Tuesday January 23, 2007 5:10 am Lethbridge Sunrise 8:16 Sunset 17:10 Hours of daylight: 8:54

A. Morning Musings

5:00 am It is +6 C at the moment with a high of +9 C forecast. The wind is still there: 33 km/h with gusts to 46 km/h and forecast to rise to 50 km/h with gusts to 70 km/h. But it is not howling like it was yesterday.

Here are the news.

CBC Headline: Crown Lays Out Grisly Case Against Pickton

As I predicted, this is still the lead headline. Apparently he has admitted to killing 49 women. The heads of the 6 he is accused of murdering in this trial were found in a freezer. This is only going to get worse. Why, if he has admitted to killing them, need we have such a prolonged trial?

Canadian Headline: see above

Australian Headline: (from The Australian): Vanstone Dumped, Hockey and Turnbull Promoted

Federal politics. Watching Vanstone over the last two years while we were in Australia, I am surprised she lasted this long. Hockey & Turnbull are names I am not familiar with. Turnbull will be Environment Minister with resposibility for water. It is nice to see Environment rated as an important post. That has not been true in Canada until very recently: a combination of an embarassing presence at the last UN Kyoto Accord meeting together with the announcement that it is the opposition Liberal party's primary priority.

 

I continue to spend a couple of hours a day reviewing my books, rearranging some, throwing a few in the recycling, and filling boxes to be given to the city library and the uni library. There is an aspect of cognitive dissonance here as I do not want to admit that I spent too much money and time on some of these books.

Thinking that, I decided to google "cognitive dissonance" and found this web site: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/index.htm

I like the way it is organized as well as his informal style. Overall, I think he has done a superb job of synthesizing the academic material. This is what I should be doing with this web site. I think I have a good approach to a daily journal but I have yet to address the issue of "so what?". As a result of my daily activities, what is the net result as far as my understanding of a topic goes? I also like his use of mind mapping software.

It is important to create my own maps: one each for my major topics: Psychology, Technology, Mathematics, Science, History, Art, Philosophy, Literature, Trains, Go, Birds, Drawing and Recipes. The danger is to treat these charts as permanent. I need a way of documenting the evolution of each chart. I could do this the same way I keep track of my notes: each time I make a change I save the revised chart on the same web page so one can scroll through the revisions.

Similarly, it is important to realize that all such maps are very personal. They do not represent the abstract idea of what constitutes commonly accepted knowledge - it only represents my understanding of the topic (which in some cases may be appallingly little). Raban's travel novel is an excellent case in point: his views on early native cultures in north-west North America are different than much official scholarship, but they make sense.

This may also be a way to integrate all of my books into a set of coherent wholes. Right now they seem to be more like a set of incoherent holes.

It is still early in the morning (6:24 am). Time to play with this a little.

From rear window	South patio
Both images taken at 1:15 PM

B. Plan

Immediate
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Technology	Begin reading "iPhoto"	1 hr
	Digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings	1 hr
	Preview Delicious Library software	1 hr
Model Trains	Follow tutorial for 3rdPlanIt (Manual p. 8 - 13)	1 hr
Literature	Begin reading "The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle" by Monique Proulx	1 hr
Mathematics	Review and organization of my personal mathematics books	3 hr
Later
Chores	Investigate water softeners for home
Technology	Read manual for cell phone
	Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac"
	Burn backup of images onto DVD
	Edit iPhoto images
Mathematics	Read "Fearless Symmetry" chap 9: Elliptic Curves
Model Trains	Add ground cover to oil refinery diorama
	Continue assembly of coaling tower
	Purchase DCC system
History	Read Watson "Ideas"
Philosophy	Read & make notes for "Breaking the Spell"
GO	Complete reading "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"
Puzzles	The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #10

C. Actual/Note

	Mathematics 01 January 23
Mathematics Chronology
8:30 am I am still playing. I began by taking a couple of mathy books off the shelf and tried creating a concept map corresponding to each chapter in the book. This lead to the idea of taking all of my math books and creating a "real" map on the living room floor, each stack of books corresponding to one node (i.e. topic) in my personal math space. This accomplished a few goals. One, it acted as a strenuous weight lifting routine as I moved books from two different levels in the house. Two, it was interesting to see how the categories formed. Three, it lead to the phrase: where am I (in this mess)?, when am I (as I have not read some of these books in decades)? and then, obviously, who am I (since I am some incomplete combination of all of this, plus other potential combinations of the remaining books on my shelves. But books are not everything, for most people they are hardly anything, and what makes up an individual is much more than what has been read. Experience is a much better umbrella to hide under. More important that the accumulation of print is the issue of under what conditions can I recall what is necessary from all this to help me handle the present situaton. Answering questions on an exam is a very small part of this. If one is a mathematician this may mean how can one extend this knowledge in a new manner. If one is a teacher of mathematics, this may mean how can one set up a syllabus that will foster learning on the part of the students. 11:10 am Here are a few photos of reality: Overview Chaos & Fractals Infinity - Number - Primes Education Calculus Logo - APL -Technology So much for a general overview. Here is a better sense of the distinct categories: Mathematics Numbers Special Numbers (e, i, p) Primes Infinity Chaos & Fractals General & Recreational Calculus Real Variable Complex Variable History Geometry Groups & Symmetry Science Education Learning Teaching Notation APL Logo Mathematica The labels in red represent those categories with the most books. These do give a fair representation of the topics that are of most interest to me. Logo was my main preoccupation during the 1980s, chaos & fractals during the 1990s. Education was always there, as was recreational mathematics. A more detailed interest in special numbers and prime numbers is a relatively recent interest, fostered by the abundance of new books with this focus. While looking at these books, I became interested in one of my favorites from the 1970s: Harold Jacobs (1970) Mathematics - A Human Endeavor. I have a personal preference for this over all of the textbooks that have published in the last 35 years. It captures the spirit of mathematics: the process of working with ideas rather than numbers, of discovering formulae rather than using them, and conveying a sense of open-ended exploration rather than mind-numbing memorization of both facts and procedures. We have lost our map. Here are the chapter titles from Jacobs: The Mathematical Way of Thinking (inductive & deductive reasoning) Number Sequences (arithmetic, geometric & Fibonacci) Functions and Their Graphs Large Numbers and Logarithms Regular Polygons (symmetry & polyhedra) Mathematical Curves (circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, sine, spirals, cycloids) Some Methods of Counting (permutations & combinations) The Mathematics of Chance (probability) An Introduction to Statistics (frequency distributions, central tendency, variability) Some Topics in Topology (networks, trees) The emphasis is on ideas. The ideas are not that many, and they are not that difficult. The underlying idea is a search for regularity and pattern, not to get the right answer. The concept of a "right answer" stifles thought and exploration and encourages one to stop thinking. It is one of the worst ideas that education has adopted. There is a place for it, but it should be a relatively minor place. The major ideas should focus on process and rationale, an answer is just a logical consequence of what is really important. I have made a promising start at clarifying where I am in my morass of mathematics books. I at least can see the trees in the forest. Now to identify a few for climbing. 12:10 PM

D. Reflection

10:30 PM I had a good iChat with Allan earlier this evening. That is an amazing application: the voice is excellent and the image is very good as well. Much better than a phone (and free).

Allan gave me some information on a new software program called Delicious Library that takes information from a book and obtains additional information and images from amazon.com. I have this working with a demo version when I type in the title and author. The bar code reader appears to be disabled and I am trying to find out if the Import feature is disabled as well. Since I have a data base of my books, this would be a great feature if it works. An exciting way to end the day.