a belated pi day post

Maybe it's because I'm a complete nerd or maybe because math is wonderful and has the capacity to be oh so very interesting, but I'm a fan of Vi Hart and her videos. If I had a guarantee that math would be as cool as she makes it seems in her videos all of the time, I would become a math major right now. But alas. It's not so. But Vi Hart has convinced me that tau is indeed better than pi. You're probably wondering what tau is. It's okay. I too once was ignorant of the wonders of tau. 

And if tau is not good enough for you, maybe wau will be. 

If she can't make you love math, I honestly don't know who can. Anyway, here is a picture of the rebellious tau cookies I made last pi day. Ironically I don't think I even remembered tau day when it came around. (Although I believe I was in France so I guess I can use that as some sort of an excuse...).

That's right. I'm going against you pi.

Despite the fact that tau is by far superior to pi, I'm still a fan of anything that allows me to embrace the nerdy. So of course I bought a pi day t-shirt. With the money I won from a bet with my math TA. Yes, I know betting is not the best. But he was insisting that no set of vectors could span if they were linearly dependent! I mean, it's obvious, really.

Just kidding pi. You're the (second) best.

Anyway, happy late pi day!

my fears

There is always some part of me that is afraid: afraid that my actions right now aren't good enough and that I'll regret them later. It's not that I'm making obviously poor choices; it's more subtle than that, but there's always the part of me that tells me that I can be better than I am, and that I should be trying harder to be that person. I'm afraid that I'm not living my life in the best way possible, I'm afraid that one day I'll look back and think about who I could have become but didn't. Part of me is afraid that I'm not good enough now to get into my dream school, MIT, for grad school, and then another part of me, perhaps a larger part, is afraid that when the time comes that that won't be what I want anymore. It scares me how little control I have over my life. I want to take my life by the horns, but yet I'm forced to live life one day at a time, just like everybody else.

And perhaps that's what makes life difficult: the fact that we do have to go by life one day at a time. It's easy to make big plans, but actually following through on those plans... that's difficult. It happens to me all the time with homework, especially the homework with a due date far in the future (i.e. summer homework... which I didn't have this summer!). I'll make big plans to do it, and I'll even start it, but then I'll feel overwhelmed, and I'll give up, or at least for that day. But in order to be successful you have to be persistent  I read this book over the summer, and I would highly recommend it. It's called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Everyday Lives, and like the title might imply, it's about randomness. The book talked a lot about how just mere talent does not guarantee success: authors we now praise often only became renown after many attempts at having their books published, and popular movies likely have an equally good counterpart movie that was never produced because the idea was shot down.

Sometimes I feel like I'm going upstream, and all of the fish
are giving me really strange looks

Although I certainly have my share of imperfections, I can't let my fears rule my life. I need to decide now that I am going to act. Not tomorrow, today. I will change today. I will stop wasting time, I will stop going to bed too late (actually can't do that today... already past midnight. Whoops. But oh hey that means I can go to bed earlier today!), I will try harder to have a social life. I will be better, and I will start today.