August 4

Saturday August 4, 2007 7:00 am Lethbridge

It is +7 C with a high forecast of +28 C. Sunrise 6:05 Sunset 21:09 Hours of daylight: 15:04

A. Morning Musings

7:00 am

It should be cooler today. It only takes a couple of minutes to set up the next daily web page. Now for a cuppa while I think about doing some mathematics.

Immediate	Description	Time
Literature	Continue reading "Howards End" by E. M. Forster	1 hr
Mathematics	Continue ch. 1 of "A Transition to Advanced Mathematics"	1 hr
Mathematics	Complete problems 4.11 - 4.21 of "The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems"	3 hr
Mathematics	Continue reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb	1 hr

C. Actual Learning Activities

7:30 am

Mathematics 33

August 4, 2007

7:30 am

I want to redo problems 4.11 - 4.18, this time actually drawing the graphs as I think through the problem.

calculus

10:00 am

The activity took about 2 1/2 hours, but it was very pleasant and instructive. I never would have been able to do the last three problems without having ratched up my skills and understanding with the earlier problems. One must be very careful when working with absolute values. It is possible to sketch fairly complex functions by carefully building up the graph from a simpler graph which is well known by applying a series of graphical transformations. I do not recall ever doing this before.

10:45 am

I have been playing around with printing a few of these web pages. The page breaks are very poorly handled, but the overall content comes across quite well. This raises the question of whether it is worth doing. Probably not. If one assumes an average of 2 pages/day, that comes to about 700 pages, and if the average is closer to 4 pages/day, the total comes to about 1400 pages.

Treating these web pages as raw data, how should one condense the material? One approach is to examine the annual chronology table. This gives a fairly accurate summary of how much time was spent on various Learning activities over an entire year. But, as I have commented many times, the real issue is not time but cognition. What have I learned, and how much of this can I utilize in a novel situation requiring such knowledge?

As an aside, consider the case of a young student in school, or an undergraduate university student. In the case of the young school student, she spends about 6 hours/day times about 200 days/year equaling about 1200 hours/year studying. What has she learned it that amount of time. For the undergraduate, the numbers are closer to 8 hours/day and about 100 days/semester, giving 1600 hours for a 2-semester year and 2400 hours for a 3-semester year. What are my numbers? At about 2 hours/day and 300 days/year suggests 600 hours/year. That is surprisingly low. I am clearly not engaging in Learning at anywhere near the level that I did as a student. On the other hand, I have a life. I do not want to spend 6 - hours/day studying. Fair enough. But one should also recognize that the amount of new learning will be appropriately less. It is the goals that need to be readjusted down. This is another argument for cutting back on the variety of topics that interest me and focusing on only two or three. Two of these are calculus and abstract algebra. A third would be literature. I must try to make sure that most of my Learning time is focused on these three activities, and that I be careful about adding to much to my agenda. However birding is great sport. I will try to alternate that with Literature. Thus days spent birding will take priority over literature, but the two activities together will not interfere with my mathematics activities.