happy wednesday?

i was asked today what i've been doing while i'm in town, to which the response is "well, my family's always at work, and none of my high school friends are in town, so i sit around in my PJs all day and read"... not quite true, but pretty indicative of the pace of my week.

i enjoy that my family now has sattelite TV and i can put full house reruns on in the background while i eat lunch or dinner...

i enjoy having access to a piano while i'm home alone, even if it's horribly horribly out of tune, and i enjoy remembering how to play. (i like playing when only i can hear me -- my mom's a brilliant organist and when i was 8, she tried for about 2 weeks to try to teach me and gave up on account of my stubbornness, so i taught myself how to play instead, and have no sense of rhythm, other than memorizing how it sounds when mom plays a song and then imitating what i hear in my head... consequently, getting mom to hum tricky rhythms for me, and then imitating what i could hear of her in my head is how i learned flute parts when i played too -- i was not meant to be a good musician :-P... nonetheless it's fun to play around anyhow :-P)

i've been fixing the family computer... besides the drenching the keyboard issue this weekend, they've managed to download a few viruses, etc., and never installed antivirus software, so i've been slowly but surely getting rid of all the things piggybacking on internet explorer and cleaning up the machine with appropriate other software... i think i've finally won! :-P... now to convince them to get something better than a dialup connection ;-)

and otherwise i've been reading. i'm about 1/4 of the way through The Story of Mathematics -- i've made it up to astronomy calculations of the early AD centuries, and it's an interesting read, but not engaging if you don't have a prior interest in math history... if you do though, it's decent, and well illustrated.... the pictures are what drew me in to getting the book in the first place, and a history with lots of visuals to benchmark it along the way gets bonus points in my book.

i've read the first 40ish pages of Mathematics in a Postmodern Age, the book i posted about yesterday. so far that's the intro and chapter 1... it's mostly outlined what they mean by a "modern" view and a "postmodern" view... both in general and with respect to mathematics, and give examples of mathematicians whose working philosophy fits into each. by their definition, a modern view of math is one that says things are true because they are logically derived to be true. that a mathematical theorem is true whether we're thinking about it or not. that mathematics is independent of the cultural construct we have to view it from. a postmodern view says that we put a lot of faith in the mathematical community and that the way it goes about things is correct... that for example, while i can illustrate that 3+4=7 on my fingers or even in a couple lines using the successor function and the postulate that a+S(b)=S(a+b), computing 1204871204712907 x 12095871035790237509 is not something that i can do so easily, and i must use either an algorithm or a calculator or computer program to deduce the answer. but the multiplication algorithm or the calculator are cultural constructs in some sense -- a "proof" of the answer of the above multiplication is not down to the bare bones of mathematics, it uses constructs that we accept to be true. while no one in their right mind would argue that there's more than one answer to that product, one can see the general idea we're getting at here. i think just from the bit of reading i've done today, i fall inbetween the two views, but i'll not elaborate on my view right now -- i've done that from other angles in previous posts... at any rate, lara spends hours reading books about the philosophy of math for FUN when she has free time -- how crazy is that? :-P

finally, in the last hour, i've read the first 1/3 of The Five People You Meet in Heaven -- i've seen this book around and know it was at the top of the new york times bestseller list for awhile... i'm not spoiling the story at all to tell the summary on the back cover-- eddie dies trying to save a kid's life and discovers that heaven is a series of 5 people who you met in your life who changed it forever, whether you realized it at the time or not, and they each have something to teach you -- in this way, heaven is getting the peace of understanding the purpose of your life on earth. so far i've made it partway through the second person... it's an interesting light read... like i said, read all that in an hour, so i'll prolly finish the book tonight or tomorrow... it's quality, and i'm enjoying it.

all the reading aside, wednesday night is the one night i'm guaranteed to get out of the house when i'm in memphis, no matter who's in town. doc and lois are a couple at my church in memphis. he was the FIRST principal of mom's school, when it opened back in 1947, and then he took a second career as a dentist, before he finally retired, but they're still both very active in everything under the sun related to the church and school (they're in their 80s and do all the yardwork there, etc.)... anyhow, for years and years they've run a "college and career" Bible study at their house in germantown on wednesday nights... the regulars are the two of them, leni (lois's older sister), diane (lady around my mom's age who keeps in touch with me year round), liz and brian (married couple 3-4 years older than me (liz used to be one of my babysitters :-P), daniel and janelle (engaged to be married in a few months, daniel was in kindergarten through 8th grade with me), jacob (son of the former pastor of the church), paul (liz's brother who's a year younger than me), and a few other random people on and off. i'd been going to that bible study since before valpo, so when i'm back to visit, wednesday night's i'm with them... tonight we discussed matthew 25:1-13 (the parable of the ten virgins), but next week is the every few months movie and burgers night... so i hit it good time-wise :-P it was good to see people again and i like seeing them all... daniel didn't even realize i was in town and was genuinely surprised and pleased to see me. liz and brian are expecting a baby this fall and *that*'s completely crazy to me, but yay for them... so yeah, i got out of the house for a bit, and it was fun.

i'm done rambling... that sums up my day though... for sitting around in my PJs with books until 5pm, that's a pretty decent novel of a day, eh? ;-P

i get out of the house, moreover out of *town*, tomorrow morning for a bit, but i'll tell more about that after i get back...

night y'all! :-P