I’m glad I caught this early enough.  Learning something so vast in a systematic way is daunting.

This was just a passing observation, but it is amazing how intensely some people can live.

Hoarding is a mental illness, and one I flirt with.

So I find it liberating to delete about 50% of my aggregations feeds in preparation for a class that will be starting up this coming Monday.  Tomorrow I’ll be boxing up all of my philosophy books – with the exception of my Nietzsche collection – and giving them to my father for long term custodianship.  He is interested in many of the same things I am, so this should be mutually beneficial.

It is interesting when I detach from a text or collection of articles.  I get some minimal tangible  enjoyment from them, but they are spread so thin that their collective bulk – psychologically as well as physically – outweighs any benefits I might enjoy when I’ll pull a title off the shelf.  At the same time, when it is out of sight, it quickly leaves the mind at well.  The lightness is analogous to the clarity of vision one has when being fitted for a new pair of glasses after a lengthy run on an out-of-date prescription: you are taken aback by just how clouded your vision was.   When I purge in this manner I feel lighter, but in a way I was unable to understand pre-purge, which is is probably why it is a minor illness as much as it is a bad habit.  Moreover, if this lightness is so appealing to me, it is telling how I keep allowing this excess weight to creep in so easily.  It is like deliberately damaging my eyes while claiming to appreciate how useful vision is.

I shouldn’t just purge more often, but avoid the need to purge to begin with.

I have this great flashcard application that keeps track of correct and incorrect answers, and then feeds them back in a weighted order based on performance, incorrect cards being more frequent.  As I move through them, the application keeps a running percentage of how many are marked correct. In my initial run through a 500 count GRE vocabulary flashcard set, I find myself hovering just below 50%.  Having not drilled myself on vocabulary or committed a single unknown definition to memory yet, I figure that knowing above 50% of the standard GRE vocabulary right off the bast is a respectable place to start out.  But I stand just below that mark.  

I’m sure this is a common tendency, but when I move through flash cards I often find myself half-knowing certain words.  I’ll often be pretty sure of a definition, but not certain.  Of course, when I check my answer and I find myself correct, that “pretty sure” retroactively becomes “I was certain”, and I’m inclined to mark the card as “correct”.  I need to rebel against this tendency, because my study method will consist of efficiently weeding out all of the words that I know off the bat.  The lower I set my threshold of knowing a word, the more likely words I’m shaky on will pass through my filter, never to be studied again.  And so as I moved through this initial flashcard set, I kept this in mind and tried to be vigilant.

But I wanted to break that 50%, and so the temptation to cheat myself seemed even more acute.  I realize this is deeply irrational.  (50%?  Why not 60% or 45%?)  Still, the pull was there, because my ego wanted to feel empty vindication.  This pull was there, that is, until my ego realized something else: wouldn’t it be great to make huge strides in my vocabulary from this point up to the GRE?  To that end, the lower my percentage became in this initial run, the better it felt because it had that much higher to climb.  So the threshold on knowing a word was pushed even higher, which is the right thing to do in this process of study.

Letting one’s egotism call the shots isn’t the healthiest thing, but if necessary it is always good to angle it in the right direction.

And….I’m going to stick to my dead-fundamentalist-makes-me-smile sentiment from early Monday morning.

Bin Laden represented the sickest aspect that human beings can achieve: the fundamentalist belief that god was calling upon him to plan and organize the murder of those not following his rigid (not to mention detestable) dogma; his “Truth”. Basically, that is to say anyone living in a post-enlightenment national atmosphere deserves to die. Your friends; your neighbors. The sentiment of this much cited quote only solidifies my earlier feeling: MLK’s statement gets to the heart of how poisonous hate and resentment can be, and it is a very important message to take to heart. But it glosses over another very important point while taking aim at the jackasses who will no doubt be dressing up in Bin Laden cross-hairs tee-shirts in the days and weeks to come, fetishizing his specific death while likely praising their own god for bringing justice to God’s great USA and blah blah blah… Whatever. Take it to Sarah Palin’s Jesus-and-Country freak-show and leave me alone.  Because here is the real point: people like Bin Laden absolutely forfeit their right to live in the harmony of the same world that MLK envisions with these words, and the sort of world I would want to live in. (If believing that puts me next to Sarah Palin in this particular discussion, then fine – I’ve always wanted to meet her anyway.) But unless MLK’s words are supposed to support an empty, cloud-in-the-sky pipe-dream, then there needs to be a line in the sand drawn to bring about *real* harmony in the *real* world. So unless you absolutely reject rule of law, then it should be obvious which side of this line Bin Laden stood on.  This is not even about Bin Laden, but what he represented and continues to represent. The man was/is a symbol of a much deeper sickness, and we should be proud to to be a part of the force in the world that finally killed him.  This pride is *not* the same thing as rejoicing.

That MLK quote is very powerful and very wise. But not today, people. Not today.

————–

Note: The quote attributed to MLK is inaccurate.

Right now I need to do two things: Learn programming and get very, very good at mathematics.  These are two independent areas of study, but they are related in perhaps the same way that avoiding junk food and exercise are related: they go hand in hand, and if I am smart I will use the momentum of each one to spur the other on.

I am going to be working quite a bit with polynomials.  Learning to perform operations on polynomials (factoring, etc.) is sufficient to meet certain mathematics benchmark.  Similarly, I am learning to code in Java and am also learning basic programming project methodology.  Any standard project will meet certain programming benchmarks.  But  designing algorithms to perform operations on polynomials kills two birds with one stone.  Designing an entire project around the development of my own mathematical skills is a golden opportunity.

This is how I need to think.

While errata in an English Literature textbook is unfortunate, errata in a mathematics or logic text can be downright traumatizing.  For those of us not blessed with the natural gift of mathematics, too often we’re clinging on by the skin of our teeth under the best of circumstances.  A misplaced variable or negation in a proposition can send an insecure student on a mentally exhausting wild goose chase.  Such could have been the case yesterday when I stumbled upon this relatively simple example of a nested while loop in the text Java Software Solutions, 4th Edition.

int count1, count2;

count1 = 1;

while (count1 <= 10){

	count2 = 1;

	while (count2 <=50){

		System.out.println("Here again!");

		count1++;
	}

	count2++;

}

This was just a snippet in the text, and not a runnable application, but I became very frustrated after casually glancing at it.  A simple trace through this algorithm just didn’t make sense to me, but insecure of my abilities, I did not want to immediately doubt the authors.  They are professional men, competent enough to write an entire book software development; I am a failed student with lackluster analytic skills. I began telling myself: if this is confusing you, you might as well give up now.

But objectively speaking, anyone used to looking at code should immediately notice that the algorithm is clearly wrong.    The count1++ and count2++ are in the wrong order, never allowing the inner loop to terminate.  Instead of worry about this, I plugged it into a simply application and ran it.  Sure enough – my reasoning was correct after all.  Moreover, the error is not even listed in the book’s errata.  It was so reassuring to find that my initial instinct and analysis was correct.

So not only do I now feel just a little more confident having discovered this, I feel like I caught something special.