I Am So Fucking Normal Right Now. *stands Perpendicular To The Tangent Of The Plane*

hmmmm idk, this seems like an overgeneralization to me

this whole semester I've been slacking a lot even though I knew I could try harder, but at the same time I felt like even if I give a solid 30% from myself I can still pull it off, so that's what I did. there was no particular reason for it, many times I just didn't feel like studying. I wasn't tired or stressed, if anything I was too relaxed

right now I regret it, while I'm studying for exams I can tell that if I worked more regularly it would be much easier and I would learn much more, but yeah, it seems like I'm going to pass with pretty good grades. however, having had been more systematic I would get better outcomes, especially that I totally had the means to do that. what is this if not pure laziness?

"lazy" is not a negative word in my opinion, or at least it shouldn't be used as such. laziness is when I know I can do better but I choose not to, when I know I can make my future great, but instead I settle for making my future just okay. sometimes there is no underlying reason for it, I simply don't feel like doing more than borderline enough

but that happens sometimes and I think we shouldn't assume that if there is no reason then there must be a hidden reason, because it implies that the natural state of being is working hard and doing your best, which sounds a bit too capitalistic to me. I know for sure that unless there is a reason not to, I will be lazy, and I don't see why this is a bad thing

this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price

I have a bunch of followers and mutuals that I never even talked to and I know some of you guys are very into math too, so let's get to know each other, shall we?

if you feel like you'd enjoy talking to me then go ahead, write me a message! I just realized I never said something like this and I would really love to have conversations with like-minded people

if this feels familiar, you can reblog this post to invite people to talk to you

mood: filling an open set with dyadic cubes and pretending this is studying measure theory

Square is a rhombus, regular hexagon can be tessellated with three equal rhombuses, and every regular polygon with even number of sides can be rhombi-tessellated.

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day? - gist:4158578

“A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what’s going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it’s not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don’t really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

“It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”

That’s certainly better than nothing, but it doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?

The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they’ve understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but if you’re going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.

Fortunately, math has an incredibly powerful tool that helps bridge the gap. Namely, when we come up with concepts, we also come up with very explicit symbols and notation, along with logical rules for manipulating them. It’s a bit like being handed the technical specifications and diagrams for building a vacuum cleaner out of parts.

The upside is that now you (in theory) can know 100% unambiguously what a vacuum cleaner can or cannot do. The downside is that you still have no clue what the pieces are for or why they are arranged the way they are, except for the cryptic sentence, “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”

OK, so now you’re a grad student, and your advisor gives you an important paper in the field to read: “A Tool that does Suck Dust.” The introduction tells you that “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy,” and a bunch of other reasonable but vague things. The bulk of the paper is technical diagrams and descriptions of a vacuum cleaner. Then there are some references: “How to use air flow to suck up dust.” “How to use many a coil of wire to make a fan spin very fast.” “What you get from the hole in the wall that has wire in it.”

So, what do you do? Technically, you sit at your desk and think. But it’s not that simple. First, you’re like, lol, that title almost sounds like it could be sexual innuendo. Then you read the introduction, which pleasantly tells you what things are generally about, but is completely vague about the important details.

Then you get to the technical diagrams and are totally confused, but you work through them piece by piece. You redo many of the calculations on your own just to double check that you’ve really understood what’s going on. Sometimes, the calculations that you redo come up with something stupid, and then you have to figure out what you’ve understood incorrectly, and then reread that part of the technical manual to figure things out. Except sometimes there was a typo in the paper, so that’s what screwed things up for you.

After a while, things finally click, and you finally understand what a vacuum cleaner is. In fact, you actually know much more: You’ve now become one of the experts on vacuum cleaners, or at least on this particular kind of vacuum cleaner, and you know a good fraction of the details on how it works. You’re feeling pretty proud of yourself, even though you’re still a far shot from your advisor: They understand all sorts of other kinds of vacuum cleaners, even Roombas, and, in addition to their work on vacuum cleaners, they’re also working on a related but completely different project about air conditioning systems.

You are filled with joy that you can finally talk on par with your advisor, at least on this topic, but there is a looming dark cloud on the horizon: You still need to write a thesis.

So, you think about new things that you can do with vacuum cleaners. So, first, you’re like: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves! That’d be super-useful! But then you do a Google Scholar search and it turns out that someone else did that like ten years ago.

OK, your next idea: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean cats! That’d also be super-useful. But, alas, a bit more searching in the literature reveals that someone tried that, too, but they didn’t get good results. You’re a confident young grad student, so you decide that, armed with some additional techniques that you happen to know, you might fix the problems that the other researcher had and get vacuuming cats to work. You spend several months on it, but, alas, it doesn’t get you any further.

OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody’s ever thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they do some back of the envelope calculations that you don’t really understand and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for cleaning streets and such.

This goes on for several years, and finally you write a thesis about how if you turn a vacuum cleaner upside-down and submerge the top end in water, you can make bubbles!

Your thesis committee is unsure of how this could ever be useful, but it seems pretty cool and bubbles are pretty, so they think that maybe something useful could come out of it eventually. Maybe.

And, indeed, you are lucky! After a hundred years or so, your idea (along with a bunch of other ideas) leads to the development of aquarium air pumps, an essential tool in the rapidly growing field of research on artificial goldfish habitats. Yay!”

℘²

moreover tiktok adhd content is not even good lol most of it is videos themed "things I didn't know were adhd" and they actually are personality traits and it's not helpful at all with anything

just saw a post complaining about how hard it is to find adhd resources for adults and one of the comments said “tiktok has a lot of adhd tips” as if telling someone with adhd to enter the algorithmic quicksand of perpetual dopamine hits isn’t the most insane thing you could suggest for someone with adhd

10 IX 2022

today I need some extra motivation to study because I didn't sleep well these past few days and it has drastic effects on my productivity, energy, motivation and what have you

also I am struggling to make the choice as to what I should do today

yesterday I started solving some basic exercises from hatcher's textbook

Δ-complex structures are becoming more intuicitve with time. take my solutions with a grain of salt, I am just starting to learn about these things and won't vouch for them lmao

some more complicated objects (the last one is an example of a lense space)

I decided to study commutative algebra today

so far I'm enjoying it. not as much as algebraic topology (which will always be my number 1) but it has its beauty

right now I'm at hom and tensor functors, the structures are fairly complicated, but pretty, and they look like they need to be studied in stages, with repetition and breaks, to fully grasp what's going on

my sensory issues are terrible today and I'm exhausted and hyperactive at the same time uh

I'll try working through a lecture on commutative algebra and give an update on how it went later

update: I studied for a while, but it wasn't going great so I decided to take a nap instead. god knows I tried

30 VII 2021

did some stuff today. found out my cat would die tomorrow if it wasn't for an operation he had today, that didn't feel good but also oh god was he lucky

sleep: better but still trash. yesterday fell asleep between 3 and 4, today planning to go to bed at 3 so in a few minutes

concentration: not as great. couldn't focus because my cat was fucking dying

bo phone time: decent

did some topo today, i think i managed to understand the idea behind the quotient spaces and i really liked it. can't wait to dive deeper tomorrow. other than that i wrote a method that takes a parametric function and provides a partition dividing the curve into k intervals. also i'm almost done with the art comission

sooo tomorrow i plan to finish the code, i want to achieve the functionality that takes a parametric function and draws it with a dashed line. that's why i needed the partition, it's gonna look fucking beautiful. and i need to complete the comission. i hope there will be some time left for quotient spaces, i am very hyped. oh and i forgot i'm drinking tomorrow. so i guess no topo for that gal. eh

gonna list my general goals, not necessarily what theorems i want to learn but rather some global "fix your life" things. gonna post about it every week to keep myself accountable

(1) wake up at 9 instead of 12. go to sleep at 1 instead of 4. if my current circadian rythm is here to stay, it's gonna be a fucking nightmare in november. first goal is to start going to sleep between 2 and 3

(2) concentrate on lectures. my focus is really bad when it comes to listening to someone. i have some interesting lectures downloaded and want to use them as training. first goal is to be able to actively listen to one for 30 minutes, then I can have a break for a zone-out

(3) get used to not checking my phone every damn 20 minutes. first goal is to have two 1-hour intervals daily of not checking it

probably will add some more soon