Although I like the locution, I’m not always quite sure what might be meant by “become what you are” (BTW, I get the phrase from Watts, not Hatfield). To some ears, including some of mine, such phrases smack of circularity, or worse. Then I think of phrases like “the limit, as t approaches 0, of sin(t)/t equals 1”, which makes the same amount of sense as “become what you are”. Somehow (sometimes) the former seems more concrete than the latter. If I believe a man-made bridge will hold my weight as I walk over it, I’m implicitly agreeing with some statements about limits and differentials, right? So somehow I need to bridge that understanding of the ‘limit’ concept over into the ‘becoming’ concept.

There seems to be an irreconcilable divide between how I see myself and how others see me. I care mostly about who I am and what I can become, and little about what I’ve done or what I can do. Most others take the opposite weighting. This is, I think, as it should be. But it’s good to recognize the fact and make use of it in order to choose my priorities or align my directions with others’. For example, learning about geometry is a better way of becoming who I am than learning about marketing, and that gives a certain lean to my priorities. However, learning a little bit of marketing will let me better put geometry into action in the world, and will help hook me up with people, projects, and tools to learn about the next bit of geometry.

Helping others become what they are is the next most joyous thing in my life after becoming what I am. A friend mentioned today that attending a funeral made him think about the importance of telling people in his life the things he needs to tell them. Along those lines, I think I ought to make sure that I’m doing what I can to help people close to me become what they are. I’d like each of my loved ones to pass from this plane with their last thought of me being that I had helped them achieve their self. More than that, I’d like that to always be their last thought of me.

Ya know, you could structure your life so that, say, you never have to cross a bridge over water, or you never have to use a Nabisco product, or you never have to buy a car, etc… but is there any way to align your life so that you never have to deal with morons? I have my doubts about that one. Morons have infiltrated every level of society, insinuated themselves into every institution.

Maybe there should be a public service campaign, featuring Dummy the Bear: “Only you can prevent the growing stupidity”.

Of course, we do have the problem that if you asked each person to enumerate the Morons and the Not-Morons, the union of the former sets would be a superset of the union of the latter ones. Ah, what am I saying? That’s no problem for me, because I’m not _asking_ anyone else.

[This post has been rated Useless. Please do not read.]

if PDEs were often a topic in a labor-law talk. But hey, what do I know compared to this site. 🙂

Due to the heavy use of the calculus of variations in my image analysis class, I’m having to refresh some of my mathematical knowledge. Frankly, I’ve felt like an idiot at several times during the class, since, ya know, the phrase “as we all know” in the lectures was often followed by something that I, for one, didn’t really know.

Part of it, though, is that my criterion for ‘to know’ has changed over time. Through grade school, high school and my early college years, I think the main thing I was trying to achieve in my mathematical learning was recognition by my teachers and peers. And, that I did accomplish. I was praised by teachers and somewhat respected by peers. But most of what they were seeing was a symbolic show, like the translator in Searle’s Chinese Room.

Not that I had a complete lack of deeper understanding, just that I didn’t particularly care about a deeper understanding and was fine with being able to do the symbolic manipulation efficiently and ‘correctly’. Nor did I really have any basis for connecting the stuff to the real world: I didn’t have any applications in mind when learning a new concept, except for the sham applications that textbooks present (“you can use this to calculate the area under the graph of x^2”. BFD!).

So now, when I remember the ‘rules’ of mathematics, I’m immediately stopped short by the fact that they don’t all really make _sense_ to me. And with my new criteria for an acceptable level of understanding, I now have to put my work in the class on hold for a while while I try to get the next level of understanding of, for example, what ‘dy/dx’ means (hint: it’s not just an indivisible symbol for ‘derivative of y with respect to x’).

Of course, I do know that in order to apply image processing techniques, I can get by without really understanding it very deeply, just like I can drive a car without being able to design an aerodynamically optimal intake manifold. So, I can still get through the applications by symbolic manipulation, but I’m going to be backfilling a lot of understanding of some basic mathematics at the same time.

Huh.

Interesting: news bit about Alonovo.

This is one of the beauties of the web and the aggregation capabilities that more sites are starting to expose. You can create a specialized front end to someone else’s services, without having to build the whole world yourself, and everybody wins (Amazon gets the sales, Alonovo gets their cut, anyone who wants the service can use it, and anyone who doesn’t can just use Amazon directly).

It seems a bit odd, when I think about it, that I am praising the fact that middlemen can thrive on the web :-), given that I’m usually not a big fan of middlemen. I guess the middlemen I’m not a big fan of are the ones who insinuate themselves inextricably and/or don’t provide very visible value. That’s a dying breed in the webbed world anyway…

My oldest DVD-ROM drive now refuses to open the tray. I might be able to fix it, but I’ll probably just retire it and get a new one. Too bad I don’t have a DVD-burner-burner.

Since I’m taking a course in image analysis and computer vision, I’m becoming more aware of uses of these technologies in daily life. They’re all over. For example, I watched an episode of Modern Marvels (kickin’ show, BTW) about agricultural harvesting, and there were at least four processes in modern agriculture mentioned that make use of image analysis/computer vision (analyzing satellite maps of vegetation density, sorting fruits by ripeness, identifying fruits for robotic picking, and helping drive unmanned tractors).

So I suppose this course will have some nice applications for me; I’m bound to run into projects with an image processing component if I’m watching for them.

In thinking about software and quality as I was walking home just now, I thought of the phrase “solid oak software”. I figured I’d see if that was a somewhat original phrase, but a Google search turns up a little hornet’s nest of stuff related to a company by that name. Having little interest in the web filtering market, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this company otherwise. But now I’m pissed that my funny little phrase is all used up…