Did That To Me

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

some experimentation with colors, i tried the inverse:

looks neat tho i think i won't stick to that, as my previous notes are black on white and the inverse is taken by changing the template and the marker color uhh they're gonna be incompatible

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

The chili plant made a deal with their God to only be consumed by things that could spread its seeds and fly. The chili received capsaicin, making itself painful to eat for mammals, but not birds, and all was well for the chili.

Then the human shows up, tastes it, and likes the pain. So now there's this flightless fucking mammal eating the chili. Like not even a fruit bat or anything, a flightless fucking mammal chomping on the chili.

What the fucking shit, God, cried the chili, I specifically requested the opposite of this.

Now hold on, wait a moment, replied the God who talks to plants but has no idea what the fuck these apes are going to do next. It might be something cool.

And in a flash of a second, in barely fraction of the time that chili took to develop capsaicin, the humans went from walking across land bridges and rowing little boats across small waters, into building ships that could cross oceans. More humans tasted the chili, and liked the pain. They took the seeds with them, and planted it elsewhere.

See? They spread the seeds.

They're still not flying, said the chili, still feeling insulted and betrayed.

But before the conversation was over, the humans were still not done fucking around and nowhere close to finding out. The ships became machines, and another machine was invented, capable of flight. Now, not only were the humans farming chili on continents far too far away for any of the birds that originally ate it could dream of flying, but the chili flew with them to lands where it could possibly not grow, so that humans over there could also eat it and enjoy the pain.

You see? They spread your seeds and fly.

It doesn't count as keeping a promise if you only manage it by a fucking accident, said the chili, still somewhat insulted. But nonetheless, the chili thrived.

you know girls can tell when you look at their boobs

i don’t care how quickly you glance, 1 second is like 5 seconds in boob time

so, for relativistic boobtime, where t is the observer, and t’ is the time measured at the boob. t=t’/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) solving for t=1, and t’=5, we get that the boobspeed, v, is represented by v=+/- (6*10^8)sqrt(6)i m/s

boobs travel at 1.5 gigametres per second in the complex direction.

rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:

" 'They' isn't singular!" Oh yeah? Show me its multiplicative inverse matrix then.

I want to follow all of you!

for the sake of an updates to this, I didn't get 100% on that topology test. I got 85%, which was the third best score. I finally scored the highest possible final grade on that subject, so I'm satisfied. fuck I love algebraic topology so much and I think she loves me

oh and I scored fucking 54% on the analysis test. I think I had a mental orgasm when I found out about that lmao it felt so good. I finished the course with a grade of 4 (idk if it's universal, so 2=the lowest, failed, 5=the highest) which is the best I ever got in the analysis course

28 V 2022

topology and analysis tests are over, both went I think alright

if I don't get 100% from topo I'm going to be very frustrated, because I studied hard and acquired deep understanding of the material – so far as to be able to hold a lecture for my classmate about any topic

analysis ughhh if I get ≥40% I will be overjoyed. but that's just the specifics of this subject, you study super hard and seem to be entirely ready, you solve all of the problems in prep and then best you can do is 40%. my best score so far was 42%, so anything more than that will be my lifetime record lmao, I want this so bad. I solved two problems entirely I think, which should give 40% already, and some pieces from two more, chances are I get 50%, which would be absolutely amazing

here are some pictures from me transforming math into an art project

stokes theorem

topology

I was thinking about how annoying I find what people say to me when I tell them that I'm not happy with how I'm doing at math. their first idea is to tell me how great I am and how all I do is good enough and shit like that. it doesn't help, it just feels like I am not being taken seriously. when I barely pass anything, am I really supposed to believe that everything is actually good? it feels like they skip getting to know my situation and just tell me what they would tell anyone, automatic

when I try to calm myself down and think something that will keep me going I don't try to force myself to be happy, fuck that, not being content with one's achievements is very fine, I believe not being happy all the time is fully natural and all that positivity feels so fake

instead what seems to work is asking myself where the rational threshold of being ok with how I'm doing is. the thing is I will never be satisfied, whatever I have, I always want more. but I can set the limits in advance and that stops me from falling into self-loathing loops

although what has really changed the game for me was getting a few good grades, finally I am achieving something, anything. people tell me that I should learn to be alright without this external reliance on achievements but how am I supposed to do that when the source of my low moods is precisely getting less than I want? I don't understand why I should brainwash myself into thinking that this is actually not what I want. the trick here is to separate the goal-orientedness from the sense of self-worth. the groundbreaking realization of mine was figuring out that I believe I deserve more than I get, that's why I am unhappy. so now that I am getting what I think what I deserve I obviously feel much better

Theory Time

The reason endermen don’t like it when you look at them is because they communicate telepathically with one another by locking eyes! Humans are absolutely not designed to do this so when we look at them we are accidentally projecting all of our thoughts into them at the same time and it hurts :(