aesmael: (sudden sailor)
I wonder very much about continuing these. If I did not, then I would say nothing of most of what I read, and give it less thought than if I attempted to find words for each. If I did not, I would read more, and quicker. I cannot quite shake the feeling that posting these is a pointless mechanical activity, a task continued because it was once set.

These links do not form an entirely honest record. There are items I have read and not noted because I did not wish to give the tacit approval of a link and did not know how to express or form criticism of the content in question.

The reason the majority of these are from shared items is, of course, that I have resolved to first become current with those before reading material of my own subscription.

About.com: Agnosticism / Atheism
  1. Bias and Vested Interest: Interpreting Facts Unreasonably [Well, yes. I strive to avoid this but on good days do not pretend I achieve it.]

Dispatches from the Culture Wars
  1. Even More Political Chutzpah [I suspect most people do not investigate such claims - I know I tend not to, and rely on information provided by those who do.]

Google Reader shared items
  1. Mysterious White Rock Fingers on Mars [via [livejournal.com profile] gentle_gamer. Mars may not be my favourite planet (which is? none, really, the overexposure of Mars or any other location seen as a prospect for life grates on me) but areology is fascinating!]
  2. Because I can't help but make a LIAR out of myself [via [livejournal.com profile] soltice. I agree with this post. That photo is far too pretty for me to quite believe. Really, flower-filled meadows? Wild grass is brown, not green, and never contains flowers. This sort of scene is about as fantastical to me as the elves and snow I read of in stories.]
  3. Inflation Theory Takes a Little Kick in the Pants [via [livejournal.com profile] soltice. The people commenting (at least at first) do not seem have understood what they read - the main claim is that a previously thought clear test for inflation has been found to produced by other sources too, and thus detection of this gravitational radiation cannot easily be taken as confirmation of the theory.]
  4. Industry execs sound IPv6 alarm - is the sky really falling? [via [livejournal.com profile] soltice. Mm. I tend to be wary of people saying we have plenty of time to deal with a foreseen problem. Often, it seems solving it takes longer than projected.]
  5. HP Mini-Note gets unboxed, causes extreme jealousy [via [livejournal.com profile] soltice. Presumably this computer is a big deal.]
  6. Let's all pack up and move to Great Britain [via [livejournal.com profile] soltice. Odd seeing posts from feeds I have subscribed to shared by other people, and not reading them more directly. this comment sort of seems on the nose to me:

    "Us Brits aren't precisely an areligious lot - most of us have some sort of faith, but it's so vague and noncommittal that it passes for atheism.

    You know the kind of thing - "I believe there's something comforting out there but I don't know what it is and whatever it is I'm not going to let it affect my life. It's just nice to believe sometimes."

    So, when Brits say they're afraid of "religion", what they're really afraid of is passionate religion. And seeing as Anglicanism is by definition almost never passionate, they're afraid of other religions being passionate. And in practice that means...Islam.

    When my countryfolk talk about the evils of religion, they're talking about mosques, the Quran and ramadan. But what they're thinking about is bombs.

    So you see we're not so elightened after all."
    ]

    Pam's House Blend
    1. NYT article on convention bloggers features Pam's House Blend


    theinferior4+1
    1. Border Crossings
aesmael: (Electric Waves)
Plain enough. Music library of choice on shuffle, list the first ten songs (I would say tracks, but mean to skip any podcasts which come up).

  1. Grainger - Country Gardens
  2. Luciana Souza/Romero Lubambo - Muita Bobeira - I think this track came with Vista *shrug*
  3. Queen - Killer Queen
  4. Akira Yamaoka - April Fool's Song
  5. Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories - (would have been: Jason Rennie - The Sci Phi Show Outcast #53 - Sci Fi and Politics with Dr Courtney Brown)
  6. Starsailor - Don't Stop Moving
  7. Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories #2
  8. See-Saw - interlude
  9. The Beatles - Love Me Do
  10. Delerium - Forgotten Worlds


I desire to include some substance of my own deliberate composition so I will say that over the past few months I have been working to abandon the rich text interface as much as possible, using it only long enough to learn how to input something I did not know before. So I am proud at knowing how to format this list without having to consult any outside source.

I have not been learning much, have not been making a deliberate study as I have felt always more pressing things to do and then sleep, yet what I have been learning is very satisfying. It reminds me of the latter half of last year, when I had to learn some LaTeX formatting for the wiki on which I was keeping my Electromagnetism notes.

It is not something I know yet how to describe yet learning such things, seeing something of how they work and fit together, is a very... clean pleasure for me. Similar to how I have felt in my brief studies of Mandarin too, and now I am thinking if I could find this in mathematics too that would be rather wonderful. Perhaps my perspective has been mistaken? Focus on the operators rather than the individual problems maybe. Might help with astronomy/physics too.

... I was supposed to be writing.
aesmael: (writing things down)
    No words written yesterday, plus other bad things I do not wish to speak of. I did get Skype working in Ubuntu though! The trick is remembering that someone has encountered my problem before and finding their solution.
    Today I made a bit of progress on schooling related items. As well as some library related homework, I also started up a wiki for the electromagnetism unit I am taking at university. The idea is that if I attempt to organise and explain the information we are being taught so that (hypothetical) others can understand it, I will have a better chance of passing the course and graduating and lording it over the rest of you. Possibly with an iron fist.
    A while (weeks) ago [livejournal.com profile] whimsical_esper and I were talking and we both agreed a wiki would make a useful medium for collecting and organising story notes. I don't intend to use this one for that purpose because it is too public (but talking with [livejournal.com profile] whimsical_esper today has showed me it is still possible to use mediawiki so this can be considered practise) but I may expand it to include other material too*. We shall see.

P.S. Click here for Wiki-Make-Go. Try not to vandalise too much or I will have to lock you out, kay?

*other material may include further self-education efforts, notes of various kinds perhaps on things read and possibly acts of fiction I have committed**.

**This is the kind of information sensible people do not mention unless and until it actually happens, because they are sensible.
aesmael: (probably quantum)
    Thanks to the very educational Jennifer Ouellete|Cocktail Party Physics for pointing me to this marvellous post by Terence Tao, who is apparently some kind of mathematician.
aesmael: (haircut)
I may not have been here much lately but I did manage 1439 new words. Something to be pleased with. Also reading. Baroness Orczy commits a cardinal sin (that is, something Richelieu might do) in The Scarlet Pimpernel and lies to the reader with authorial voice (pg 54 in my copy).

Digression: Since cardinal is a (apparently rarely used) term for the positive integers (1, 2, 3, 4, ...) I am wondering if the term is related to the so-called Seven Deadly Sins as something numbered.

For referencing I know of cardinal as the numbers, the high-ranked Catholic priest, the red bird (named for the priest, I believe) and the phrase 'cardinal sin'. Anyone know of any others?
aesmael: (nervous)
So. An irrational number is simply any Real Number which is not Rational. In decimal form an irrational number is neither terminating nor repeating.

That did not seem very hard. Almost too simple...
aesmael: (sudden sailor)
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.

Profile

aesmael

May 2022

S M T W T F S
12345 67
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 2026-03-25 17:08
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios