I'm walking on eggshells [wooah, it don't feel good]

SWMNBN is going nuts.¹

15 minutes from home...

She asked motherdearest to put down her window. It wasn't down far enough so she communicated this to us with pepperings of "f*cking hell", "you are all f*ckers", and kicking her inactive window switch. From here, She smoothly segued into how she hates us all, especially me.

7 minutes from home...

She began talking about how her and I can have the house to ourselves, sit on the couch, cuddle and watch a scary movie ["but only a ittle bit scary"], while Deirdre collects her sowing kit.

3 minutes from home...

She is asleep.


Mythbusters had a look at Chinese Water Torture and the found that it was not the dripping water in-and-of-itself, but the regularity of the dripping  that made the experience torture.² It reminds me of and is possibly related to this interesting little ditty from Cornell U. The idea being we look for patterns to make things simpler for ourselves, so we reduce the amount of information we have to handle. Generally speaking it has made us pretty awesome, but accidentally or intentionally complicated/irregular/non-sensical information makes us its bitch.³

****

¹Well, she is growing more apparently nuts...


²I know I paint her in a pretty bad light at times, but she is hilarious, shockingly adroit, and generally
very niceⁱ. I don't think we much cared for each other at the beginning of my time in the country, but we've gradually won each other over, like some kind of mutual Stockholm Syndrome.



³In Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, the punishment within the Maths was to copy from and memorize "the Book." It is rife with errors, which grow more insidious chapter-by-chapter, the feared result being a corruption of the mind.

++++

ⁱI'm hardly going to relate the dull bits; it's kind of like war- lots of waiting around interspersed with moments of terror.

Chirp chirp

It has been a while since I put up something.⁰

I suspect that the elephant in the drawing room is that I finished my thesis two months back;¹ the idea of typing anything more than chats/emails has had that giving it the eeeeeevil eye. Although it is possibly compounded by being generally house bound in the middle of no where with a pack of kids; and really one post on them is the same as another.

So, I'm going to use someone else's words as a jumping point.

Preamble: myself and Kevin were chatting about Twitter today...

Kevin: Twitter seems to be actually a very difficult concept to grasp

I don't understand how

but (and this is an eerily familiar statement) it's almost too simple for people to understand easily

me: I use it to say or pass on something i think remarkable

Kevin: you can use it for whatever the hell you like!

me: lol

yeah

Kevin: so when people ask me (and they have) - "what is it for"?

and I say "anything"

they don't understand

It's like Seinfeld

"It's a show about Nothing"

older generations didn't get it

younger generations made it the most successful sitcom of its day

me: ah

the twitterati

Kevin: but trawling hashtags appears to be the main use of it.

I'll get back to the chat in a moment, but now for something completely different obliquely relevant...

I learned an interesting thing in linear algebra back in the day: for an n-dimensional space, any set of n vectors can be the basis (i.e. the axes/frame of reference) for that space as long as they are linearly independent of each other. (The change of basis theorem, at least I think that is what my lecturer called it.)

An example (repeating what they say in the link, but we all have our vanities):

In three dimensional vector space of real numbers one basis would be:

[1 0 0], [0 1 0], [0 0 1]

Where the three vectors arbitrarily represent "x", "y" & "z" axis. Multiplying, or dividing and adding these vectors together you can define every point in space. However, it is also possible to express it in terms of:

[1 2 3], [3 1 2], [1,000 0 11]

Now, Don't Panic the two sets of vectors are equivalent, in a Machiavellian way... take the coordinate [1 1 1]; both basis can be multiplied and added together to get it:

[1 0 0] + [0 1 0] + [0 0 1] = [1 1 1]

1/315x(326x[1 2 3] - 337x[3 1 2] + [1,000 0 11]) = [1 1 1]

And it is the case for any three vectors as long as they aren't a straight up multiple of each other (i.e. [1 1 1] ≡ [2 2 2])

Clearly, there are convenient and inconvenient ways to get things done... Now, the reason I put it forward is because we could think of ideas as objects in an abstract-space,² and the basis is a perception or way to describe the abstractions; then there is a best way to pass an idea to someone else. I saw an article, a summary, of a paper on education at my favourite website, physorg.com, a couple of weeks back.³ Basically it showed that teaching/practicing mathematics abstractly leads to better understanding of the core principles than if the students dealt with "real world" problems that only illustrate the principles.

Aaaaand back to the chat.

It is unlikely that this was the first conversation about Twitter that went this way. But I think Kevin's analogy (he loves analogies) and his turn of phrase is nice and simple. It was like looking at Twitter through new eyes after I finished reading it.⁴

For those that prefer antic-based tales of high-adventure from Máirtín, I'm moving to Belgium to start working as a crack research engineer so emigration will be a healthy source of blog-worthy stuff (it better be!).

**********

^{0I've given up on the MacNamyver finalé, or whatever it was... Long story short, the draw strings for a velux in a high-ceilinged room got stuck and they couldn't be reached, even with crutches stuck together. I nipped down to Tesco, bought duct tape and 50 wooden bbq skewers (suspicious buy/boy). I used two brushes and a mop with their ends pulled off, which left me with hollow tubes. I slotted the skewers into the ends of the brush handles to join them together and then wrapped some torn phone book pages around the joint and taped it together. With my ad hoc thing-longer, the handy plastic hook that is at the top of the last brush disentangled the draw strings from the velux and I could once more open and close the window with impunity [Mwa ha ha ha ha ha].}

¹So much writing... [rocks back and forth, rubbing upper arms]

²In Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, he has this description of where dragons went:

[...] And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but it is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the top of a tail, the the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon.

I think ideas are like that; a Venn diagram by Salvador Dali.

³Here's the site, and DOI:10.1126/science.1154659, and the journal link

⁴Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd