A Post of Mathy Tentativeness

So. I am trying to reacquaint myself with mathematics, working first from an old textbook from 1974 (no basic part of the field has been overturned since then, right?) titled  Concise Mathematics.

It starts with the basics. So, I now know that rational numbers are a subset of the real numbers.  That rational numbers are numbers which can be written in the form a/b and that they can be written as a repeating or as a terminating decimal. Also that to convert a rational number from fraction to decimal form one takes the usual action on seeing an expression of the for a/b and divides; this took me a while to figure out as the text contained no explanation, it simply said 'do' and I did not at first recognise the examples as being long division. I have not done long division since sixth grade.

You may have noticed I am experimenting with presentation in this post. I am tempted to fire up OpenOffice.org Math and see if I can do the exercises with that program. Possibly even upload to LiveJournal. Why not? It might be fun.

In a startling revelation, it turns out describing what happens may be an effective way of writing a story. Half a page has happened since I wrote the last post and would have been more had I not stopped to write this one. I have been pondering, however, that having a targeted number of pages may be preventing me from flitting from project to project and instead focusing me onto a single one, as it is trickier to determine how many pages have been written out of however many paragraphs in five different stories. But I don't think I actually did flit that much.

Edit: Note to self - Maybe don't use underlines in future. Looks too much like links.

Reading

The Virtues: Be Compassionate - posted by Ebonmuse|Daylight Atheism

Pre-Sleep Thoughts

• A comet is a mass of dust and ice endlessly falling. When it falls too low it is boiled away by sunlight; the million-kilometre trail of debris and sparking destruction from this is what we see as beautiful in our skies
• Humans, like almost all life on this planet, are water held together by dirt and powered by sunlight
• Sunlight is pretty potent stuff
• I suffer from the delusion of being able to process an infinite amount of information
• Sometimes I try to do without sleep. This never works. Nonetheless, it continues to seem both easy and appealing
• I am supposed to post the next instalment of Jayde tomorrow, which I missed last week and for which I apologise
• Tomorrow looks to be too busy and interrupted for proper editing to be done
• Perhaps it can be posted the day after instead. This is still Wednesday in some places and therefore Not Cheating
• Jayde has a feeling of petering out in my mind. Possibly it is a story of disconnection/connection, certainly both seem needed for its writing
• There are many other stories I am excited about telling. This translates into a sort of enthusiasm for writing them which never seems to result in a actual writing
• ???
• Time before getting up again: 100 minutes
• Yikes!