Over the last six months I took an intensive pre-calculus course at the U. It means I learned a year's worth of precalculus in one semester. As I look back over the blog I am surprised that I never mentioned it here. My time on Howard's Brainstorm's probably used up any commentariat urges I felt about this topic at the time.
But now I am thinking about what, exactly, happened to me.
Note 1. Patience with the left brain.
I have always been smart technically. It has always been easy for me to grasp extremely difficult notions and relate them correctly to similar ideas. But my handicap has been an impatience that becomes a kind of wild feeling after any prolonged exposure to hard ideas. After 20 minutes of studying semiology or genetics or hyperdimensional space, I am in a zone and happy. After 40 minutes I am manic and ready to tear through the room rearranging the furniture, making noise, unable to sit still. You can't build a career on 30 minutes of attention twice a day.
The math class forced me to learn to sit with hard stuff for hours. I had to detune my adrenaline. At first this resulted in increased naps of increased intensity and satisfaction. Eventually I found I could study for 4 hours at a stretch, that I had acquired a kind of pace, but it precluded a deep intellectual excitement. A kind of yoga. I find this extremely useful in several areas of my life, including my real job which has recently changed from mastering lots of new technology intermittantly, to mastering one really big, extensive technology over a fairly long arc.
Note 2. Humility.
I am much more interested in other people's ideas these days, and concurrently less interested in my own, or even coming up with new ideas. When I began to surrender to trigonometric exercises (Hey! I GET this stuff, lets move on, oKAY!??) and did them over and over, it began to sink in that the simplicity and elegance of sines and cosines was one of the underlying mysteries of modern western technology, and I had always taken them for granted. The Great Love of My Life intellectually has been hyperspace: multidimensional reality. I have been stuck in a geometric and visual relationship with these wonderous issues, however. The class imposed a painful apprenticeship to some brutally hard but eventually very rewarding Algebra. It was a true breakthrough for me to realize that these concepts which I flung carelessly around in my thinking were much more powerful, basic and interesting than I had allowed for decades. And for the real humility kicker, there are tens of thousands of 19 year olds getting this stuff every day, every year, year after year. Okay!
Note 3. A new love on the horizon.
When my math teacher found out that I had actually published in the field of multidimensional data display and organized international workshops on the topic, he asked me what the hell I was doing in precalculus. I told him truthfully I needed the prerequisite to take the more interesting classes in modelling that I wanted to add to my major in Urban Studies. I also allowed as I had some kind of weird intuition about multidimensional applications of cosine transform methods as was used in the JPEG compression algorithm. It sounds like science fiction, but the depiction of complex higher dimensional data sets is hopelessly mired in a few tired methods that haven't seen any progress in 15 years or more, and that is reason enough to try something of a gamble. He happened to be knowledgable enough about these things to at least know what I was talking about, but not enough to form a solid opinion about my chances. He gave me a B- in the class and invited me to talk to him this summer and see if the U had a place for the kind of research I envisioned.
Note 4. The first break in 20 some years.
Ever since I got my first programming certificate in 1982, I have been pushing myself to develop a multidimensional data visualization package that incorporates what are considered "aesthetic" perceptual skills but will someday be recognized as essential intelligence. I have been perhaps unlucky enough to actually get some results without ever getting backing, and it has consumed more than its share of my faith, energy, and youth. The work I did in the math class was hard enough that I felt I deserved a break, and I have spent the two weeks since finals assembling a very inexpensive collection of used midi gear to add to my modest home studio, where I intend to make noises for the summer. I feel I am getting some intellectual rest for a change, and not being "on" all the time about dimensionality and representation and cognition and perceptual physiology etc etc etc. I have found time to play, with my toys, and with Kelsey, and with Sam and Sara, too. It feels good.
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