Thursday 19 March 2015

Balance The Equation

Four attempts in, and finally something is emerging from the fidgety fingers and idle brain, fully recovered from the zero effort expended in passing the literacy and numeracy professional skills tests. What, you didn't think I was literate after the hundreds of incoherent essays on this merry blog? Oh, what cynicism, pettiness, madness and wisdom! They were alarmingly easy tests, leading me to worry about the standard of education as a whole, not just idly but as a polymath and polyglot PhD who finds these things alarmingly easy. People have to resit them? Really? I shudder at the thought, arrogantly and with great insensitivity. You can throw fruit now, irate reader.

It's a strange thing to be tested, so long since the last time, and it was even stranger to not be stressed at all. Never was there a more boring and straightforward process. At least the whole endeavour prompted a trip to Cardiff, and with it the obligatory visit to 'Rules of Play', one of the best board game shops around. It's quite rare to plug shops here, but I'll do it this time, and recommend 'Rules Of Play' wholeheartedly. It's even pleasurable to visit as a penniless itinerant mathematician, armed with only a pencil case on the end of a stick and 'The Voyage of the Beagle' by Darwin.

Do Darwin and 'Moon Over Miami' go together? Do they have to? With only one episode left, it's an almost entirely academic question, but more on that show after the finale. Darwin was a lucky man to ship out on that survey ship, and satisfy the naturalist's urge within him in an era when exploration was still possible. Where now to go for those possessed by the wanderlust, and a raw need to live on the frontier of all that's known? Will they be satisfied by working in whatever jobs are left to them in a world ever more teeming with people? How do they stand it? Do they stand it or does the urge become perverted into other noble paths in life?

For my part, in my personal voyage of discovery, I'm struggling with the very basics of mathematical modelling. In my orange model quest, dimensional balancing has reared its ugly head, and it's a tricky thing indeed. If my grandiose verbiage seemed arrogant earlier, then now is the time for incompetence and inexperience to show its face, as I've never had to balance an equation dimensionally before. For the unitiated, both sides of an equation have to have the same units, so you can't have '1 kilo = 9 meters per second', to choose a most basic example. When you put together a model and set out your system of equations, the dimensional analysis is a tool to check that it makes some kind of sense. If sense isn't to be found, then you need to think again. How to think again, though? It's no good just making up some quantity to multiply by and 'fix' it all; there needs to be reality mixed into it, some science. It's going to take a lot of thought, in a problem that was supposed to be easy. More on this one later, too, if it ever works out and I don't go mad in the process. Does anyone have a good source for information on the life cycle and maturation of an orange fruit?

Is the humble-meter going off sufficiently? Did it all balance out to net neutral arrogance?

O.

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