Dgplug

I’ve been learning Maths and daydreaming about careers in Mathematics I loved the idea of being a pure Mathematician and then realised that path was not for me. My head hurts when I focus on my Maths work :P But then it struck me how much of Maths & Science was done by people in their spare time, by tinkering and thinking long and hard and with focus on or about something. So many folks had day jobs that had little to nothing to do with their work and the accomplishments they were known for. ...

Started: 2018-05-14 Finished: 2018-05-14 Willpower is like a muscle. There’s only so much of it that you can use if you don’t train it. And it gets tired and depleted of its energy reserves, if you just use it rashly. You need to train it, bulk it up and make it strong so that you can then use it to create change. As Baumeister states in the conclusion of the book, ...

I keep going on in the channel1 about how I didn’t learn this until it was too late. But it doesn’t bother me at all. Because “Disguise your judgement. You don’t need to show people how smart you are. I didn’t learn this until my early 80s.” — Charlie Munger If Munger can still be learning at 96, so can I :) I hang out at #dgplug on the irc.freenode.net server most days ↩︎ ...

“Since I was very young, I’ve played all kinds of music: bar mitzvah music, Sousa marches, strip-club music, jazz, pop. Everything. I didn’t have to learn a thing to do Michael Jackson.” “You’re supposed to use everything from the past. If you know where you come from, it’s easier to get where you’re going. Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?” ...

I recently subscribed to the The Great Courses Plus, so that I could bring myself up to speed on the Math needed to do my 12th standard exams. All these years, whenever I’ve tried to teach myself trigonometry (or other people have tried to explain it to me) it has always been an exercise in frustration, followed by the general exhortation to just mug it up. My brain sadly is not wired that way. I can and I will mug it up. But I do want to know what the first principles are, so that I have the ability to derive what I need. I need to understand. ...

Listening to Marcus du Sautoy’s A Brief History of Mathematics this weekend. In two hours, and ten episodes, du Sautoy spans the gamut of mathematicians from Leibniz & Newton the 1690s to the ensemble Bourbaki the 1930s Brief, rampaging and hugely entertaining, this is well worth a listen!