Can you look at anyone as though you love them?
No.
Can you recast anyone as a math major?
Not even.
I can see that you're struggling! Why don't you grab a piece of chalk and come up to the board to work on it?
Well, only 45 minutes left in class. Do your best.
I am really bad at calculus these days. I should take a refresher.
Do you remember how to compute the slope of a line? Rise over run? There's still 40 minutes left.
That's just algebra. I use algebra most days. I can never remember how to integrate and differentiate without looking it up.
In Sufism there is this hidden prophet, Khidr (or Khizr, Khezr, etc), who one may encounter but he will be disguised as someone ordinary or even wretched. A homeless person, a beggar, or someone so ordinary you wouldn't look twice at them. Sufis often recount miraculous meetings with him (he occurs in the Qur`an without name as a mysterious companion and teacher to Moses in the 18th sura).
I knew several remarkable men in Morocco and one of them, who was the most humble person I'd met though extraordinarily learned (among other things he had all 10 of the various minor variations of recitation of the Qur`an memorized and taught them). As I was departing the country I asked him for advice, a legacy from him and he told me to treat everyone I meet as if they were Khidr. Which strikes me as very much like the exercise in the OP. It's an extraordinarily difficult spiritual exercise.
10 I may be a few beers into this bender so that didn't exactly parse right in places.
9: You think it's algebra, but you're actually computing a rate of change! Let's look at a word problem.
11: No, no, you were flattering me. Let's not mitigate it.
How about the rate of change of shape of the tibial head and it's relation to pain?
Excellent! So if I told you the first derivative was positive, would your pain be increasing or decreasing? Remember what we said about slope.
I know like, one math major IRL. He's a great guy, but it would be wrong to extrapolate from such a tiny sample size.
A homeless person, a beggar, or someone so ordinary you wouldn't look twice at them.
Too easy. Let's try a Trump voter who says things like "If women didn't try to hold jobs in male-dominated fields, they wouldn't have to worry about sexual harassment."
15: Assume a three-dimensional skeleton.
I'm reminded of the short period of my life when I thought my contribution to human happiness should be to go on the "hot or not" website and rate every person as a 10. Of course, to do that I didn't necessarily have to believe each person was a 10, but I think over time I might have gradually started to believe that. Then I decided I better stop, so I could keep my job.
18: We'll get to gradients and multivariable equations next semester. Hang in there, champ - 30 more minutes.
It's nice to see time-stamped proof that time really does move more slowly in math class.
What does that tell you about its derivative?
Milk has two derivatives, cheese and butter. Corn has thousands, thanks to ADM, supermarket to the world.
Pub quiz question last night: Which yields more numbers, combination or permutation? We got that one right, but not the one about the star of Sons of Anarchy, because nerds.
So you're saying it's negative?
17 Yeah, there's my limit exactly.
Oh! Limits! Yes, we can talk about those.
This made me google my calculus professor. He made the newspaper for accidentally posting his students' SSNs to the internet.
11: It parsed just fine. It seems to me his counsel would be more interesting if you had to treat everyone as if they might be Odin.
Oh! Limits! Yes, we can talk about those.
Didn't we have deal breakers thread years ago? I seem to remember one.
Trying to teach math is one of your deal breakers?
She doesn't want you to try. She wants you to succeed.
Can you recast anyone as a math major?
If you can, you're a better person than I am. I think there's signifiers of that tribe that are just too specific, although they do bleed out a little into similar fields. But I'll give it a try.
19
I always try to compliment people who I think probably don't receive a lot of compliments in their life or who seem to have low self esteem. I also compliment people on their outfit/hairstyle even if I don't think it looks good if it looks like they put a lot of effort or care into it.
The end result is people who don't know me very well think I'm a chirpy, kind, and positive person, rather than the bitter asshole I really am.
No-one did NMM to Chris Cornell?*
* another one of those Xs where it's seems at least mildly possible that someone actually is M to X.
Nobody was tasteless enough to note that his next stop on tour was Columbus, Ohio, and imply a causal link.
Several maths degrees between my family and my in-laws. I like to think I don't have much in common with most of them.
C went to a pub quiz with Kid A and some of her friends this week. He was the only one in their team who knew what was being removed if you had an orchidectomy. The young'uns -
which included kid A and another classics student - were sceptical about his answer.
40.2
I'm guessing the answer is not, "orchids"?
I'm so vanilla that when they tried to give me an orchidectomy all they found was... yeah.
I too did not learn orchidectomy by studying classics, asilon. But I know it.
42 my (MTF) trans friend likes to say "It takes balls to get an orchidectomy." It has come up more than once due to the generally crude nature of our conversations.
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You guys, I have less than a year (349 days, but who's counting? Oh, my countdown app is.) until I can take my pension and get out of this miserable fucking job that I used to love.
Things are in the works to create a related but non-misery-inducing job for me outside of the union.
Sorry to crow about this when some of you are dealing with lousier jobs or no job. Also, the world is still terrible.
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Aww, Kraabie. I have no job but as of today also have no strep, so things are sort of looking up. Enjoy your countdown app and what comes after!
46 was me and I explicitly asked it to remember my information but that's my life now I guess.
Somehow you passed your strep to Pokey, who has been relishing a Mama Day at home, and is not one bit sorry to have taken it from you.
39: A Columbus musician thought it was no coincidence that Richard Manuel (of the Band) committed suicide after playing a gig in Columbus.
I just checked Wikipedia and it's not even true.
Yeah, Selah had it for probably ten days before they figured out that was why her skin kept peeling off and she seemed allergic to the sun. I called it as soon as I got her back from Lee, but that swab came back negative. Nia had it two weeks before that but spent much of her recovery time in the hospital for probably unrelated complaints, though I still think there's a link even if it's not textbook PANDAS. Mara seems clear and has missed three weeks of physical therapy because of other people's problems because I can only do so much. But I can definitely do slightly more and more easily when not also working full-time.
46: Thorn, I didn't know you were jobless! I just went over to the other place to get caught up -- sorry/glad to hear it. (I'm trying to spend very little time there these days, so I've been missing out on my friends' major life events.)
23: Even if you're counting cheese as only a single derivative, you missed cream, sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk....