Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Grinds My Gears - Episode 1
When the cantor at Mass decides to change the Responsorial Psalm because the one that was selected for that given weekend isn't a complex song.
I mean, let's think about this. The Psalm is a very important part of Mass. The Vatican spent a long time selecting each and every Psalm so that it fits in with the theme of that week's readings; it is not merely an arbitrary choice. Yet the cantors seem to change it every week to one that shows off their vocal talents. They completely override the Church so that they can sing something and have the congregation go, "Oh wow, she can sing wonderfully."
The problem with this is that Mass is not a concert. I go to Mass to praise the Lord, not to listen to someone sing. When the same Psalm is sung over and over and over again simply because the cantor wants to show off, it makes me want to scream.
I don't know why my pastor hasn't addressed this with our musical department. I wonder if he would feel the same way if the Deacon opted to read a different Gospel reading than the one prescribed for the weekend. After all, one reading has already been sacrificed.
Don't get me wrong. Music has it's rightful place in the liturgy. I think that too much emphasis is being placed on it these days, though. And we're not helping by letting the music minister overrule the Vatican.
This has been "Grinds My Gears," I'm Peter Griffin...er, Taylor Martina. And now, I leave you with this Irish saying: "May you get to heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you're there."
Everybody sleep well and have fun!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
In Honor of Today's Calculus AP Exam...
IMPURE MATHEMATICS
Once upon a time (1/T), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix.
Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.
She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she still convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once.
Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.
“Arcsinh!” she gasped.
“Ho, ho,” he said. “What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see that your angles have lots of secs.”
“Oh, sir,” she protested, “keep away from me. I haven’t got my brackets on.”
“Calm yourself, my dear,” said our suave operator. “Your fears are purely imaginary.”
“I…I…” she thought. “Perhaps he’s not normal, but homologous.”
“What order are you?” the brute demanded.
“Seventeen,” replied Polly.
Curly leered. “I suppose you’ve never been operated on?”
“Of course not,” Polly replied quite properly, “I’m absolutely convergent.”
“Come, come,” said Curly. “Let’s go off to a decimal place I know and I’ll take you to the limit.”
“Never!” gasped Polly.
“Abscissal!” he swore, using the oath that he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly! The algorithmic method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.
There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly’s radius squared itself; Polly’s loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactor, he performed Rungo-Kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piece-wise continuous but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly’s denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to L’Hospital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.
The moral of our sad story is this: “If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.”
by Auntie Derivative
Monday, May 4, 2009
In Honor of Finals Week
Crastination: A Job Left to the Pros
There's a fine line between "professional" and "amateur," especially when someone loves what he or she is doing. One thing's for sure, though -- we Imagineers are all pros.
And there's one area where that's truer than ever -- the subject of "crastination." Boy, are we pros at that. You'd be hard-pressed to find more pro crastinators that we have at Imagineering. We are world-class, indeed.
There's an unpopular saying that goes, "The best work is that which is done at the last minute." Unpopular, that is, among bosses, teachers, and parents. While that saying may fly in the face of everything we were taught since we were kids, there are those who just happen to believe it's true.
How so? Well, let's look at another tried-but-true aphorism: "Success is ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration." Very true, of course, but here's what they don't want you to realize: Inspiration is ninety-nine percent desperation. As in, "My report is due tomorrow, and I haven't started it yet."
Crastination, when properly performed by a pro, is nothing to be ashamed of. You see, the mind is like an engine that spends most of its day in "idle," coasting along as you go about your normal daily routine. Face it, most of our jobs, schools, and daily tasks don't really tax our brains all that much.
Do you really think you're going to sit down and write a brilliant report with your mind's engine in its normal semi-stalled state? No, if you really want to be a pro, if you're hoping to downshift the gears and kick the accelerator, your mind needs some sort of serious stimulus. And what better stimulus than the high-grade panic of true desperation? Ah, desperation -- rocket fuel for a sedentary mind!
Now, you might think that waiting until the last minute is a very risky approach. What if inspiration doesn't strike? Well, believe me, not taking the last-minute approach has some dangerous pitfalls of its own. For examples, ideas that come along too soon, when there's still plenty of time before the deadline, are at risk of being overthought. We all know that overthinking is one of the great bugaboos of creativity. Overthink can ruin any idea, especially a good one. But if the idea isn't discovered until moments before the deadline, there's no time to overthink it. The idea is safe.
Coming up with an idea way ahead of the deadline also carries with it the risk of making your job look to easy. If you've finished the school assignment or work report way too early, you obviously didn't take it seriously ... you didn't try very hard ... or your teacher or boss isn't giving you enough to do. Coming up with a brilliant idea at the very last minute -- rocket fueled by that overwhelming sense of desperation -- can make you look like a true miracle worker.
In contrast, there are definite pluses in waiting until desperation strikes. For example, think of all the other stuff you can get done while you're crastinating, like finishing up your previous assignment, which has now reached its last minute state!
Now I'm not recommending that we put aside our work and spend our days doing things that are definitely more interesting and appealing than the unavoidable assignment. We don't want everyone going back to work or school, saying the Imagineers said it was okay to leave it all to the last minute.
After all, crastination is a job best left to the pros. Especially the ones with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks.
-Bruce Gordon, Imagineer and Professional Crastinator