One of the more unutterably delightful aspects of my existence right now is the fact that without warning I am liable to be roped into sitting through interminable "webinars" on various aspects of asking people for money. Generally when this happens I am required to take notes on the presentations, which means I get to bring a notebook along with me, and this is where the benefits of boredom come in.
About an hour into the presentation this morning I found myself doing math for fun out of sheer soul-killing ennui. My arithmetic skills are on par with those of a standard gastropod, but I can do really basic algebra, and after doodling some functions it occurred to me that you can tell whether the graph of a function is going to be linear by looking at the function itself, and that if you want to have a complex wiggly line on your graph you are going to have to do some interesting messing about with calculus of the sort I don't know how to do. Drawing complex wiggly lines on the graph made me think about sinewaves, and how alternating current is depicted, and then how rectification of alternating current to direct current is depicted, and that brought me back to a conversation I had last night with a classmate.
One of the stories I've written for my workshop this semester features vacuum tubes of various types as a theme, including everybody's favourite lightbulb-with-legs, the Cooper-Hewittic mercury-arc rectifier. A nutty character collects vacuum tubes in the story, and her pride and joy is a 150-6G six-phase MAR. I was explaining what one of these does, and somehow got into a lengthy explanation on how vacuum tubes in general work, and when I'd finally run down I was asked "Why do you know all this?"
Mostly because of last week's post: research is for fun. Also because when I see something cool I want to know how it works, and this means that I need to do considerable lookings-up and then askings of people who know more than I do--but even with the math, physics, and engineering background of a whelk Ican learn about them, and understand them, and enjoy knowing things.
When I'm bored I get especially creative, too; I'll make up stories or twist bits of notebook paper into twine and braid them or draw genealogical charts of the various families inhabiting my fiction, but I think today was the first time I've been sufficiently bored to do math without being prompted. I think this is probably either very sad or rather deep, and I can't quite work out which.
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4 comments:
I used to entertain myself during "webinars" (seriously?) by practicing writing left-handed. In high school, one of my friends and I used to pass time in boring classes by holding our breath and timing it. Needless to say, I can now hold my breath for over two minutes and sort of write left handed, both highly useful skills.
I'd say entertaining yourself with math is a sign of intelligence.
Spencer,
Sounds like a lot of fun :). Liz and Spencer have a happy thanksgiving!
Reminds me I no longer draw on my jeans when bored. I should have kept some of them; they were very nearly pop art. Or art art. Or crap art. Or the expressions of a tortured soul, in ink on denim. Ah, the denim days of yore.
The word verification for the last comment was "tothm." Sounds like a particularly toothsome creme brulee.
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