New Plan

I'm going to start writing here again. I might even start putting some non-math-related stuff up. Not extremely disparate things but just more about my life or whatever. Could be interesting.

So while reading Jezebel on the train back to Montreal the other day I came across a fascinating comment on the post about Apple removing scandalous apps from the App Store about how the first law of the internet is big-endian word order. I had no idea about how bits were read or that such things as big-endian and little-endian reading order existed. The commenter in question's use of our numerical system as an example of big-endian word order was so cool and not something that I'd ever questioned. I mean, really, there isn't anything other than convention that makes us put the big units first and the little ones afterward. Bring back the old-fashioned use of "four-and-twenty" and its ilk, I say!

Consequence of Bilingual Education

I haven't posted here in a while, mostly because of the lack of newsworthy math in my life. Since I am not exactly in a position to present myself with new and crazy math and CS tidbits I have instead been reading books and attempting to improve my driving. Some of those activities have been more pleasant than others. I thought about borrowing my brother's math textbook and seeing if I can wrap my mind around math that is near where I left off but I haven't yet because I'm somewhat anxious about the results and I feel that asking for the use of the textbook in question might lead to some sort of interrogation and possibly mockery. I might still do it, though.

Thinking about my brother's math education made me think about mine, specifically the fact that (like all the rest of my pre-university schooling) it was conducted in French. Since numbers are the same in English this didn't pose too many practical problems in my everyday life. It still doesn't. I would argue that I'm able to figure out whether a smaller but cheaper container of yogurt is a better purchase than the larger, more expensive one just as well as an Ontario-educated anglophone. However, learning math in French has led to some interesting troubles with math-related vocabulary. Probably the best example of this that I have is when a girl with whom I took an extracurricular sewing class (yes, I am that cool) was telling the rest of us about some sort of To Sir With Love-type scenario in which a teacher went into a new but underprivileged school where the students were considerably behind and "didn't know what integers were". I'm sure that to the rest of the kids in my class this conveyed an accurate impression of just how deficient these children's education had been but it made me spend an awkward half-hour (or maybe week, I think I dwelt on this for a long time) wondering what one was and why I had to ask myself that question. I guess my killer googling skills hadn't developed very much at that point.

Having talked to other people who went to French school (Max, for example) about the math vocabulary situation, I've gathered that if you switch math languages partway through your education there will be a learning curve but it's not insurmountable. This is comforting as I'd still like to audit a math class this fall and it would be nice to understand at least some of it.

Models, Theses and the Situation

Recent days have brought more math and CS-related awesomeness. Max has been investigating the symmetries of the five regular polyhedra and in order to better do this he built models of the polyhedra in question. He used bristol board and glue (which was sometimes replaced by tape) and the resulting models were really cool-looking. I especially liked the icosahedron, partly because of its shape and partly because it was a soothing shade of dark green. The models and the ensuing discussion of symmetries also allowed me to gain new vocabulary words:

Vertex: Point. Or corner. Regular polyhedra have vertices that are all the same (in that the faces are assembled identically around each one).

I can't actually remember my other new polyhedron/symmetry-related words but I may post about them again later if they come back to me. They pertained to the symmetries and whether or not the way the polyhedron looks changes, I think.

In other news, Antoine (who used to be doing a minor in CS but has since changed his mind) told me (well, technically it was an "us" but I am writing this in the first person singular) about the MIT CS paper generator (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/) yesterday. It's pretty cool. You put in the names of up to five authors and it will come up with a fake computer science-related paper these people have supposedly authored, complete with citations and everything. The papers in question apparently do not make all that much sense but they look pretty good to me. As is mentioned on the SCIgen homepage, they are trying to "maximize amusement, rather than coherence".

I would still like to post a picture of my painted and Matlab-postered room as well as of Max's awesomely awesome models but this will have to wait for three or so weeks because I will be at home/my parents' house for that amount of time. This also means that I will be away from my current sources of blog fodder, which is slightly problematic. Never fear, however, as my new location comes complete with two brothers, one of whom (though still in high school) is better versed in math than me. So though the level of math will be lower I will still be learning, hopefully things of the blog-worthy persuasion. Also, I am considering turning toward more math culture-type pursuits.

Head A Splode

One of the problems that I have in attempting to be mathlike is with the necessary patterns of thinking. My arts student brain, used to picking apart readings and, uh, remembering things, has THE HARDEST TIME trying to bend in the ways required of it in math. For example, yesterday Max asked me about a problem that he was trying to figure out for his job (which is doing math). The problem goes something like this:

Part One (this one I had no trouble with): Imagine a cube inside a sphere. The cube and sphere are sized so that the corners of the cube touch the sphere's surface. Now, using your mind, curve the sides of the cube so that they also touch the surface of the sphere.

Part Two (guard your minds, mine suffered ill effects): Imagine the original cube from the previous exercise but instead of putting it in a sphere put it in a torus (new vocabulary word! This is the technical math-term for a donut shape). Now try to do the inflation-of-the-sides thing.

Honestly, I can't even really conceptualize what we're trying to do here. My best thought was maybe putting the cube in one side of the torus and then stretching it all the way around when you come to the inflation bit. On an encouraging note, Max says that we're not really sure what we're doing here so I guess this isn't entirely an arts brain fail. Also, his idea of how to do this was the same as my best thought. Apparently this notion of how one would solve this doesn't regularize though. I asked why we couldn't just use Matlab to model it for us and was told that it is more of an applied tool whereas Maple is more symbolic.

But yeah. http://no.hablo.matlab.head.asplode.net/

Vocabulary

My first integration project was being able to fake my way through a conversation about computer science without giving away the fact that I'm not in CS. Key words that I remember from this endeavour are

PERL - This is a programming language. I'm apparently allowed to have strong feelings about it. I haven't really decided how CS Catherine feels about PERL yet. This one time some random guy emailed the person I was dating at the time soliciting his help for some assignment that he had involving programming in PERL.
Edit: My research tells me that spelling "Perl" in all-caps is considered a sign of not belonging to the core group of Perl users. Horrors! I will implement this finding going forward. Also, my religious studies student self was pleased to discover that Perl was named after the parable of the pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. The plot thickens...

Object-oriented - I'm told that this is a way that you can describe programmes that you're writing. This vocabulary word kind of scares me because I'm not sure what context it should be used in and I feel like misusing it would be a dead giveaway for my ruse.

I feel like Wikipedia could be a useful source for this ongoing vocabulary situation. Math profs use it as a resource for their students all the time (or so I'm told) so I should be able to put at least my usual amount of trust (which is pretty considerable- if there's no entry about something I'm curious about I always kind of feel at a loss for where to look next) in it.