I’ve just (yesterday) finished reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a sci-fi novel about a man whose dreams have the power to change reality. It was enjoyable, but I found that it wasn’t always clear just what was going on, and why (then again, this may have been intentional, since the main character also seemed confused). It was worth reading once, anyway.
As far as math is concerned: I’ve discovered that I hate category theory. It seems like it ought to be good for something, but I’m just not sure how it all works, or even what some of the terminology and notation means. I’ve still got one category theory book which I may try to read a bit more, but I’ve little motivation at this point.
I’ve got a test tomorrow in statistics, a class which I haven’t been attending since the first week of the term. However, it’s a very introductory course. The topics to be covered on the exam (as far as I can tell) are binomial distribution, normal distribution, and the prerequisite knowledge for these like mean, median, standard deviation, etc. I’ll discover tomorrow whether my ‘sleep now, study later’ policy was a good idea.
Also: my computer hates me. I’m not sure why, but sometimes it just slows down so that even typing into notepad is unbearably slow (i.e. I finish typing a sentence and have to wait 5-10 seconds for the text to catch up). Even as I type this, I’m getting a bit ahead of the text on screen. Sometimes, though, the computer works fine. Unfortunately, the ‘unbearably slow’ times seem to outweigh the ‘fine’ times, so I will need to do something. My solution at the moment is to download an Ubuntu live dvd and just boot into that to do everything. It’ll probably be faster, by and large, than what I’m suffering through now, and it’ll prevent me from needing to do anything drastic to my computer. I really would like to just format my drive and install a copy of debian, but I fear that there’s some windows-only thing that I’ll need, so I keep putting it off. Well, here’s to procrastination. I’ll fill in the rest of what I meant to write tomorrow. For now, fiction and my bed beckon.
Update (2007-09-12): The computer problem was due to overheating. Cleaning the fans thoroughly fixed it.
