when other people wrap up the cables to my laptop. The way I wrap it looks SO much more pleasing to the eye. I could come up with a few more instances, but this is enough... The thing is that only in the last couple years has anyone ever accused me of being anal. So I wonder if it's the algebraist in me showing itself or if algebra anal-izes people or maybe it's the influence of the anal algebraists around me. Have I been anal all my life and it's only now been noticed? Have I matured into an anal 25-year-old? I just do not know. I think I'll just stick with: I'm not anal...
Ohh and a side note, it seems that female algebraists are really interested in Judaism and things Jewish.