Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   all the inherent advantages of it still being August
Monday, August 26 2019

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York

After awaking in the greenhouse this morning, I had a light but troubling cough. All it served to do was clear an occasional tickle, but it hadn't been there when I'd gone to sleep last night. Was I developing a cold? Perhaps I'd spent just a bit too long a bit too cold for comfort in the Adirondacks. (Does being cold actually contribute to catching the cold?). The cough continued throughout the day, occasionally combined with a mild but nagging feeling of dysphoria. This didn't feel anything like an alcohol-related hangover; if it was caused by drugs, it felt like it might've been an effect of that ambien I'd taken. I've had this feeling in the past after taking that. But it could've just been that I was coming down with some sort of illness.
It ended up being a beautiful day, with low-70s early-autumnal temperatures, cloudless skies, and all the inherent advantages of it still being August. I love driving around in such weather, so it was a perfect day to make my weekly office supply re-up at the Red Hook Hannaford.

Our friend Anna and her girlfriend Tiffany would be stopping by for a few hours this afternoon, so Gretchen asked me if I could possibly come home early. So I made up some excuse, put it in the workplace Google calendar, and left at 3:00pm, an hour earlier than usual.
When I got back to the house, Gretchen and the others were all off at the Garden Café, so I tinkered with my Waterbot, trying to figure out whether or not the L293D is really supposed to be able to reverse a motor.
When Gretchen, Anna, and Tiffany got back, we sat out on the east deck for a little less than an hour (until Gretchen had to go off to teach the first of one of her prison-based college English courses). We mostly talked about our respective workplaces, since all of us except Gretchen are now employed fulltime. I mentioned the name of the company I work for, which is almost comically generic-sounding, and how it had been bought by a private equity conglomerate with an even more generic-sounding name. Then I brought up an example of how casually resistant our tiny company has been to being assimilated: a week or so ago there was an all-hands email saying that, throughout football season, Fridays would be "football jersey Fridays," for which we were encouraged to wear the football jerseys of our favorite teams. I said that, though I don't feel much of a cultural connection to my colleagues (at least in comparison to the way things were when I worked with computer professionals at an animal rights organization), I can't imagine any of them wearing a football jersey to work under any circumstances.

I don't consider myself particularly adept at mathematics. My basic arithmetic skills are weak and error-prone, even when using a pencil and a piece of paper, and, since college, I haven't had much reason to use math more advanced than trigonometry. But I do actually have a fairly deep mathematical education, having managed to somehow pass a multivariate calculus class during my sophomore year in college. So I have an understanding of most mathematical terms that I hear even if I can rarely follow a mathematical explanation fast enough to understand it. All of this was in mind this evening when I decided to, what the hell, watch a YouTube video called "500 Years of Not Teaching the Cubic Formula" on a channel called Mathologer. Mathologer takes the form of an affable, giggle-prone bald-headed gentleman with a light and indeterminately European accent. His explanation and production of the Cubic Formula (which I'd never actually heard of) was unexpectedly entertaining even if it did go much faster than I had any chance of following. What made this video so wonderful was the obvious fun the presenter was having. He even changed his tee shirt (without ever saying a word about it) from one depicting a tree with square roots to one having cubic roots as the kinds of mathematical roots he was discussing changed. Furthermore, he kept effortlessly leaping back and forth between seemingly disparate mathematical disciplines, showing how interwined they all were. When, for example, he showed that some of the roots of cubic equations are complex numbers, he then showed how the components of complex numbers can be fed into trigonometric functions to produce simpler expressions. There was even some use of simple calculus (in this case, derivatives) to explain where certain parts of both the quadratic and quintic formulæ had come from. If I'd received my mathematical education from a guy like this (as any kid today can!) I'd have a much deeper grasp of mathematics than I ended up with.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190826

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