Thursday, March 23, 2006
Huzzah!
Gov't are not proceeding with the Mental Health Bill.
In other news....
The Party is an absolute doddle compared with having 10 teenagers hanging around the house for three hours. Each brought Son a large bar of chocolate so we are eating some of it for him to save his health. They were all polite and well behaved (some of them even played football in the garden for hours) but it's definitely not like having children round. I did get them to sing Happy Birthday to him though, once they'd all been rounded up into one place. I gather the Geeks came tobogganing with us on Saturday (there were three of them- odd but charming) and these were the Slightly More Mainstream of Son's friends, hence the football.
We fed them pizza, crisps, M&Ms and chocolate cake and they went away happy but queasy. Then we tried getting chocolate out of the carpet.
My second essay is just about finished- Plato and why he's deeply unreliable as a source for history of maths. Tutorial on Saturday and then I must press on with the coursework. What with the Budget I've been just a tad busy (and lazy). Been playing Cities a lot (Cities.totl) as well as various games online.
Watched Howl's Moving Castle on DVD. Had read all the mixed reviews but thought it absolutely wonderful. Liked dissecting it- the plot very DWJ (even though it diverges a lot), the soldiers very HM, the ambiguity in the alignment characters spot on for both of them. And Howl was lovely.
In other news....
The Party is an absolute doddle compared with having 10 teenagers hanging around the house for three hours. Each brought Son a large bar of chocolate so we are eating some of it for him to save his health. They were all polite and well behaved (some of them even played football in the garden for hours) but it's definitely not like having children round. I did get them to sing Happy Birthday to him though, once they'd all been rounded up into one place. I gather the Geeks came tobogganing with us on Saturday (there were three of them- odd but charming) and these were the Slightly More Mainstream of Son's friends, hence the football.
We fed them pizza, crisps, M&Ms and chocolate cake and they went away happy but queasy. Then we tried getting chocolate out of the carpet.
My second essay is just about finished- Plato and why he's deeply unreliable as a source for history of maths. Tutorial on Saturday and then I must press on with the coursework. What with the Budget I've been just a tad busy (and lazy). Been playing Cities a lot (Cities.totl) as well as various games online.
Watched Howl's Moving Castle on DVD. Had read all the mixed reviews but thought it absolutely wonderful. Liked dissecting it- the plot very DWJ (even though it diverges a lot), the soldiers very HM, the ambiguity in the alignment characters spot on for both of them. And Howl was lovely.
# posted by Louise H @ 12:41 pm 
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Oh no; post calculus I get non Euclidian maths, projective geometry (whatever that is) and topics in the history of computing-last two bits are Turing and the Four colour theorem.
Plato wasn't a mathematician but he loved the topic because it demonstrated the features that he thought all knowledge had- it could be discovered by contemplation of higher things without soiling your fingers with anything worldly.
He has Socrates demonstrating that a slave boy "knew" how to double the square if asked enough leading questions, he stuck lots of stuff in the Repuplic about getting his ubermensch to study maths topics to make them more virtuous (but astronomy was to exclude observation and harmonics was to have nothing to do with actual sound) and in Timo he decides that the four elements are made up of 4 Platonic solids with the cosmos being a dodecahedron (and that the relation between the elements is that of mean proportionals; A:B= B:C= C:D).
None of it is exactly maths but it's enough to squeeze a 600 word essay out of, especially if the second half requires that you explain why his maths writings are problematic as sources.
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Plato wasn't a mathematician but he loved the topic because it demonstrated the features that he thought all knowledge had- it could be discovered by contemplation of higher things without soiling your fingers with anything worldly.
He has Socrates demonstrating that a slave boy "knew" how to double the square if asked enough leading questions, he stuck lots of stuff in the Repuplic about getting his ubermensch to study maths topics to make them more virtuous (but astronomy was to exclude observation and harmonics was to have nothing to do with actual sound) and in Timo he decides that the four elements are made up of 4 Platonic solids with the cosmos being a dodecahedron (and that the relation between the elements is that of mean proportionals; A:B= B:C= C:D).
None of it is exactly maths but it's enough to squeeze a 600 word essay out of, especially if the second half requires that you explain why his maths writings are problematic as sources.
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