Friday, March 07, 2014

the curse of time.

i don't know what exactly i mean by the title;
at best, i can only explain it by example.



a month ago I was absolutely delighted to convert one of my old proofs .. which initially relied on weak star cοmpactness .. into a purely geometric argument.

at the time i thought this was the coolest thing ever .. and i still think it was worth the effort .. but it's been a month and now i have to stop myself from saying ..

wait: shouldn't it be obvious..?



as another example: whenever i wrote an exam for one of my courses, i'd take it myself and multiply the elapsed time by 4; if the product was less than the length of the exam period, then the exam was too hard for the course.

now i'm considering changing it to a factor of 5.

either students today are slower or i'm getting faster .. and i'm almost sure that i'm not getting any faster.

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