QQC 13

Happiness Revisited


"While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal - health, beauty, money, or power - is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy."


Is happiness attainable and maintainable?


"We do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all."


"Despite the fact that we are now healthier and grow to be older, despite the fact that even the less affluent among us are surrounded by material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago...regardless of all the stupendous scientific knowledge we can summon at will, people often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom."


How do we combat boredom? What is happiness? What is the difference between being content and being happy? Are they the same?

“Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”

So being happy is essentially how we interpret situations/life/etc.

“Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target the more you are going to miss it.”

That’s like aiming a dart above the bullseye because it’ll come down and hit the bullseye. But you can’t aim for the bullseye. 

QQC 12

The Three Laws of Mastery


"What can we do to move toward mastery, on of the key elements of Type 1 Behavior,..." 


What is Type 1 behavior?


"As with so many things in life, the pursuit of mastery is all in our head."


This reminded me of a quote I heard while watching the Master's. Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-inch course...the space between your ears. - Bobby Jones


"Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities - what she calls our "self-theories" - determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish."


"Those who subscribe to an "incremental theory" take a different view. They believe that while intelligence may vary slightly from person to person, it is ultimately something that, with effort, we can increase. To analogize to physical qualities, incremental theorists consider intelligence something like strength. (Want to get stronger and more muscular? Start pumping iron.)"


Which is true? Is the pen mightier than the sword?


"The two self-theories lead down two different paths - one that heads toward mastery and one that doesn't. For instance, consider goals. Dweck says the come in two varieties - performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal."


"In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straight-forward problems but often inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations. For example, in one study, Dweck and a colleague asked junior high students to learn a set of specific principles, giving half of the students a performance goal and half a learning goal. After both groups demonstrated they had grasped the material, researchers asked the students to apply their knowledge to a new set of problems, related but not identical to what they'd just studied. Students with learning goals scored significantly higher on these novel challenges. They also worked longer and tried more solutions. As Dweck writes, "With a learning goal, students don't have to feel that they're already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not prove they're smart." 


This sort of informs the "new age" of teaching. How can teachers use this to improve the classroom? How would they reward people who achieve a learning goal?


"To incremental theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is malleable,  they see working harder as a way to get better."


Isn't that what the American dream tells us? But why do we work hard to get nowhere great?


"Type X behavior often holds and entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizing learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. Begin with one mindset, and mastery is impossible. Begin with the other and it can be inevitable."


"The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets' ratings on noncognitive , nonphysical, trait known as "grit" - defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals."


"Sociologist Daniel Chambliss has referred to this as "the mundanity of excellence."




"It's the same reason that, in another study, the West Point grit researchers found that grittiness - rather than IQ or standardized test scores - is the most accurate predictor of college grades. As they explained, "Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible...in every field, grit may be essential as talent to high accomplishment."


"As Carol Dweck says, "Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them."

QQC 11

50 Life Secrets and Tips

Read books.No explanation needed.Yes. Love reading and it will be kind to you.Get in the sun.Superman was completely re-energized when he flew out to space and soaked in some rays and you can do the same right outside your front door (if you live in a constantly dreary place, my apologies). The sun feels amazing: your entire body will be coursing with warmth and life.Just don't stay out too long. Then instead of warm you'll be burning. Help others.I’ll just give you a plethora of reasons why this is a MUST

• Helping people has a ripple effect. If you help someone they will feel more obliged to help someone else, and so on. Pay it forward

Sometimes people will do this at Starbucks. They'll pay for the person behind them. Its interesting.

Start your day off right.

Wake up and set aside an hour for personal development activities (meditation, self-introspection, observing nature, etc.) Do the things that make you feel blissful, optimistic and empowered so that you can set a positive tone for your day. I guarantee that once you start doing this, your days will be more enjoyable and fulfilling. Today is going to be the best day of your life. Duh.

I wish I could start my day like this but it usually starts by running out the door. I can't wait to go to college in Hawaii.

Travel. Anyone who has ever gone anywhere will tell you that traveling is one of the most exciting and life-changing activities that you can do. Observing a different culture will expand your mind while making you further appreciate the life you already live. This goes back to becoming an explorer: this world is your jungle so go explore! Who knows, maybe you’ll find a place you love so much that you decide to move. Imagine the positive repercussions a new environment could have on your life.I soooooo want to! I want to go everywhere! The only problem is money. Gosh darn...Learn to lucid dream, or to realize when you are dreaming so that you can control your dreams. Sleep feels good, but its rather boring and unproductive. With lucid dreaming under your belt, night time can be even more exciting than when you are awake. You can do anything: fly, travel to other planets, party with a celebrity, get intimate with your dream boy/girl, etc. Many lucid dreams have also reported being able to speak directly with the subconscious during dreams by demanding to be taken to it after becoming lucid. For those that know a thing or two about your subconscious, that is a BIG deal.What? Relax!This one is for you work-o-holics out there (myself included). Yes, work is very important and productive but you need to take some time to chill out everyday or you are going to burn out faster than a candle with no oxygen. Additionally, you need to reward yourself for a job well done. What’s the use of doing all of that work if you can’t have a little fun from time to time anyways?Yesssss.Get good at something.Call it a hobby or a passion, whatever it is, just get damn good at it. Your occupation does not count! Make it something that you can practice often enough to excel at. Examples: Magic tricks, surfing, ping pong, creating short films, and unicycling. It can be anything but I would recommend choosing something that: 1) You are passionate about 2) You can bust out at any moment to display your skills for any discerning crowd. My mind goes immediately to aerobatics and break dancing, but that’s just me.Maybe for me...Some form of crafting/sewing/etc.?Do what you love. There is a huge difference between making a life and making a living; which one are you making right now? So many spend their entire lives trying to make as much money as possible so that they can afford to do what they really want later. It makes no sense to settle in life until you’re 65 so that you can retire and do what you want when you’re already WAY past your prime. We only live life once so why wouldn’t you want to spend it pursuing your bliss? To do anything else would be a tragic waste of the freedom you are allowed if you are reading this right now. Follow your bliss and you will be a thousand times more happy than your retirement date and 40+ years younger.I hope I end up doing what I love.I wonder how you follow all 50 at the same time?50 Life Secrets and Tips

Project Proposal

I'm not quite sure how to go about this but here goes. 


After senior project/illuminated mathematics, we only got to pick a subject that no one else that had. But, after that project I really wanted to explore a topic that I didn't get to have and that was math as a universal language. I want to discover more about not how numbers came to be, but, rather how everyone uses them. So I would like to investigate numbers through different cultures. For example: We use the roman numeral system like most of the world, but, before the Chinese used roman numerals they had their own way of writing and using numbers. I would want to do a project that explores these differences. By the way, one of my passions is Chinese so I'd be applying it to that. 

QQC 10

Much Ado About Numbers: Chapter 1

“The mysterious Philosopher's Stone the unknown catalyst that was thought to transform base metals into gold and be the elixir of everlasting life - was said to be “one in essence” according to the 17th-century scholar of alchemy William Gratacolle. (However, William also found about a hundred other names for the Philosopher’s Stone, ranging from “the eyes of fishes” to the rather bizzare “belly of a man in the mist,” so it is unlikely that being “one in essence” was terribly helpful in the centuries-long search for the stone.)

I wonder why people thought that the philosopher’s stone existed. “Belly of a man in the mist”? Wut? Where do people come up with this stuff?

“And of course, number one is often used to mean “the best.”  In China, Feng Shui can be improved with the right numbers. The number one is the first of the yang numbers and its strongly linked to growth and prosperity.”

I’ve never heard of 1 being a good number. I’ve learned something new. Eight is a really lucky number but four is not because the word for four and the word for death are pronounced the same way. There are also larger numbers that when you say the numbers one after another they sound like auspicious words like prosperity or happiness for example. 

“Natural numbers are the pigeons of the number world - you see them everywhere you look.” 

I can’t imagine numbers flying around and perching on buildings in major metropolitan areas.

“Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.”

I’m surprised a man said this. XD I would’ve thought that a math witch would have said this. 

“Not surprisingly, it is said that 2,000 years ago, couples in love would exchange talismans and lockets with the numbers 284 and 220 on them, and apparently many marriages have happened between partners who each had perfect numbers for birthdays, horoscopes, heights (or anything else they could think of).”

I think its funny that numbers in the past were such a prominent part of a persons personal life. We don’t really revere numbers as much as we used to.

“Although it seems a little strange 0.99999999... is 1.”

Number  buckets! Throw it in the 1 bucket. 

QQC 9

Much Ado About Numbers: Chapter 0.000000001

“We’ve know these must exist for centuries; all anyone has to do is take one apple and cut it in two in order to see the problem.”

Never thought of it this way. 

“Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos, and led an eventful life during which he traveled to Egypt where he was influenced greatly by their philosophers and customs, was taken as a prisoner of war to Babylon where he learned mathematics, music and sciences, before returning home, to Samos, and then moving to Croton, in Southern Italy.”

He was taken as a prisoner and learned mathematics. That is some torture. 

“The speed at which a trained abacus user can calculate sums is remarkable, and proficient users are even able to visualize the movement of beads in their heads in order to achieve astonishing feats of mental arithmetic.” 

That’s really cool. It makes me think of our reliance on calculators and how, while useful, we don’t really need them. 

“DNA, the molecule that holds together and makes up all our genes, is 2 nanometers in diameter.”

“In 2003 scientist at UC Berkley, created the smallest electric motor, less than 500 nm in size.”

Think of the ramifications for the medical field. 

“Scientists at MIT have even managed to attach a nanosized radio antenna onto a gene and use a radio signal to control its expression.”

Wow. Just wow. World of Warcraft that is. No I’m just joking. XD That is some pretty amazing shittake. 

“That’s 141.6 picometers or 1.416 Angstrom, which rather remarkably happens to be pretty much the size of a carbon atom. Not bad for 2,500 years ago, before anyone even knew atoms existed.”

I wonder what would happen if we went back in time and told all the great math figures the type of math we have now?

QQC 8

Much Ado About Numbers: Chapter 0


“Numbers are words (and symbols) that we use to describe patterns. It is essential for all creatures on our planet to perceive patterns. Even the simplest organism needs to be able to distinguish between things that may kill it and things that it needs to eat.”

If you look at it this way, the organisms with the most ability to recognize patterns survive. In this way every generation gets smarter. So, could you say that simple organisms evolve intelligence?

“We are the only creatures on Earth to make use of language, so its not terribly surprising that we are the only ones to “speak numbers.””

What defines a language? How do we know we are the only ones that speak numbers? In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the dolphins are the second most intelligent beings and know far before humans of the destruction of the earth. How do we test if another species knows numbers if they don’t see “numbers” as a representation of a number of objects?

“Clues of the origins of the Roman numerals are also visible in their language. In Latin, rationem putare means “to count.” The word ratio meant (as it does today) “a relationship between things” and the word putare meant “to cut, or prune a tree.” So when the Romans talked about counting, the spoke words that effectively meant, “use your eyes to observe relationships between things and make cuts in wood.”

“Nothing was invented around 1,800 years ago in India.” 

Where did the concept of zero come from mentally? Aside from a number to keep other numbers in place, how do you quantify nothing?

“It took a while, but eventually it was realized that zero doesn’t always obey the rules that other numbers obey.”

Zero be breakin’ rules. But is it ethical? XD

“Over a thousand years after Brahmagupta had written his work, a French mathematician named Guillaume de I’Hopital received his credit for this idea of shrinking series to zero over zero and it is known today as I’Hopital’s Rule.”

Mathematics is such a violent and vindictive hobby. Yeesh.

QQC 6

Euler

“Leonhard Euler was Switzerland's foremost scientist and one of the three greatest mathematicians of modern times (the other two being Gauss and Riemann).”

I'm confused. When did this guy live?  

“The French Physicist Arago, in speaking of Euler’s incomparable mathematical facility, remarked that “He calculated without apparent effort, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind.”

I wish I had that skill. He sounds like a calculator. He's a luck y 'un. 

“He suffered total blindness during the last 17 years of his life, but with the aid of his powerful memory and fertile imagination, and with helpers to write his books and scientific papers from dictation, he actually increased his already prodigious output of work.”

That is some serious dedication to math. I don't think I could go blind and survive. Euler is like superman or somethin'. Clark Kent. Super strong and a nerd at the same time! Perish the thought!

“His business was mathematical research, and he new his business. He was also a man of broad culture, well versed in the classical languages and literatures (he knew the Aeneid by heart), many modern languages, physiology, medicine, botany, geography, and the entire body of physical science as it was known in his time. However, he had little talent for metaphysics or disputation, and came out second best in many good-natured verbal encounters with Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great.”

Glad to know he isn't just one big ball of what students would want on their college applications. But seriously. That is some range. Did he have any successors? 

“His personal life was as placid and uneventful as is possible for a man with 13 children.” 

I can't imagine his home life. "Quiet down children! I'm proving the law of sines!" "Uhhh! Dad! Math again!?" I feel sorry for his wife. They didn't have the conveniences of modern medicine back then.

SO he created e? If not for Euler, kids everywhere wouldn't be groaning about math class...

It must of sucked writing all that with a quill and ink. Just think! No erasers. It makes me shudder. 

"Euler was the Shakespeare of mathematics - universal, richly detailed, and inexhaustible."

QQC 5

Leibniz


"He made memorable creative contributions across the entire spectrum of intellectual life, from mathematics and logic through the various sciences to history, law, diplomacy, politics, philology, metaphysics, and theology. No one thinker except Aristotle has rivaled him in the range and variety of his abilities and achievements.”

If Leibniz was so varied why don’t we hear of him more often? Why is he not one of the great philosophers that get their picture on google on his birthday? When is his birthday?

All I think of when I hear Leibniz is Newton’s extraordinary vengeance. How he pursued his rival past the grave when trying to destroy his achievements.

“He acquired a love of history from his father, and he spent most of his childhood eagerly devouring the large library of choice that his father had collected, including Herodotus, Xenophon, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Pliny, Polybius, and many others.”

How could he read those? How come every great philosopher or whatever is a magical genius from birth? Dang, those are still hard to understand even for adults so how could him as a child read all those just for fun? Its hard to believe.

“At that time the University was firmly congealed in the sterile Aristotelian tradition and did nothing to encourage science.”

Benjamin Franklin used to steal bodies for science so beneath his house they found a virtual cornucopia of bones.

“Leibniz spent the next year in Nuremberg, which was then a center of the secret mystical order of the Rosicrucians, and he made himself so familiar with the ideas and writings of the alchemists - much as Newton was doing at Cambridge - that he was elected secretary of the local Rosicrucian society.”

This also reminds me of Benjamin Franklin. Its rumored that he was a part of a secret sex society.

“The most important of these goals was survival, for at that time the swollen arrogance of Louis XIV was like a boil on the face of Europe, and his armies were threatening the Low Countries and the small German states around the Rhine.”

Gotta pop a boil. It seems Germany is a popular country. 

“Western Europe was drunk with the wine of reason, and Leibniz enthusiastically joined the party when he moved to Paris at the age of 26.”

I believe we think 26 is young but at that time maybe you would only live to 60. 

I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend...