olena:

This [title link] is probably the most real speech [/thing] I’ve ever read.

A piece of it:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

— DFW

••••••

But, there’s something else that needs saying that he didn’t get to, or maybe he hinted at it in mentioning our various “temples of worship”:

When you’re doing the daily thing, whatever it is you do, and tu fais your grocery shopping and dinner and unwinding, and you have to choose what to think about — whether or not you’ll succumb to those “petty frustrations” of crowds, muzak, monotony, tiredness, etc. etc. or whether you’ll reason, consider alternatives, think outside yourself…

If you can manage not to succumb, can you use that time (in lines, crowds, commuting, etc.) to do something more? Even if that something is yet another “god” to worship; if you choose one anyway, consciously or not, mightn’t it at least be something bigger than the self, something more far-reaching than the immediate/parochial wants/anxieties/honors/goals/etc?

I’m talking about, amidst all that mental and environmental baggage and commotion and grind and culture, reaching beyond it, throwing anchors out — far, far out. Can you keep at it, can you read on the train and learn things, can you do mental work and consider pertinent problems (whatever they are for you: are you a physicist, artist, sociologist, accountant, mother?), can you, despite being tired and hungry and dying to watch TV, decide instead to make a dent in that thing you thought (long or not so long ago) that you really really wanted to do? Despite, also, the fact that this thing might take very long and you may have no results at all, not for a long time.

They’re questions because it’s always a choice: to believe in the thing you set out for, even if you don’t quite know what it is or how to do it, or to hell with it and watch the telly or scroll down some really long website or other for a few hours before sleeping again, and doing the same things, again.

That’s the third part of learning how to think, or what to think about. Easier said than done.

This [title link] is probably the most real speech [/thing] I’ve ever read.

A piece of it:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

— DFW

I think about it sometimes — about people who get into the positions to talk to large amounts of other people, to talk about how they got somewhere and about their success and give advice, and how they never talk about that boredom, frustration, monotony, fear, uncertainty…

No, they do… but it just always sounds glamorous. Even when they say “this was a lot of unglamorous hard work” — it still sounds glamorous for some reason. Inspiring. It makes you think, “Gee, I can do all that hard work, too.”

But most of the time, you’re not sure if you can do it at all. It’s not obvious like they make it sound, like a timeline or something. You’re not sure if you’re working hard enough (even if it feels like that mentally or physically of both), not sure what you’re doing, or what you should be doing. And isn’t that most of life? But it usually just gets a sentence as a side-note, and they go on to talk about the success part, the fun part.

Finally someone, in 2005, talked about the water.

(via wildcat2030)

When you’ve realized you’re human, it’s all laughable. Things we do, pants we wear. Then what’s there to do but to try to go beyond that? That’s silly too (transcendence is), but it’s interesting — it’s interesting to try to unwind our stories and our age-old notions of how things are or how they might work and… let nature talk, instead. What else can we be — how can we rearrange our systems, our sets of atoms and body-stuff? We can’t even know. It’s an act of creation. The greatest art work. To know would require knowing the plan of nature, and apparently nature doesn’t have one (despite what we may have liked to think, again, for centuries.) Funny. Good one, really. So, how far can you go, what can you become, how can you experience what’s extra-trans-post-super-uber-outer-sans-human, without dying?

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

••••••

The first part is true — at least for me, with most things I do. Get them out quickly and maybe regret them a little, later, when I’ve wizened up.

But at least they’re out there… I attended a science-related talk last week and, at the end, one of the speakers’ suggestions (for young people who have graduated or will soon) was to { publish } their ideas, or else those thoughts/creations/etc. may as well be nonexistent. Especially now.

The second part, I’m afraid of.

Thanks for this, { yasmoose }!

yasmoose:

Because I wanted to help out with this but couldn’t include my entire answer in an ask submission.

Complex numbers are of the form a+bi where a is the real component and bi is the imaginary component.

i is like a placeholder that indicates that the number it’s next to is imaginary; it’s easiest to think of it as the square root of -1. So i² = -1, and is therefore a real number (or maybe just the real component of a complex number, which we’ll get to).

Visualizing a complex number isn’t too hard if you don’t take the idea of imaginary numbers too seriously (and by that, I mean, don’t get stuck on the idea that it’s called imaginary, or that it’s the square root of a negative number—not that imaginary numbers are frivolous).

Picture a plane where you have a real axis and an imaginary axis, as follows:

You can also do the above in 3D! Just like the movies.

So instead of having a real axis and imaginary axis, you’d have a real plane and an imaginary plane, like below:

where the x-y plane is real.

Now say I have a complex number z = 2 + 3i.

[side note: z is the conventional letter picked for complex numbers]

I would draw it like this on my plane:

where my real component has a magnitude of 2 and my imaginary component has a magnitude of 3. The resulting vector of these magnitudes:

is my complex number z.

So a real number is basically a complex number with no imaginary component (and vice versa).

Using the example above, Re{z} = 2 and Im{z} = 3i.