I'm sorry that our seminar got invaded by cronies too. Not that it was unpleasant to talk to our cronies, but we still had stuff on our agenda that we didn't get to.
That CO thing. Maybe a month or two after I was granted my CO the draft board sent me a letter listing three locations. the nut house in Elgin, Herrin, and I forget what the third place was. I'd been through Herrin once hitchhiking down to Carbondale and it seemed exotic. I don't know how I determined the date, but I rented an apartment down there and moved all my stuff down and showed up at the hospital I think the first Monday in September and said, Ken Schadt reporting for duty.
And they were like What, who are you? Well they had had a CO before me who had just left, they supposed they could use another, what kind of job did I want. I guessed an orderly because isn't that what people do in a hospital, but I balked when they mentioned giving enemas, and they said they could always use janitors and I said I was their man. There must have been some communication going on between the hospital and my draft board. Shortly before my time was up my draft board sent me a letter telling me that my time was up. But other than that I was just like all the other janitors.
Here is a link to the Cats and Corn show: http://www.bckat.net/KenSchadt/2017show/index.htm Taking it down Nov 12. Only one sale. What is wrong with people when they will spend a thousand bucks on the latest phone gizmo that will be out of date in a couple years when they could spend a fifth of that and get an art work which will be eternal, or at any rate, last as long as they will?
So now we've examined the operations of addition and multiplication and their troublemaking inverses and we have the set of rational numbers: positive and negative and zero, and all those numbers that can be expressed in the form a/b, where a and b are integers. How about the special case of multiplication that we call exponentiation, where we multiply a number by itself as many times as we like, aXaXaXa... till the cows come home. Doesn't seem like any trouble with this one, but when we do the inverse, trying to find the root, we stumble right at the beginning with the square root of two. If we try to express it as a/b we soon discover that that can't be done.
https://www.homeschoolmath.net/teaching/proof_square_root_2_irrational.php
Well, we all know, at any rate all of us who believe in infinity, that the set of all the integers is infinite, as is the set of just the positive integers, and the even integers and the integers divisible by a million. And between any two rational numbers there are an infinite number of other rational numbers. But now with the discovery of what we are pleased to call the irrational numbers, which caused considerable turmoil in the Greeks, caused them to turn from arithmetic to geometry, we know that there are an infinite number of irrational numbers (think numbers that go on to infinity after their decimal points with no regularly repeating patterns), between every rational number of which there are an infinity, so they are infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers, and here my head is spinning, so I will pause/
But anyway, you can't do math without the square root of two and its infinity of infinities relatives, so after the Greeks we welcomed them into the family and called the resultant number system, the somewhat defensive name of, the real numbers.
But then a problem arose in quadratic equations, which must have two solutions. x squared = 4 is solvable with 2 or -2. But what of x squared = -2? The two solutions for this are - the square root of -2, or + the square root of -2. The square root of-2? How do you deal with that? What we do is we isolate the square root of -1 to get the number i. Then the answer is the more manageable iX(the square root of two) . And now we have a whole new infinity of numbers: bXi, where b is any real number called the (get this) imaginary numbers, and in fact all numbers have the form a + bi, and are called the complex numbers, the only difference between them and the real numbers is that the real numbers are a subset of the complex numbers where b = 0.
Then there are vectors and other odd things, but I am stopping here.
The ape swinging the bone didn't know anything about mathematical principles. I guess he knew heavier and swinging harder, but until he sat down with Galileo and did the numbers he didn't know how much heavier and how speed related to that.
Mathematics isn't a language. All God's chillens speak different languages but there is only one mathematics between them. But it's an interesting idea. Clearly without language we could never have understood mathematics.
I have had several people try to explain musical notation to me and I have pissed them all off by asking stupid questions so I am not going to weigh in on that here. There is a lot of math in music, though I don't quite understand that either.
Mueller's indictments are not for activities long before the Trump campaign, and they are not a third rate burglary. I declare I do not know where Beagles gets his news. Sarah Huckabee?
No comments:
Post a Comment