Chirp

[davv]

*chirps*

I just thought I should meep or chirp to say I'm not completely dead. Just busy with differential equations and partial fractions and isoclines and all that stuff - since I'm going to take a test as part of moving (if however slowly) towards my shiny papers.

Yes, I should have known this about... ten years ago. But that time has already passed.

Also, I suppose there have been other things going on, it's just that when I'm doing various other things, I don't find the time to report on here, and so when I do go back and say "hey, it's awfully empty in here", there has been so much time since the things actually happened that I can't really sum them up :)

So... meep! Are there any other meeping critters around? Or perhaps some chirping ones, or even shiny crows?

Meep :)

Comments

[luna_manar]

I've been meeping about a bit more, recently, after dealing with a long and difficult battle losing my job and slogging through unemployment bureaucracy (you didn't miss much =P). Mostly I've been whining, so nothing I've meeped about is very interesting.

I don't have any shiny crows, though. Only dull grey ravens. And that fiberoptic Samsung hummingbird. *points at icon*

Pardon me for not paying attention, but what shiny papers are you referring to?

[davv]

I don't have any shiny crows, though. Only dull grey ravens. And that fiberoptic Samsung hummingbird. *points at icon*

Ravens are rare here, but we do have crows. They're not shiny (though I like shiny corvids, which means I just have to look at drawn pictures for that :) ) and they're definitely not technical either (unlike that hummingbird, or my fictional crow-based groupminded critters).

Pardon me for not paying attention, but what shiny papers are you referring to?

They're part of a general academic qualification. It's only strictly needed if you want to enter university, but most (larger) workplaces don't find you of any interest unless you have it.
Usually I'd have got it by going through the whole school system before university, but I quit earlier. Because of political reasons, the system doesn't really handle people who are significantly off the mean.

In this case, the certification I'd get by passing the test isn't actually part of the general academic qualification, but I'll need it if I'll pursue higher education later - at least in the kind of direction I'd prefer.

[lhexa]

*yaps*

[davv]

You remember that function I found by using Taylor series quite a while ago, that was its own second derivative? Now I know how to do that analytically.

Maybe it's no big deal to you, but to me, it's pretty neat :)

(I think it's the whole "you can specify what properties you'd like and then use specific tools and get a function that obeys those properties" that I find to be quite nice.)

Oh, and meep meep.

[lhexa]

I do remember, though I'm puzzled by you saying you're doing that analytically now. Having a power series is the very definition of analyticity.

I'm going through one of my periods of self-doubt, but at least I continue to learn interesting new things during those periods. Just today, though, my advisor warned me about the risk of never doing research because of thinking you need to learn more in order to do it...

[davv]

Yeah, I noticed that after I posted. I was thinking of closed form.

If I had gone a little step further and observed that the power sums were actually combinations of the power sums for exponential expressions, then I could have written the functions as those. But I didn't, and you know what they say about hindsight!

Just today, though, my advisor warned me about the risk of never doing research because of thinking you need to learn more in order to do it...

I've never encountered that particular problem. One does research to find something new (or at least new to oneself), after all. But if you learn new things during those periods, at least there's that.

[lhexa]

*grins* If you're still having fun with series, try sticking complex numbers into some of them and see the stuff you get. There are some neat and surprising identities! Also, any convergent Taylor series for real numbers will also be an analytic complex function, conveniently.

Complex numbers are actually much more well-behaved than real ones, in this matter... if a complex function is differentiable, then it's differentiable to all orders, and has a series expansion to boot. Those things don't always go together for real functions. *shuts up now*

The problem in question is thinking "I'm stuck on this research problem involving brackets, so I'll go read more about Lie groups or differential geometry or topology until it all makes sense" where it might already be the case that I know everything I need to know to solve the problem. :(