Plei! How is the adorable Lilybean?? I say I lurk because I mostly just sit here reading, and not saying anything. Pathetic, I know.

I was however noting the other day when you posted pictures that your daughter has the most amazing large and beautiful eyes.

And what ita, and tommy, said. This whole big blackboard of equations that resolves to those tiny, unrelated letters. Just purty.

a PC way of living articulated by Lesbians

Huh. I'm a lesbian. Who knew?

Women who follow this life script based upon biology rather than a PC way of living articulated by Lesbians are more likely to have a successful family and a happy husband.

Yes, I'm sure it's just the misguided desire to be PC keeping all those Lesbians from having happy husbands...

I went and read the Salon letters, for I am weak. And now, also horrified. I'm thinking that the whole "editor" concept is kind of key to LTE -- otherwise, you have wanky blog comments instead.

In more fun news (really!), my math ran out of steam in the 3rd semester of calc. I still had that beautiful eureka thing going with all the concepts at that point, but my lifelong habit of never doing the homework finally caught up with me. I never got to the more advanced stuff -- which I agree is all about the beautiful and the visual and the patterns and stuff just FITS, damn it, and not about the numbers much at all -- except as a bystander, and I still dream of grasping topology.

My obligatory math rant, though, is about alg2/trig/pre-calc. It's incredibly telling, and really typical of much wider populations than here, that so many people have posted that they liked algebra and geometry and then tanked. Those are clear and well-defined and graspable things, with some real joy to them. So is calculus. But the educational biz has a bunch of other stuff that they have to stick in there somewhere before you get back to the fun stuff, and they long ago settled on doing it in the form of a couple years' force-feeding of rote memorization and looking up stuff in tables (for lo, I am of the pre-yes you can use a calculator in school generation) and assorted crap that's not really obviously related to anything else you do before or after. And unless you're one of the ones who's wired to go on with it (in which case you're going to endure all the crap anyway), it falls at just the time where they say "you're done with your high school requirements, so you don't really need to do this any more (and we'll just do you a huge disservice by ignoring the fact that it's gonna really suck to try to pick this up again when you have to do it in college when you're a year or two out of practice, for the math, she is like a muscle that can atrophy), and, well, I guess you're just not a math person." And so it's no wonder so many people burn out at exactly that point.

I took calculus in high school and fun theoretical fractal math in college and was generally good at math. But it was lots of work for me for not much return - I much preferred to spend my time learning stuff that I actually enjoyed, and the only homework was reading, not slogging away over mystical and abstract problem sets. I am married to the kind of person who assumes you understand linear algebra and matrices, and can't explain his work without them. I still remember the sohcahtoa rule and have used it in real world applications.

ION we are intending to go to a concert by bus and it is POURING rain suddenly as our estimated time of departure approaches. Rain, please pass now!

I still remember the sohcahtoa rule and have used it in real world applications.

::googles::

You had a mnemonic!!!?!

::sulks::

Oh, right, we had a formula book. Never mind.

I completely forgot about SOHCAHTOA. Shoulda done the homework, I guess.

I was great in math until I took geometry from the hockey coach. I had 102% in freshman algebra. I read somewhere that it's common for girls to do well in math until that point, but the geometry teacher was truly amazingly awful, so I tend to blame him.

Yeah, me too. I love solving puzzles, and I was always good at math (I was even on the math team in middle school!). But I think once it got to the point where I needed a calculator to figure something out for me (sine, cosine, pi to the brazilianth decimal), I lost interest.

Yeah, I don't know what this is all about. After I got my first Cs in college calculus I was shocked when packing up my childhood bedroom to find a ribbon from a contest in elementary school-- I had placed third in a district-wide math contest and I have absolutely no memory of this. I remember sucking at math practically from the womb.

Plei! How is the adorable Lilybean?? I say I lurk because I mostly just sit here reading, and not saying anything. Pathetic, I know.

She's pretty dang adorable, I must say. And you don't say much, but I know you're probably there, so it's separate in my mind from all those faceless nameless lurkers out there.

Paul keeps checking out math books from the library. At this point, I think he should start using his free credit hours to take evening math classes, if he's that interested.

And you don't say much, but I know you're probably there, so it's separate in my mind from all those faceless nameless lurkers out there.

Awww. thanks!

I something think about going back to school (okay, a lot, because when I did go back to finish my degree I lurved it a lot!) but lack of time and money prevent me, alas. Also, laziness.