Refseek.com

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

Thank you, /r/ProgrammerHumor, I love you endlessly.

Redditors competing to make the worst volume sliders possible...

ah yes my boy tom cardy. everyone must listen to him, he's the best

I need everyone to see this ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE

Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and shag a nun.

(via Feminism)

i'm conducting an experiment on how to study the theory effectively

there are i guess two main ways:

(1) read and take notes simultaneously

(2) read first, then take notes

so for the first one, there is the risk of going passive with the note-taking, writing down the symbols without focusing on their meaning. for the second one there is the risk of zoning out and just reading the symbols, again, losing their meaning

the problem seems to be that the processing of sheer symbols and processing their meanings might be disjoint and their natural tendency seems to be so

from my recent actions i noticed that (1) doesn't work for me as effectively as (2)

it might be that when i don't plan to write something down right away, i am more inclined to remember these things short-term as "i won't be able to check it later so remember it now in order to understand what comes next", and when i'm taking notes simultaneously it's "i have it written down anyway so i can take a peek anytime"

so now i'm testing the strategy of

read → try to understand the idea and memorize the elements → why all the elements are important → understand the construction in more detail and write it down

this is how i imagine my mind working:

it means that at first i start to remember the elements as points of its own but simultaneously my brain builds its idea on how they interact and then i notice the inner structure of how the elements are connected with each other in less obvious ways

this idea is cool to visualize how i imagine my thinking, because it shows how learning the topic reduces possible permutations and paths. i have this problem that when i start learning something new i see so many possibilities of what can happen to the elements that i can't discern between crucial and additional stuff. in order to use the knowledge i need to provide some structure

thus the main goal of optimized learning is to take the leap from "i memorized the elements" to "i understand their structure" as fast as possible

and so the strategy (2) might be more effective as it forces the memorization of the elements first and then it is easier to provide structure for them, where i would be defining order on something that's already in my mind. whereas (1) strikes at memorization and structuring simultaneously, it is too difficult for me to see at first in which direction the topic is going, i must know the next point

in a few days i will focus on how "the point" can be defined in this and how to characterize the connections

honestly tho this is some sorta pseudo graph theory and pseudo topology and i don't believe this could be as straightforward. otherwise nobody would ever post any study tips and we would have a field of study called "learning optimazation", this would be too big to go unnoticed. i wish it was so easy to just know how brain works and be able to build such an algorithm that would optimize the desired processes lmao

i wish i was a σ-field or something

side not is, i love this kind of thinking and i love to analyze how the thinking works, especially when it can me algorithmized or structured in some ways. the moment i see something is structured or algorithmic it becomes interesting to me

that's an interesting perspective

recently I've been thinking about it in an opposite way. it started during a conversation about brains, in particular how stupid and flawed they are, I realized that I enjoy math because it gives me a break from being human. there is no place for emotion and cognitive bias, only formal reasoning and proofs. it feels so safe and so distant from the day-to-day life filled with problems caused by the human nature, it feels so clean. it's a place for me to enjoy only the best qualities of my existence. it's an acceptable way to separate myself from everyone, and simultaneously stay connected

I love how different this is from what is described above, as if math offered a place for everyone to find something that they will like

Im trying to find a really long Tumblr post that talked about how sad it was that people are so happy to complain about how much they hated math and how math can be a way to connect with your fundamental humanity and...

Yeah, I've been studying a little bit of it on my own, ten years after I dropped out of college, I've been going back to seeing some basics of calculus, and I've been really feeling some of that.

There is this sense that math is this alien thing, separate from the true concerns of humanity. This external topic, strange and inhumane that only those few weirdos with a eccentric and atypical cast of mind, who are themselves separate by a few degrees from human nature, can grasp.

But it's not that, We, messy warm emotional dumb humans came up with it, we silly atavistic creatures dedicated so much time and effort to develop it and explore it, this silly, quirky, wet, ape-like species is the only living creature on this planet that concerns itself with doing math in any serious capacity. It didn't come from aliens or the gods or from dolphins, math came from humans and humans are the only ones that use them. There could be nothing more human, more fundamentally ours, more intrinsic to our nature than math.

And it's not just a tool! Is not just this thing to be celebrated because its useful in a purely base pragmatical, prosaic way. Is not this thing we have to dissapasionatly conceed credit to because I guess it does useful things like bridges and rockets and computers and taxes. Math is not just the civilizational equivalent of going to the dentist or eating your vegetables.

i hesitate to call it a philosophy or an art, it is a way of human thinking, it is a way of thinking like a human, of thinking in a way that only humans can think. its is one of our oldest and proudest traditions, it is a way to feel greater than onself, it is a way of growing. it is a song with a prosody all its own. There is such a profound sense of meaning and beauty and truth and purpose to be found in math, and the best of all is that it works, when it says something it means something, its telling you a thing that is meaningful, that represents something true, that couldnt be any other way, that has consequences and uses and can be relied upon, that it representes something which carries weight and its ours, its truly a part of our nature, of what we are.

i ended up not doing topo yesterday and made an animation of a lipschitz function instead:

i'm kinda proud of it even though it's messy. had so much fun with it. maybe i'll do some more today

but i want to do that topo content i planned to do so we'll see. i also need to do some coding and finish an art comission

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I JUST REALIZED

YOU KNOW THE HAIKU BOT???

OFC YOU DO

YOU KNOW THAT MESSAGE HE PUTS AT THE END OF EVERY POST????

"Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up."

YEAH???????

WELL THATS A HAIKU TOO

Beep boop! I look for

accidental haiku posts.

Sometimes I mess up.

NOW YOU LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND TELL ME THATS NOT THE CUTEST THNIG YOUVE EVER HEARD

that sounds a bit like mystery flesh pit national park

I’m Christian and respect the order of creation as God intended it but I’m not gonna lie if I could take a massive vat of agar and grow an alive shopping mall made out of red blood and meat and feed it living human bodies to make it expand larger with more shops and amenities, Without hesitation, Without question I would do exactly that

22 VIII 2022

I will have to give a talk soon, in a few days I'll be attending a student conference. I decided to prepare something about my latest interest, which is knot theory. what makes it so cool for me is that the visual representations are super important here, but on top of that there is this huge abstract theory and active research going on

I decided to talk about the Seifert surfaces. this topic allows to turn my whole presentation into an art project

other than that I'm studying euclidean geometry and unfortunately it is not as fun as I thought it'd be

my drawings are pretty, ik. but there is almost no theory

I had a thought that working through a topic with a textbook is a bit like playing a game. doing something like rings and modules, the game has a rich plot (the theory), and quests (exercises) are there to allow me to find out more about the universum. whereas euclidean geometry has almost no plot, consists almost solely of quests. it's funny cause I never played any game aside from chess and mine sweeper

commutative algebra turned out to be very interesting, to my surprise. I was afraid that it would be boring and dry, but actually it feels good, especially when the constructions are motivated by algebraic geometry

commalg and AG answer the question from the first course in abstract algebra: why the fuck am I supposed to care about prime and maximal ideals?

oh and I became the president of the machine learning club. this is an honor but I'm understandably aftaid that I won't do well enough

I'm stressed about the amount of responsibilities, that's what I wanted to run away from by having the holiday. good thing is I gathered so many study resources for this year that I probably won't have to worry about it anytime soon, or at least I hope so