Pete's Log: cogito ergo sum
Entry #1320, (Life in General)(posted when I was 24 years old.)
I've just now realized that for the third week in a row, I've forgotten to get my five free dollars at the bookstore. All I have to do to earn this is get my picture taken. Blah.
Several weeks ago, when I was still in the habit of being a superstar model, I used some of the bookstore money I earned to buy A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving. I finally finished it a couple days ago. Before this book, I considered Irving to be one of my favorite authors. I think now he's got the top spot. I probably liked Garp better than Owen Meany, but Owen Meany was pretty damn good.
Tonight Meg and I saw Signs (written, directed, and so on by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mel Gibson). I liked it. It had some fun faith and fate themes that made it complement Owen Meany very well. And isn't it a fun twist of fate that I finished this book and saw this movie so close in time?
Um. So class has been kinda silly this past week. We've been talking about probability, and I've been messing it up. I keep looking at the material I want to talk about and thinking "oh, I know this stuff, I don't need to prepare much," and then finding myself at the board, doing silly things like using permutations instead of combinations. Silly me. So tomorrow I'm gonna show them Donald in Mathmagic Land, and then I'll use fall break to get better prepared.
As part of my attempts to redeem myself, I went to the bookstore looking for a fun probability book. I wanted something with entertaining examples. I found a book of that nature, and also picked up three other math books. One called Zero, which discusses the history and such of -- you guessed it -- the number 0. Another called something like The Magical Maze which is a basic intro to the fun of math, written primarily for a youthful audience. It looked like a good source of ways to make math more fun. And finally, I bought a Dictionary of curious and interesting numbers.
I like math. I need to dedicate a significant amount of time to getting better at it, especially the calculusy stuff that I avoided learning when I was supposed to (through the clever technique of not going to class).