Ramblings...

This morning, my battery finally died at a gas station, good thing I've prepared a new one in the trunk, so I was able to swap it pretty quickly! Anyway, I guess I can finally get rid of the extra weight in my car for the past 5-6 months. I thought the Honda Dealer mechanic just wanted to rip me off earlier this year when he told me that I need to change my battery, so I went ahead and bought a new battery just in case... and I suppose he's not lying after all! ;) The bad thing now is that my radio's anti-theft feature kicked in... after power outage, now it's asking for a code and I have no idea what it is... need to get back to Honda dealer to figure that one out!

I've also recently finally finish my reading on the Symmetry book. Was able to get a lot of reading done on the plane! Quite frankly, I still don't have much of a clue what that math professor's talking about... and the author knows that most people won't be able to get it either... so at least he wrote the book with some historical perspective. I know a lot of mathematician names from math classes... they're either equation names or theorm names. It's kinda cool to finally know some of the histories behind the various mathematicians. According to the author, in order to be a good mathematician or artist, one almost always have to suffer a bit of autism. The official medical term would be Asperger's syndrome.

Hans Asperger, a Viennese paediatrician, identifited the problem as a higher functioning type of autism. Symptoms include severely imparied social interaction; all absorbing narrow interests; burden themselves with routines; non-verbal communication... and in some cases... clumsiness.

I think I might have this disease! ;)

There's an interesting character name Conway in this book who the author has worked with. He holds the world record on his ability at knowing the most decimal places of Pi. He can also quickly figure out what day or the week is it at any given date. He set up his computer password that way... he has to do this exercise several times within a time limit or else the computer would lock him out. He claims no one would be able to hack inside his computer! ;) He also has the ability of flipping 20 heads or 20 tails in a row. Unfortunately the author promised that he won't reveal the secret... so I don't really know how it's done... so basically, this dude is just obsessed with math and makes games of it. The guy is actually very talkative... except that the communication is one way. He likes to share with you, but he doesn't necessary want to hear what you have to say... the guy cannot remember the names of his colleagues even after working 20+ years with them!!! ;)

Anyway, moral of the story is that people are just different. What's mathematically cool near the end is that these guys were on a race trying to prove the existence of a Monster symmetrical shape that exists in the 196,883th dimensional space. It's interesting that this Monster seems to have some sort of connection with another totally unrelated theory called the number theory. Why is there a connection? What is the source of this connection? They still don't know. They call it the moonshine effect. Just as we see the moon shines, but it's not really giving off light, it's merely reflection light from another source, which is the sun. At this point in time in human mathematical history, they still don't know what is that sun yet, but they have figured out that there must be something! The new mathematical discover also seemed to be peaking interests of physicists... because it offers way to marry quantum physics with theory of Relativity!

It's really amazing how deep knowledge can go as humans dig deeper and deeper.

I personally believe that ultimately, we will be able to find the glory of God causing all those moonshine effects! ;) When I'm actually living my eternal life, perhaps I'll spend some time to actually figure out what the heck these mathematicians are talking about in detail! ;)

(Num 1-3, 174.4 lbs, $4.779)