Brain stuff « POWIP

3Feb/106

Brain stuff

Cognitive fluency - we like to think of stuff that's easy to think about. For me, I prefer to think of individual atoms, and not conglomerations of same; this is why I majored in physics as opposed to chemistry. Those chemists.... scare me.

Is Math a socialist plot? Or just hard to think about?

You don't have to be bipolar to be a genius, but it helps. I could note that pretty much all the examples come from the arts... but I've met plenty of messed-up mathematicians [and some infamous ones in history], so it may hold. Of course, part of this whole mad genius thing in the academy could be that only the mad could put up with it [or it's one of the most friendly places for the mentally unstable to work]. Lots of possibilities.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

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Dan Collins
February 3rd, 2010 - 07:33

Keats’ formulation “Beauty is Truth—Truth Beauty” is the same thing, really.

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- Meep
  February 3rd, 2010 - 07:44
  
  Truth is beautiful, actually.
  
  But doesn’t mean it’s easy.
  
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Dan Collins
February 3rd, 2010 - 08:00

Yes, but the tendency in academe (as I’m sure you’ve seen me fulminate) is to see aesthetic pleasure as opposed to truth, and to inculcate an appreciation of the ugly, as a result. It’s the logical result of pursuing an inverted neo-Platonism, in which the kosmos is pitted against our minds’ worldliness, rather than seeing the human mind as somehow fitted (as would seem more likely) to the apprehension of the kosmos. And that, as Jeff would point out, means that without the curative lenses of academese, we are blind. Yadda yadda.

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agile_dog
February 3rd, 2010 - 09:28

In that article “Is Math a socialist plot?” (which is not the subject of the article), the author, a mathematician, talking about the term overeducated, says: No, there it is again in the article’s very first sentence,

“President Obama’s popularity has slipped among a wide swath of the population. Among the nation’s overeducated, however, he continues to do just fine.”. He don’t count so good for a mathematician – the word overeducated appears in the SECOND sentence. Maybe he is overeducated?

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StPatrick
February 3rd, 2010 - 20:19

No need to fear chemists – we just work in our own little cul-de-sac of physics. The laws you apply to your work apply to ours, we just apply them to electron shell interactions and matter-energy interactions on the atomic level.

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- Meep
  February 3rd, 2010 - 20:39
  
  still, it scrambles my brain
  
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