Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Tsundere babysitting. Holy crap. This has elevated my brain to galaxy levels. “It’s not like I want to join the PTA, Karen. What should I bring for snacks?”

 

Unused-as-far-as-I-know fic title up for grabs:

All's Fair in Love and Pestilence

For those romance-while-social-distancing fics I know you're all writing at the moment.

 

Thing I think: "I'm going to make a pop song"
Thing I end up with: dark trance

 

It's a good thing I don't write fiction, because I am totally the kind of petty asshole who would critique someone's "constructive criticism" line-by-line, word-by-word, in front of everyone in the comments.

I have like a dozen defense mechanisms planned out for if I ever end up producing things that aren't mathematics and all of them are overkill.

 

It turns out that one reason that I'm having trouble getting to the actual top score for 2048 is that the version I'm playing gets a bit buggy after about 32768. Unfortunately, it is also apparently the only version of the game available for Android that is both ad-free and has an undo button.

 

Searching through math articles on JSTOR, except due to either the keywords being just barely too broad or JSTOR having something funky going on with the search/tagging system, occasionally there will be a result like "Cannibalism in Trilobites" or whatever.

 

I think the problem is that I don't actually listen to pop at all. I have a vague impression of what pop sounds like, based on hazy memories of middle school and whatever is happening in the backgrounds of TikToks, but the closest I come to actually deliberately listening to pop is like, Babymetal.
This is the same problem I had when I decided that I was going to start making house. Or when I decided I was going to start making dubstep. Or when I decided I was going to start making trap. The reason I keep ending up with dark trance is because I listen to dark trance.

 

I think the main problem I have with the notion of "free will" isn't actually the "free" part, it's the "will". I think I might actually be okay with the notion of a nondeterministic universe, as I do accept that quantum mechanics appears to give nondeterministic measurements for individual experiments, but I have strong reservations about calling that sort of breaking from the past "will", as "will" to me implies a rather strong sort of continuity over time. If at every moment you are unconstrained from your past selves, in what sense are you a self, and if you aren't a self, how can you have will? How can you have willpower over a future self that present you doesn't control?

 

I'm so glad that Western music has moved away from just intonation. These kinds of tricks are fun but I'd hate to have my tuning be dependent on the actual melody being played.

 

Fun fact: due to the somewhat haphazard nature of my math education pre-college, I actually learned the term "scalene triangle" from the tumblr meme.
I only have a vague idea of what gets taught in typical US middle-school and high-school math classes, having never taken any. I probably know all of the material, besides maybe what things are called, but if you ask me to write out a syllabus then we'd probably just end up with a list of prereqs for proving that you can't double a cube with a compass and straightedge.

 

Meat, but crunchy

 

So apparently I can force the dark trance to become a bit more poppy by adding a plucked acoustic guitar. It still sounds a rather sinister in the places where I can't get the guitar to fit, but whatever.

 

The other other other problem with this track is that I'm only now realizing that, at least for the chorus, the tonic appears to be G, rather than D, A or B# as I had previously thought. So I guess that makes most of this track in G ... Dorian? Wandering into G Mixolydian for part of the post-chorus? Except I'm treating it as D minor wandering into E Phrygian. Haha no wonder it's still sinister.

There's a reason that the melodic content of almost all of my work is just inversions of the A minor triad.

 

US grade school math curriculum, especially at the middle and high school levels, is oriented around calculus. Middle school is usually increasingly complex algebra ime. In high school it branches into geometry that will become trig and algebra that will become precalc. Depending on your specifics you may not do all of that, or you might begin calculus in high school. But the point overall is to prepare students for eventually taking calculus by teaching them math that’s relevant to that.

 

I know the broad overview of the curriculum, but very little of the specifics. Like, I know that conic sections are apparently covered, but I don't know what about conic sections. Do they learn that they are slices of a cone? Do they learn the fully general form? Do they learn about foci? Do they learn that you can change an ellipse into a hyperbola by moving one of the foci past infinity and back along the other side? Do they learn about degenerate conics? From what my dad told me about what he gets asked to tutor kids about, the set of topics covered regarding conic sections is a very strange subset, probably based mainly on whether they can finagle a relevant exercise into looking like the quadratic formula.

I don't really have a great idea of what the prereqs for calculus are, now that I think about it. I learned calculus by taking a textbook and skimming just enough of the text to be able to do all of the exercises; my precalc education was even more piecemeal, and my "geometry" and "algebra" education was even worse than that. I'm trying to think of what I would put as a prereq for calculus, based on my experience as a TA, and I guess I have a list of maybe twenty things, which definitely doesn't add up to several years unless we're really getting into the weeds. So there's a bunch of other stuff that gets taught in those classes that are frankly kind of useless for calculus as tested by the AP exam, and it's that other stuff that I'm super hazy on.

 

We did learn all of that about conic sections. I can’t speak to the strangeness of the set of stuff, both because it’s been a long time and because I have no comparison.

 

I kind of want to write a fic about Sansa Stark haunting the Winterfell Godswood for ages and ages, just giving advice to her great-grand niblings. Like, everyone thinks that the Stark lords and ladies go to the Godswood to pray to the Old Gods for wisdom, but no, they're just going there to ask Aunt Sansa what to do.

 

I love that. That's brilliant.

 

My college roommates have found out about one of my other online handles, and have found the math paper I wrote under that name. Haha, oops.

 

"Huh, that's an interesting lineup of bands...oh, wait, that's a list of Shakespeare plays."