Now is When I Get to Wear My Pretty Summer Dresses Again
I have been thinking about math a lot lately. I told my acaemic advisor that I should probably take another math class before I am dumped into the real world, just to brush up on my skills. Since I don’t need any more math credits to graduate, he recommended an ambiguous artist-friendly elective called Math and the Imagination, which sounds titillating but came with an incredibly sophomoric course description. I declined his advisement and signed up for Alchemy instead. But today, I stumbled across this delightful post on a Times opinion blog that made me remember why I wanted to take another math class: I like math; I think it’s neat-o. The end of the article really taps into my poet-girl obsession with quantification:
Snell’s law describes how light rays bend when they pass from air into water, as they do when shining into a swimming pool. Light moves more slowly in water, much like the hiker in the snow, and it bends accordingly to minimize its travel time. Similarly, light also bends when it travels from air into glass or plastic as it refracts through your eyeglass lenses.
The eerie point is that light behaves as if it were considering all possible paths and automatically taking the best one. Nature — cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone” — somehow knows calculus.
This is the kind of OpEd I can get behind. Rather than try to enroll in an architecture class about the mathematics of concrete, I am going to dig out my old calc books and get the ball rolling again on the physics portion of my MCAD studies. Whether I want to go to grad school or not, I have to say that I just enjoy learning. The great thing about practicing math is that it is soothingly rhythmic. Like making lists of words with similar sounds or collecting geodes, it appeals the obsessive inwardness of excercising one’s own brain.
I hope everyone has been watching Life on the Discovery Channel. It’s a great throwback to the days when Discovery actually showed really fascinating animal documentaries and elevated ecology and biology to everyday cool. Shark week, anyone? These days, it’s all Ice Road Truckers or whatever, and the up-close shots of flies’ eyes have been forgotten. I miss the microcosmic focus of the good old Discovery. We used to be able to put on the poisonous snake shows to scare my dad, but not anymore. It’s only cool to watch king crab boats at work once or twice, but snake bites just never get old. If only Steve Irwin hadn’t had to go and get himself killed like that (poor guy), I would watch a lot more educational TV
Eat ice cream cones with friends. Add sprinkles if you want.
