It's the perfect time to work, too: it's Friday and working now gives a good excuse for weekend follies [1] later .. yet no prelim reading accomplished and no research done. I think I know why:
Deep down inside me, I want this holiday break to be an actual, proper holiday -- not just the peace and quiet where one settles down, without students underfoot, and gets down to work -- but doing non-academic things and non-work things.
I mean having "fun" which others outside of your building and department would also consider to be fun. For example,
- Renting and watching movies is considered fun, by most persons.
I haven't done this in a while. - Building snowmen, then tackling them in a drunken mirth might be considered a little strange, but still fun.
I might have done this before, but I can't quite remember .. - Writing on chalkboards and using the Triangle Inequality [2] might not be considered fun by the "regular" stretch of the imagination.
I think I do this at least once a week, and my friend Kevin does this almost every day.
But as we all know, procrastination needs no motivation. It is merely a state of mind and if one willingly enters that mindset and realm, then that is enough. However, one must reach that realm first, and not sit or stand on the neutral boundary, lollygagging and squandering time that could otherwise be spent on real work or real play. That "frozen" mindset reminds me of this passage from Dante's Inferno, Canto I.
And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
having escaped from sea to shore, turns back
to watch the dangerous waters he has quit,
so did my spirit, still a fugitive,
turn back to look intently at the pass
that never has let any man survive.
having escaped from sea to shore, turns back
to watch the dangerous waters he has quit,
so did my spirit, still a fugitive,
turn back to look intently at the pass
that never has let any man survive.
If I ever get my act together and make a decision, then I can salvage something from today, whether it be great fun or a modicum of work. Maybe both .. who knows? But I have to stop idling and sitting so mentally-transiently, and do something.
[1] .. never mind the fact that I never do anything on weekends anyways, with the occasional exception of being invited to math grad parties, which are far better than they sound, as my non-mathmo flatmate can testify.
[2] .. Roughly speaking, the Triangle Inequality (Δ≠) is your common sense about distances, but written in mathematical symbols: that is, if you're travelling from A to B, and then B to C, then that total distance travelled is no shorter than had you travelled directly from A to C.
(Δ≠) |A - C| ≤ |A - B| + |B - C|
See? That wasn't so bad, was it?
To the experts, yes: I did use norm-notation without much reason why. q:
2 comments:
Isn't it strange that the statements that we call "inequalities" are not of the form "A is not equal to B". Instead, they are either "A is less than B" or "A is less than or equal to B". The latter statement should not be called an inequality at all, since it allows A and B to be equal...
A set can be open, closed, open and closed, or neither open nor closed...
It seems like you're asserting an "inequality" as something that should be a pure inequality of quantities. It's a fair point and one I hadn't thought about for very much: at most I see it as an abuse of language.
I don't know very many of those (that is, pure inequalities), and some would say that the case of equality in a conventional "inequality" of interest is an industry in itself.
Some also call this 'sharpness,' though a 'sharp result' may arise from sources that are non-analytic in nature ..
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