Pursuing praxis

I’ve been on a self-enforced book-diet since Christmas. Read my lips: no new books (till after China). Well, China’s a week away, and it just seemed like the right time. My mind’s about to turn (yet another) corner, and I want ammunition on hand. Time for show and tell.

First on the chopping block: Calculus, again. I’ve taken/taught calc I three times. Does it ever stick? No. And calc II is but a series of vague memories of exclamation points and numbers in pyramids. I need to know about matrices. The weapon? Calculus: Concepts and contexts, by none other than Jimmy Stewart. Ok, James Stewart. I bet he gets that a lot.

Next: logic. About time, don’t you think? I sure do. Does anyone have suggestions on do-it-yourself logic books, besides this one? Tarski’s certainly tops, but I’m a beginner.

Next up: Stuart Kauffman. A labmate recommended At Home in the Universe at least once to me. Kauffman got several pages of treatment in Gould’s Structure, and he’s like white on rice with the Santa Fe Institute. I think he could be the father (or self-proclaimed father, at least) of complexity theory. I’m thinking I need to read some of Brian Goodwin’s papers too. I have more reading to do now than ever.

But, I think it’s important to hear from more than one person on a given subject. So I picked up another book on complexity: Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

And, finally, to return home: Gould’s The hedgehog, the fox, and the magister’s pox. I’ve been eyeballing this one for, yeah, two years. Ever since it came out.

As if I didn’t have anything to read on the plane already.

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(Re)observation of the day: I notice that after any kind of monster academic exam, it’s like I can’t let go. And I don’t want to. The immediate removal of all expectations and duties doesn’t, for me, result in gleeful, reckless abandon. The exact opposite. I crave more of the same. After finals sophomore year, with organic chem and cell biology still pinging around my brain, I pounced on a spare cryptography book and started learning about algorithms while everyone else was out drinking. Same now. After my exam, I headed straight to class and we hashed out exaptation and emergent properties. At the bar after that, someone asked me, "Why aren’t you wasted?" "Because I have a meeting to run in about 15 minutes," I said. The full truth, though, was that it would have felt like a total waste not to push on, even though my brain felt like day-old roadkill. 

This drive for more, it’s like a dance my brain really doesn’t want to stop - I get into learning, and get into hammering it hard, like tomorrow I’ll be on a battlefield of knowledge, and moment to moment, in preparation for this thing that will probably never come, I’m as happy as can be. Nothing will tear me away. I feel like I could go forever - no food, no sleep, no coffee, just a little water and my cd player and stacks and stacks of books, and I’m on top of the world. But, it’s not quite that pure. I think my brain’s got an agenda, some sort of equilibrium it’s trying to re-establish in its own wierd way. It feels like a combination of biology backlash (I seem to go for the math-y things after OD-ing on biology) and the "nature abhors a vacuum" principle applied to my brain and knowledge. I can’t go from full knowledge to full brainlessness. I don’t think I’m physically capable of it. It’d be throwing away the very best of everything, when, with just a little more effort, I can have - know - be - even more! That’s irresistable.