BCC

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

mathematicians, constantly: god I’m so tired of people telling me how much they hate math whenever i mention what im into

me: yeah it’s fucked up. i do probability theory, what about you

them: oh man I hate probability theory

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

free recall

here I am sitting and trying to learn something from a textbook by making notes and ugh I don't think this is gonna work

what I'm writing down will probably leave my head the second I switch tasks

today I found a cool video about taking notes during lectures and a method called free recall is mentioned there:

to summarize: taking notes during the lecture is ineffective, because it requires dividing attention into writing and processing the auditory input. instead of doing that one should just listen and then try to write down the contents of the lecture from memory. I can believe that – this is how I studied for my commutative algebra exam and the whole process went really fast. I highly recommens this guy's channel, he is a neuroscientist and bases his videos off of research findings

I will try to do this with textbooks and after a while I'll share how it felt and if I plan to keep doing it. the immediate advantage of this approach is that it gives raw information for what needs the most work and what can be skipped, which is often hard to see when trying to evaluate one's knowledge just by thinking about it. another thing that comes to mind is the accountability component – it is much easier to focus on the text while knowing that one is supposed to write down as much as possible after. kinda like the "gamify" trick I saw in the context of surviving boring tasks with adhd

I'll use this method to study differential geometry, algebraic topology, galois theory and statistics. let's see how it goes

ofc that's right, thank you for fact checking!

Me duele la cabeza

I have a possibly unusual question. since I left high school and was no longer being forced to read I completely stopped looking at fiction and other books that are not math textbooks. this is partly because I fucking hated reading as an activity – I have adhd and asd, so not only my attention regulation causes a lot of problems, I also struggle with visualizing what's happening and imagining/undestanding the intentions and mindsets of the characters. now, I am properly medicated so attention isn't as much of an issue anymore and I remember enjoying some of the books I've been forced to go through. I miss reading, overall it had a positive impact on my thinking process, I miss analyzing the human experience, so to speak

I liked Dostoyevsky, Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Huxley, Kafka and some other "philosophified" authors. I also enjoyed war-themed books in general such as all quiet on the western front, and everything related to the soviet union

finally, my question is, what would you recommend for someone with this taste, who also likes math¹, has a hard time with visual imagination and people but enjoys analyzing human experience, who would possibly like to see a represenation of themselves in the characters of the novel? I would love to rebuild my reading habits, but I am lost as to where to start so I don't get discouraged

¹ I included math in here because maybe there is a book about what it's like to be a mathematician (or a scientist of some kind) that give some existentialist vibes or something, if it exists I want to read it lol

some more animation: how secant-teenager becomes tangent-adult

also! it illustrates a well-known inequality of a differentiable convex function and its tangents & the monotony of slopes

when i think about the value of studying math for so many years, i don't really think it comes from the specific subjects i studied. i mean, okay, derivatives and also linear algebra do come up every now and then.

but for the most part, the probability that any specific piece of math knowledge will be relevant for any given problem in life is pretty small. studying math feels less about learning mathematics and more about training that part of your brain that does the math, and you have to learn new parts of math because you have to keep finding new things to train on.

i have some knowledge, sure, but most of it is functionally useless. the real value is in the building of some intuition about how certain types of problems "should" work, and also how to formalize and communicate that intuition to other people (or to a compiler)

29 X 2022

another exhausting week finally over! fortunately I have two extra weekend days, so I can rest and do my homework without stressing over it

I found another promising youtube channel about learning. and "insanely difficult subjects" sounds about right when it comes to everything that's happening in math

I wish there was more content about learning math specifically. the tips I see, however good and useful for studying memory-based stuff such as biology or history, don't seem to work for math

for now my best method is to study the theory from the textbook, trying to prove everything on my own or if that fails, working through the proofs, coming up with examples of objects and asking (possibly dumb) questions that I then try to answer. afterwards I proceed to solving exercises

recently I've been studying mainly commutative algebra, in particular the localization

we didn't spend much time discussing local rings so I had to find some useful properties on my own. the whole idea of "local properties" is an interesting one and I definitely want to read more about it

I find it to be much more elegant to study localization through its universal property and exact sequences rather than through calculation on elements. it's funny how you can cheat so many of our homework problems by knowing basics of category theory and a little bit of homological algebra

I wonder if it's possible to learn math using mind maps, never actually tried. here is my attempt at doing that for one of the subjects in complex analysis:

other than studying I had to prepare a presentation for one of my courses

the topics were given to us by the professor so I thought it would be boring and technical, but I got lucky to discuss the possible generalizations of the Jordan theorem

now I'm gonna talk about something more personal

this week has been difficult because my brain doesn't enjoy existing. some days I had so many meltdowns and shutdowns, I could barely think and speak, let alone study difficult subjects in math. it's really disappointing, as I thought it got better after introducing new medication, but apparently I still can't handle time pressure and I break very easily when emotions become overwhelming (which they frequently do). one of the most discouraging parts of a neurodivergent brain is that you can't always say "alright then I'll just work harder" when you see that the situation requires it. you can't, because your brain has a certain threshold of "how much can you take before you snap" and no tips for studying when you're tired can change that. if you try, you'll just have a meltdown and your day is over, the rest of it must be spent regaining your strength and all you can do is hoping that tomorrow will be better

I wish I could always simply enjoy math and see it as an escape route from a confusing world of human interaction and unpredictable emotions, but whenever there is a deadline or grading criteria, I can hardly enjoy it anymore. I know that this is not what it's always gonna be, the further I go the less deadlines and exams we have, so I must wait and one day it might be okey

since june I've been trying to discuss accommodations regarding adhd and autism with my university but the process takes forever and I'm slowly losing hope that I will ever have it easier

nonetheless, I'm willing to do everything to achieve the goal of spending my days alone working on developing some new theory. just a few more years and I might start living the dream

at some point I was wondering what about the researcher publishing their paper in an expensive journal and it turns out that the author does not make a lot of money from that, so it really is about fucking this exploitative system and not doing any substantial harm to the researcher, if anyone was worrying like I was

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…