Personal Blogs

[This is a mid-think post about something that I will, maybe, write a more reasoned post about in my nonsense.]

For one reason or another I needed to look back through my blog posts—crivens, I have written loads of loads of nonsense, haven't I?

Anyway, I got interested in what I was doing/feeling this time last year—much the same is the answer. Is this a good thing?

Maybe, but in one sense very not—I can see that I'm falling [have already fallen?] into the same study-trap that I was in then: I'm not pushing myself hard enough.

For example, last night I was working my way through a group theory proof, I could see, in a general sense, what was going on. But I was skipping over details, you can't do that! Not when you're learning anyway. I wouldn't do this if I was reading code—then I would need to see what every line did.

The time has come when I either, need to get serious about maths, or decide that these maths is just a hurdle that I have to jump over in whatever way that I can.

If I decide the former [which I will] then I need to buckle down and start making this stuff mine. By which I mean that I need to be able pull together what I know in an organized fashion. At the moment there's too much, "oh, yeh I knew that" when I read the answer and not enough, "how do I get from there to there? What things do I know?"

I'm not explaining myself well here. That's the problem, I've worked on quotient groups for nearly three years now, could I explain them [and why they were important] to my wife? [She wouldn't let me.] Can I explain them to myself?

For the topology course I don't have the same problems, although I can see the problems approaching. [I just tried to explain something that I thought that I knew in the forums, fortunately I realized my error in time].

If you can't explain then you don't know.