Personal Blogs

My feet are in a horrid mess, I've worked seventeen days on the trot and I've been doing six in the am until nine/ten in the pm shifts for the last three days.

Still I bagged, I hope, another five marks in my topology TMA tonight. More to the point, in doing so, I understood [yet another] something that is you intuitively think is true, is not true when it comes to topology.

Topology is just plain mad but it has a beauty that any kind of jejune normalcy just doesn't.

My feet can be fixed, my mind is forever altered.

Started with Danny and I painting the new pinboards in the front entrance. Pinboards are a pain to paint, they're dusty, textured and rough. Even with well-thinned emulsion and a thick-pile roller it takes for ever. Danny did the cutting-in, I did the roller work.

When we'd finished we stood back and admired our work. It looked great, as it should do—we've spent loads of time, effort and cash over the last few weeks making it so. Getting the War Memorial bronzes/brasses cleaned cost over 2K alone, the oak-framed pinboards weren't cheap either.

Danny and I have got a wee bit Colin & Justin lately, we spent ages agonizing over the exact shade of green that we wanted for the pinboards, Danny has been madly rearranging the trophies in the new display cabinets for over a week. There was still something wrong.

It was the plasma screen, it wasn't on but even if it had been it would have destroyed the symmetry that we'd worked so hard to create. I'm not a geek for nothing, so I created a powerpoint template that matched. For once I lucky, I get perfect colour matches.

Sad old sods that we are, we horizontal-beamed as we did three-sixties[2π] from various vantage points to check out our work. The thing looks lovely. Almost nobody will notice what we have achieved in any conscious sense, they will subliminaly clock that they are in a temple of education.

Then it was off to my topology tutorial.

I'd forgotten that it was festival time, central Edinburgh was stowed with mal-dressed folk. I was beginning to get ratty with them when I ran into Graham in the Grassmarket. He was having a fag, which I'd been in-head planning for some while. So I rolled one as we walked to the tutorial together.

I've had a couple of maths books wasting time on my bookshelves for a while now, so I'd been planning to give them to mates, who would appreciate them. I had two about my person when I met Graham.

His was: the philosophy of maths. He will have much more fun with it that I ever could. I, also, gave Chris my partial differentiation book, it's probably too easy for him but...

Graham and I were early, not the first, so we sat with the others in the reception cafe-typee-thingee [nobody ever eats the free fruit] and talked about t0pology, groups and the online OU life. I'm in an awkward place when it comes to either.

Then we did our topology. Towards the end of which I looked round my wee group of mathos, We were tired. Because I played chess from an early age I know that thinking is as knackering as digging holes.

When we'd finished doing the stuff that none of us understand [well I at least don't], I walked back through an even-more thronged Grassmarket/canal to my school. I did the few bits and pieces that were needed so that tomorrow, when the cleaners come, they won't be in my way. I would have liked to go for a pint with my mates...

When I got home I found my wife toiling in the garden, so I was obliged to help. She bossed me around for about an hour.

I was pecking by this point so, I played the astronomical card—the Perseids are due tonight Babe, I said. We might want to be out walking in the dark for that.

I'm now drinking strong cider, but come dark, if the sky is clear my wife and I will be out in the wild-world looking for the Persiads.

I don't often get days like today. But the fact that I get any days like today shows that I'm on the right track with my life.

Life is an existance theorem when it comes to the joy of it.

I helped a teacher rearrange her classroom today. After we'd finished we both agreed that there seemed to be more space. I pointed out that there couldn't actually be any more space, we hadn't taken anything out [and we didn't do anything 3-D]. But there was more space.

I went away for a wee ponder. The main change was that instead of ten blocks of three desks there was one big block in the shape of a square W.

Ah, borders and faces!

The original arrangement had eleven faces and ten borders. The new arrangement had only one border and two faces. Does this matter? Yes, I think that it does.

For example you want to paint a room, what do you do with the furniture? You shove it all together into the centre of the room don't you? You reduce it to a single border of the shortest possible length and the faces to two.

You don't get any more floor area but you get better connected space [not a proper term].

There's something topological about this...

My wife spent the day in the garden, I spent my day with topology [when no lifting was needed].

She had a good day, I think, and I thought that I'd had a good one too—I had a fair copy TMA question ready. Then the bomshell dropped—I was piddling around the course site when I saw a sinister errata. It appears that the TMA question, the one that I tackled, was exactly the same as an exercise in the unit text. So the TMA has been changed.

There's good and bad in this, mostly bad it has to be said.

• The good: I got the thing mostly right
• The bad: I didn't even spot that I'd done the thing before, and given that I'd seen a model answer why did I spend three pages doing something that was a paragraph in the unit?

Still, the thing is a doddle now, they didn't even bother to change the type of question—all I have to do is plug in another set of numbers. Mechanistic maths.

Which is what's beginning to worry me—is that all that I'm good for?

I finished my topology tma today [fair copy]. The thing is a mess, but will be submitted, as is, tomorrow. Time is something of a problem, for me, just now.

'tma away' is always a wee bit of a wrench—you know that you could have done better. This one has been a huge annoyance to me; I know what I wanted to achieve and I came up way short. Many of my solutions lacked elegance, some were grotesque.

I always say that if, you are coding something and you can't see the whole of the code on a single screen you have a problem. I'm getting like this with maths, and this tma fails to jump that hurdle.

I think that my answers are correct but I came to them in a shitty, verbose, fashion. Everything was an expedience.

I hope that I'm developing a personal style with maths, if I amn't I'll give up. If you can't bring you into what you are doing, is it worth the effort? But aside from a couple of questions, I seemed to be brute-forcing my answers [taking all of the cases and dealing with them monkey-poke-fashion]. By the itching of my palms I knew that there was a neater way to do this stuff.

My trouble is that I'm lazy and impatient all at once. The only way to achieve elegance is by knowing what you are doing so well that you can look effortless, to others, when doing it. Pissing around at the last moment just won't cut it.

In the end, as ever, I'm bitching about me—comfortable with that, now for the, trickier groups tma...

I'm coming to the end of unit A1 of the topology course, distance and continuity. What to do next?

So far nothing has been too off-the-wall  [we're stretching our M208 stuff mostly], I think that I see where we are heading. At some point the ground will be swiped from under us and we shall fall flailing into the abyss, but we aren't there just yet...

I'm on backshift [yet again] next week ,so I'm not going to get too much done. I'll sleep late and then lie drowsing, with a unit text in my mitts and a bed-full of pencil stubs just waiting to stab me in my soft parts.

Still, I have some choice about, this, not too much. Should I?

• Try to cement my knowledge of A1 by doing lots of exercises [ε-δ stuff mostly]
• Start A2, metric spaces
• Do 1B1 for the groups course [why is it called that?]
• A combination of the above

I should do the first [that was the plan], but I think that I've neglected the groups for too long now. They may pine.