Some of coworkers like to talk politics. I typically avoid it and usually try to discourage it since it usually just ends up heated. Sometimes I just listen. I personally don’t get bothered and if its just me and one other person I just go with it.
All that being said, something a coworker did made me wonder if I used to be like him (I probably was) when discussing politics.
For whatever reason the conversation turned into talking about Trumps pick for the Department of Energy. My coworker was talking about how Trump picked someone who apparently knows nothing about nuclear power (I haven’t fact checked this). I asked something along the lines of why does it matter? He said that the department of energy only deals with our nukes and nuclear energy. I assumed he would be more knowledgeable than me so I asked him, “If it’s the department of energy, but they only deal with nuclear stuff, who deals with all the energy?” He said he doesn’t know and talked about how stupid Trump is for a bit. I assumed he was right and I was just confused but whatever.
10 minutes later I see him go on his phone and then tell me, “Oh, ok, apparently they do deal in energy.”
It was just odd to me seeing be so mean and hateful yet didn’t even know something basic like the Department of Energy dealing with all kinds of energy.
It made me think that I was probably like that when discussing politics in the past.
~yeah I thought I did because of stuff you’ve shared and talked about. Though I think in my head I trusted them at a 10, because of stuff I’ve seen here, I trusted them less at a 8. But after actually reading Silent Spring (still going through it), maybe I should trust them like a 3/4? idk.
Not really, this is just surface level stuff I know from many occasional youtube videos and some podcasts. I think I would like to read a book on korean culture and east asian culture broadly.
I recently saw a YouTube short joking about how there are a lot of muslims today (typically younger) who will smoke marijuana, drink, party, sleep around, etc. yet draw the line at eating pork. I grew up, and around, muslim/s and I would say that feels pretty accurate. I wonder why that is?
What makes pork a thing most muslims will more-or-less consistently take seriously but not other things. I can confidently say that in the few party scenarios I’ve been in I’ve seen a muslim friend have some alcohol but skip the pepperoni pizza.
I saw some comments on the YouTube short being like “Pork is easy enough to ignore to gain virtue, while alcohol/weed/sex are fun and harder to give up.” I guess this may be true in one sense, but the friends I had didn’t feel like they were making some calculated decision. I don’t know how to put it but their not eating pork came off as very religiously serious.
Recently got new contacts. I’m very very happy with them. It’s been much easier to use my computer and read in general.
My old pair of contacts went out of prescription quite a while ago. I usually get my new pair around this time of year (though this time it took extra long 3 months instead of 1, they come from Switzerland so I wonder if the tariffs had anything to do with that idk). Prior to that my old prescription was already feeling really uncomfortable after 6 months. So I probably should’ve addressed this sooner.
Hmm. Oh yeah I didn’t address this sooner because I have no medical insurance. Apparently my contacts are considered a medical product and not a vision product, so vision insurance won’t cover them. They run me $2500 a year (though I got a 10% discount this year so that was nice of them). So I try to force the cadence of once a year even if I feel like I need a new pair sooner.
No. I need specialized lenses. From what I understand most of the stuff you can get for regular prescriptions are mass produced in a sense . Or at least easy to produce.
From the $2500. $500 goes to the doctor apparently and the rest goes towards the cost of my contacts. Oh yeah fun(?) fact: all that is the cost of a single pair.
Oh yeah and my comment about them being a medical product:
maybe because they’re a specialized product, regular vision insurance refuses to cover it. regular contacts and glasses are covered under vision insurance, my contacts will only be covered under medical
Hmm. Last month I wrote around 15 days. I think I’ve been considering days a post a bunch as writing. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Do you want me to keep the two activities separate? I don’t mind and it would make sense. I just noticed myself previously trying to go for 5 posts in a day and ignoring 15 minutes of writing. This month I wrote ~8 days so far. Though I think this month has more to do with school than anything else.
But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
“Multiplying by zero collapses the number line. But dividing by zero destroys the entire framework of mathematics.” - Zero
That’s cool. You have a number line. Let’s see. I did some of this stuff during tutoring. If you multiply a number line by 3 it gets bigger. You divide by 3 it gets smaller.
Hmm. This made me remember something. Is division actually a thing or is it just multiplying by a fraction? Idk if this matters much but I never really liked the idea that subtraction is not a real thing. All that exists is addition and adding negative numbers. It just doesn’t match with reality. Subtracting, to me, is removing stuff. If Tim has 3 apples and Jerry takes two of those apples, then Tim is left with 1 Apple. Jerry took two apples. He didn’t add negative two apples. I wonder if mathematicians are the issue (though I don’t know how common this view is, my math teachers shared this sentiment however) or if I have a misunderstanding of negative numbers/subtraction. Maybe both. idk.
Oh yeah. Zero is this book: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea - Wikipedia. I read it as an audiobook a while book. The quote isn’t something I highlighted. The tool I use to review book quotes has a feature to get popular quotes from books to review. I do that for the audiobooks I listen to.
Do you have any books on math you recommend? Something in the vain of the above book. Not exactly a textbook.
I’ve been doing 5 problems a day through Alcumus. So far they’ve been quite simple and I haven’t gotten anything wrong yet. Oh yeah. Its been just three days of doing it. I haven’t felt a need to share anything but I could.
I’m planning to start my prealgebra textbook soon. I think I’ve been procrastinating because it feels odd to work on that when I could spend the time working on my math class. oh yeah i did three points yesterday and today. i’ll see how it goes.
for grammar i’ve done some grammar trees. i haven’t shared them because of color coordinating being annoying to do. i wonder if i can do something with keyboard maestro to make it easier. i have limited experience with that program so idk.
I plan to do more from there just because I want an easier (but kinda interesting) text to go through. From what I understand of translation things are usually made simpler in the native language (Lord of the Mysteries is originally Chinese).
I say easier because I want to also keep going through Atlas Shrugged but some sentences get long. Here’s some I did:
Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum’s particular despair.
Write the parts of speech for each word for this sentence.
Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum’s particular despair.
I didn’t read this whole thing but it has at least one error.
It - pronoun
hurts - verb
so - adverb, from the dictionary Apple uses, “to such a great extent”
much - adverb, from Apple, “to a great extent”
Hmm. That seems a bit weird. I did look up “so much” and its also a phrase in Apples dictionary it didn’t give a part of speech so I looked at merriam-webster. It said so much could be used as a an adjective:
used as an intensive
so maybe “so much” is one adjective phrase modifying hurts?
