{"id":230,"date":"2009-02-07T02:09:19","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T02:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/difficult-sums\/"},"modified":"2009-02-07T02:09:19","modified_gmt":"2009-02-07T02:09:19","slug":"difficult-sums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/difficult-sums\/","title":{"rendered":"Difficult sums"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you remember the exhilarating feeling of finishing your last A-level [high-school exam] ? Do you remember thinking “thank fuck I’ll never have to remember any of that shit again” ? Finishing the Maths exam was particularly cathartic because I just didn’t understand it. I found it fascinating, but no matter how much work I put in it just didn’t click. Goodbye calculus, good-riddance imaginary numbers, sod-you complex planes, and bollocks to natural logarithms, I remember thinking.
\nTwenty years later I’m now dealing with all of them in my job!<\/i> It was hard enough when my brain was fresh and quick, before the years of alcohol and TV abuse, but now it just hurts. The last two days have involved a load of head-crunching and I still don’t understand how any of it works. Whenever I see a formula that involves either e<\/a> or i<\/a>, my brain goes into shock and changes the subject so it doesn’t have to deal with it.
\nThere is however a benefit of twenty years’ experience: I can now use all of these arcane concepts, without actually knowing how they work and get stuff done.
\nBut it’s not enough. I need to understand how they work. It’s like being confronted by a locked door or some copy protection – and that’s why I have sets of picks and a large collection of 2600 magazines.<\/a>
\nAny tips for how to understand difficult sums welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you remember the exhilarating feeling of finishing your last A-level [high-school exam] ? Do you remember thinking “thank fuck I’ll never have to remember any of that shit again” ? Finishing the Maths exam was particularly cathartic because I just didn’t understand it. I found it fascinating, but no matter how much work I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}