Intellectual Frustration

This is one of those blog entries you will just have to suffer through. I was sitting here musing just thinking about my latest frustration and for some perverted reason, I decided to start making a list of things that truly frustrate me.

1. First of all, there is the "I don't care frustration." This can occur in several contexts. For example, you are watching some technologically sophisticated show. Like tonight, I was watching Disney's World of Color show. I sitting there looking at beautiful colors being projected through lighted water streams. I don't know, just call it my weirdness, I find myself just sitting there checking the color purity so I could try and determine if they were using some kind of high intensity LED technology. I knew better than to try and discuss this aloud with adjacent people because I knew I would get the response, "Who cares, it's enough it works and looks cool." Another version of this is when someone says, "I just use it, I don't care how it works."

2. I step outside and I am immediately struck by the beauty of the day. The colors of the leaves are intoxicating they are so vivid. All around me, in the life scurrying around and in the weather, there are patterns I can see. It is one of those rare times the outdoors has become a symphony. The numerous patterns all seem to dance in a coordinated rhythm. Because I can see the trees over a large distance, I suddenly see pressure waves as patterns form in the way the leaves are blowing. It's so weird that no matter happens with a fluid such as air, that sound waves are generated in it as a result of any action. I wonder if I could listen to the waves being generated and their pattern, if, for example, could I be told a tale of how a certain weather pattern was generated and where it is going. I know if I tell someone my weird idea that they are not going to think about it anyway. Likely, if they don't tag me as a total nut job, they will just throw at me some equations (those impossible to understand fluid equations) and just walk away.

3. I don't know why, but ever since I was little, the first thing I ever do when I meet a person is that I map the person's mind. It's fascinating how different people think. I think I really started doing this in my over crowded third grade classroom. There was a box in the teacher's mind. If you went outside that box you got smacked. So it was good to know where the bounds of that box was. I learned from that, that if I ever accidentally crossed that box's boundary, the fastest way to quell an aggressive response is to give a person a path to humiliate me. If I did that, it stopped them in their tracks. And I secretly win, because I controlled their mind.

Anyway, that's a digression. I sat down the other day and tried to map the profoundly gifted mind based on the knowledge I've acquired so far. I sat there and thought, "Gee, this kind of person probably thinks on a mathematical level 10 times greater than I do (Yes, my mind frequently wanders like that, its one of its more amusing properties). When I think that way, it always makes me feel like even more of an idiot in math (I have a love/hate relationship with the subject). It's times like that that my perversity really shows. A math problem pops into my head. I have a burning desire to know the answer to this problem. Probably a stupid misunderstanding on my part. I wondered if such problems ever pop into their minds, even at a young age. I am going to be obnoxious and write out the problem. I know you didn't want to hear the problem, but the beauty of a blog is I can write it anyway. I was thinking about the number pi. It's irrational. So that means that as you compute it, it approaches asymptotically some real number. So I take a compass, set it to an integer length, and then draw a circle. Then I compute the circumference, you know the old formula drilled into your head early in your educational life, 2 times pi times the radius. Hmm. I don't understand. The circumference is an irrational number. That means that as I calculate the circumference, the ends of the arc that is just about to become a circle approach each other, asymptotically. But they can never touch because it is an asymptote. Yet I know they do. I just drew it. As far as I know, if I were to measure the circumference around the circle, a physical measurement can't come up to be an irrational number.

4. Oh well, now I feel truly stupid for not knowing the answer to the paradox. So now I will stop musing and go back to thinking about mundane things where I belong.