On Things That Are Complimentary To Each Other

When I was in high school I knew that I was different. I didn't really like P.E. - I tried to sit in the shade as often as I could when it came to play...you know...sport-ball or whatever. I did, however, quite enjoy gymnastics...oh yeah, and the triple/long/high jumps! I was also not a particularly big fan of drama - don't get me wrong, I wasn't scared of making a fool of myself, or being embarrassed...I just thought that there were better things that I could be doing with my time. Things that were more...me...and in touch with the me-ness within. I was, of course, kind of ashamed of my leanings, at first, but I soon came to embrace them fully. It was in high school that I discovered that I'm a geek.

This Is A Poster You Can Buy, From A Site, On The Internet

My favourite subject, if you didn't know, has pretty much always been maths. English is cool, of course, and the charm of a subtle turn of phrase, or the beauty involved in correct grammar usage are certainly not lost on me. There is, however, this little...niggling thing...about English. It's subjective - that is, you can be wrong, simply because somebody disagrees with you (regardless of how much evidence you bring to the party.) I am sorry, language studies, but that is not what it means to be incorrect - that is simply having a differing opinion. In maths, on the other hand, everything is based upon a logical sequence of fact. If you say, for instance, that 0.9999... and so forth repeated infinitely ... is equal to 1, and you can prove it using pre-established facts, which are again based upon pre-established facts, until you are using axioms only (as I have done in a very very early post) then you're correct, regardless of whether the marker disagrees with you.

You Leave Maths Alone, It Just Needs A Bit Of Help - There's Nothing Shameful About That

A great deal of people who I have dealt with in my career as a tutor are, for some reason or another, quite averse to trigonometry. Some of them find it pointless, whilst others find it too difficult. I, on the other hand, find it fascinating. That's not really fair, though, as I tend to find all aspects of mathematics (except for basic probability) quite interesting. Did you know, for instance, that you can measure the height of a very large object if you can accurately measure the length of its shadow, as well as a couple of the angles that it creates? Or were you aware that, to get the maximum distance possible in a triple-jump or long-jump attempt, you should aim to leap at 45 degrees (also, you should tuck correctly, but that's more mechanics than trig.) Finally, did you know that angles that add to 180 degrees are called supplementary angles, and that angles that add to 90 degrees (like the two angles that are not the hypotenuse in a right angled triangle) are called complementary? You did know that? Excellent.

It took me, for some bizarre reason that is known only to the part of my subconscious that deals with separating language into segments, quite some time to differentiate the word complementary (as discussed above) from complimentary (meaning either free or, as is my intention here, something conveying a compliment.) I mention this fact because there is a club at the University, the members of which I had the pleasure of meeting on Club Day last week, called Bekozwy (as in, I have since figured out, "Because We Can.") whose sole purpose is basically to go around being generally awesome.

Awesome Comic, But It's No XKCD (In A Moment You'll Look Back Upon This And Go "Ooh...")

Before I finish that part of the story (and thus, to hopefully keep you on your seat's edge) I feel that I must interject with an interesting factoid. I suffer, on occasion, and I know people who suffer, on occasion, from the most amusing bouts of aphasia. At least, I think I mean aphasia. It's hard to tell sometimes (see what I kind of did there?) Aphasia is where you tend to say the wrong thing - but not in a "foot in mouth" kind of way, rather in a more "Could you pass me the elephant, oh sorry I mean steak." kind of way. It's actually less annoying than you'd think (except for when I'm in the car, trying to tell someone to turn left, and I tell them to go right, and I don't even register that I said right until it's too late.) It usually ends up just being kind of funny, like when Andy said something was in the fridge, but instead he said garage. It's usually contextual, but still it's amusing. Now...I was talking about something...

Oh yeah, I was talking about the Bekozwy club. This club offered a place for people to get comments/critiques on work they were doing, just for the heck of it - so I suggested my blog to them. They read it quite quickly, and I was afforded the following statement of appreciation:

"It's like xkcd had a baby with the stream-of-consciousness genre, and bam: one hundred hundreds."

I was just compared to XKCD. By someone I technically do not know. This pretty much just makes it for me right there. I mean, Randall is one of the best webcomic creators I can think of - his drawing style may be simplistic, however he always brings humour or something thought provoking to what he delivers, and he does it with intelligence. So thank you, Bekozwy - you have made my day.