Maths, literature, and poetry

The genesis of the ability to read has always held a place for me in the pantheon of great mysteries of this world.  How we rise from knowing what each letter means to fitting letters together into words to using those words to create fiction, write laws, and explore the aesthetic rapture found in the poetry of an opening flower.

Any student of the word is shown the infinite variety of forms our language can take on their journey.  We are encouraged not to prove how good we are at reading by getting exponentially faster at it.  We are taught to find meaning in the labor spent turning paper and ink into an active link to an imaginary world within the mind of another.  We are shown that some of us have particular inclinations to delve into anywhere on a spectrum between ultra concise legal writing and writing that defy all rules like the works of E. E. Cummings.  We are taught to enjoy writing as an explorative medium.

I believe that the Maths are just another medium with which to explore worlds both imagined and measurable.  A cod example might be that if I have two sheep and my sister falls ill, her five sheep will fall under my care and I will have seven sheep to tend.  No need to count, math provides me with knowledge preceding the moment.  With more metrics, I might be able to determine how long I my duties will take and whether or not I have the resources to care for these fuzzy beasts.  

But this is the See Jane Run of mathematical literacy.  From this modest foothold, one may explore the forces near and inside black holes, places mankind may never go, and fashion narratives of beauty and connectivity as Feinmann and other mathematical poets have done.  On a simpler scale, we have children imagining worlds where gravity is half of what it is and imagining themselves dunking balls and flying around like Jedi.  The realms to be explored this way are endless.

Mathematics, like all language, is a means to expressing a world in clarity so that it can be experienced.  Yet too often I see students of the number who merely sound out each number and use the rote tools to figure out how to say it in the acceptable format.  It is like younglings reading aloud ay-ar-arbitr-area-y con-conk-conscious-ness and yet being unable to truly understand their own phonations due to the need to move forward with the doing of reading.  In a literature classroom, I would likely give that student an easier book to read, but standardized curricula is slowly taking even that out of our control, leaving many students to flounder and never truly READ for themselves until it is too late.  With mathematics, the situation is much more dire.  I find that the average Maths teacher has not ever been exposed to the true ability to use their phonations to explore the worlds of poetry and pure beauty that exist therein.  With no teacher who remembers, the skill is lost to all but those who pursue the Maths at a collegiate level.

Mathematics MUST be taught with this linguistic imagination at the forefront.  We do not DO math in the same way that we do not DO reading.  We read to experience the other or express the inexpressible.  I math not only to see the world as the beautiful and astounding perfection that it is, but also to imagine and clearly express futures that do not exist yet.  My dear reader, this is a tragedy on the scale of the loss of an entire cultural language.  

Of all topics, a solution here eludes me, but I do have a few suggestions.  First, do not give students isolated, purely numeric problems.  That is like having kids speed read aloud random words and say it is improving their recognition.  Put students in environments where solutions to problems of ethics and art are brought closure through the application of numbers.  Teach students to live in an ever changing democratic union where the voice of the people is heard by 2/3rds majority on a mathematical level.  Simply adjusting the daily necessary votes to pass a decision is enough exposure to teach the concept of a ratio.  Cleverly throw in some girls only votes and let the discussions of fairness and partisanship arise.  These students may or may not have the linguistic ability to express these dilemmas, but they will grow in the mind like a cancer, driving the ability to express themselves.  Teach geometry in the pleasurable company of the arts.  Show students pieces that rock the occult center and then show how to bring that inexplainable beauty to their works of art through simple tools and a true fluency of the world in numbers.

In the words of Dylan Thomas, do not go quietly into that good night, instead rage, RAGE against the dying of the light.  Find the light in the darkness, my dear reader.  It exists because you do.

Electrogravitics

As a physicist there was always one rule to follow. Mass must be conserved-- energy must be conserved. Einstein taught us the two are the same. This rule was always so comforting, but it always strictly laid the distinction between the laws of nature and the laws of man. This rule makes sense to us. If we have five apples, we can't make ten apples by putting them into a machine. Yet that distinction comes when we realize that as humans we break that rule every day. Think of love. What goes in? What comes out? Think of a choir concert or another amazing piece of music. What goes in? What comes out? Always more comes out. Always.

This distinction always gave me pause. How are man and nature different? How is this fundamental principal of our sciences allowed to be "broken" daily?

Backyard scientists are discovering that this basic tenant is not incorrect, simply avoidable by fueling what is being described as feeding the toroidal field. When we feed the toroidal source of a living creature, love emerges-- when we feed a toroidal mechanism, what are being called gravity waves emerge. The result is the appearance of a loss in mass of a localized system. The perfection of this technology could yield a system with zero mass... Or less. The implications are as simple as the fabled hover board a la Back to the Future or even as grand as FTL (faster than light) travel.

I'll just let that sink in for a bit.

...

Maybe when we start forgetting about who killed who and how best to kill him back, we will start thinking of how to use these technologies to free the world from the shackles if the universal petro-dollar and usher in a new age where the term "survival" is lost from our dictionaries. Until then and thereafter, I'll still be writing and exploring how to make this world a better place. Whether through art, music, and kindness. Whether through science, politics, and humanity. My hope remains strong-- Thanks to those in my life who have shown me the true face of this world.

Random happiness at work... then random unhappiness

There are some awesome things about where I work...
Nothing is more awesome than working at a store surrounded by vegetables all day.  Fresh produce has to be delivered and chopped frequently.  This morning, a very rushed deliveryman ran into the store as I was cleaning counters and dropped a bag of onions and cucumbers in my arms (yes, OW) and said, "thank you thank you, have a nice day," before quickly leaving.  I just can't get over how awesome it feels to just get to work with fresh vegetables all day and have random things like that happen.

But there are some annoying parts about it...
Today the whole team was in early working on a truly epic catering order.  We filled an entire car with a huuuuuuge catering order that was big enough to offset our weekly shipment so we'd have enough stuff for it.  But anyway, we got a 70 dollar tip on the receipt they signed for us.  The owner brings back the receipt and pulls 70 out of the register.  He gives me 10.  I'm like "lol what's this for" and he's like "oh that's the tip for the jar."  Our jar is split up every week evenly between our employees.  Like most franchises, we only accepts cash tips except on deliveries (which is really just compensating us for the delivery since there is no delivery charge), so it's really quite pitiful at times, yet it's enough to get by and we've really made it great... but not when our boss pockets 60 dollars.

When I think about business, I think about my tip jar...
The better we do, the happier the customers are, the more tips we get.  The same is true for our total sales, but the tips are the portion I have control over.  I take the tips and split it among the 5 of us evenly except on rare occasions of sickness or low hours where I'll pro-rate someone.  If I ever own a place, I kinda foresee running  it like that entirely.  Let's say we are doing decently and we are having basic $1500 days (which is about as low as it gets for our low-end estimate).  We work 5 days a week for 4 hours (excluding open/close) and we'll assume 4 weeks in the month.  So we'll make roughly 5*4*1500=30000 dollars a month.  Rent/utils is probably a good $10,000 a month?  I have NO idea, but we are in the financial district, so wtf we'll estimate.  We order food from a special place with bulk prices.  Each shipment is about $1300 and we do about one of those a week.  Contents vary a lot due to catering needs, but in all seriousness it doesn't NEED to be that high-- we keep getting shit we don't need and not enough shit we do need.  Let's also set aside $2000 dollars a month to fix shit.  Emergency UPS order, fridge needs to be checked out by a pro, broken printer, normal shit like that.  So we're at less than two thirds of our revenue even in this low estimate and let's actually round it up to that and assume we are spending $20000 to run the business.  Now we get to paying our employees.  Let's say there are 5 employees and myself (imaginary owner).  $10000 split 6 ways is roughly $1600 a month.  But to be fair, of the 5 employees, 2 of them work like 3 hours a day.  So maybe instead we should take that money and split it evenly among each hour.  Work an hour, get one share of the pie, etc.  So 3 employees work 30 hours per week and 2 employees work like 20 (high estimate again as one does in fact work 10 hours a week) and then there is me and I'll say I work 40 because I fuckin own the place and do everything behind the scenes.  40+30*4+20*4=240 hours total to split the 10,000 into making each hour of work equal to 41 dollars an hour.  That seems awesome, but let's say I'm an UBER dick and decide to say I work 24 hours a day.  Same calculation with my new "back breaking hours" (probably less than my employees) yields hourly wage for all employees is roughly 20 dollars an hour and my monthly salary would be $9600 or 115k a year...  Oh yeah, and that's like the lowest possible estimate of our wage.  On great days, we rock nearly $3000 dollars, I doubt our rent is seriously 10k, and we probably didn't really need to round up our operation costs from $17,200 to $20,000.  ---Oh yeah, and we'd still have a tip jar.  And I can betcha we'd earn more tips (that I wouldn't take 60 of the 70 of) if we ran the business that way.

Would it work?  Would people buy into working for me when I'd tell them upright that our wages would be dependent on how well we work as a business and really let them in on how well we were doing?