30th July 2006 – Sunday – 10:37
I had a good sleep last night either because of going to bed late or because of reading Montaigne in the bed. After reading an article from Russell (Why I am not a Christian) on the computer screen, I have read an essay from Montaigne (Idleness). The book (On Friendship) is a birthday gift from S in this year. This is what Montaigne says about idleness: Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds so that, if we would make them do their duty, we must subdue them and keep them busy with seeds specifically sown for our service; and just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept busy by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject, which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts.
He also adds this known point: When the soul is without a definite aim, she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When I read these lines I thought of myself. I can not be a kind of person constantly produces new things. If I can not produce new things, I keep saying same things. This is why I keep this journal. It is two different things to create new things and to keep writing. Right now, I only focus on writing. My main idea is to keep writing as long as possible until it becomes a natural part of my life. This is a difficult task but not impossible. Of course it matters what I write or how I write but if I can not write a beautiful piece of art, it does not bother me. At the end, I am writing by myself and for myself. I have no intention of publishing them other than posting them on my blog. And I don’t think anybody reads my journal entries on my blog unless I inform people. This does not bother me either. If I can not find a real topic to write on, I write on daily things which in detail have strong power to attract the attention.
I called J yesterday. She just arrived to Bangkok from her hometown. Today, there will be some people looking for a house to rent. They will come to our house. On the phone, I made a mistake by answering her question of “How are you?” with a sentence of “I am ok”. It is a mistake because it means I can be ok without you too. The answer should be “I am suffering”, “I need you” or at least “I miss you”. Even though later I said “I miss you”, I think it did not clear my first fault. I guess almost all women are the same or at least Asian woman since I don’t know about Western ones. They seem more independent and it looks like western women do not care their men can live alone or not since they can do it themselves. A good husband must give the impression to his wife that he can not live without her and he needs her constantly. If he is happy when she is way, this means she is unnecessary or this can make her feeling superfluous. That is another reason why women feel jealous when men go to see their friends in the bars to drink and chat. Men do not mind if their wives go to see their women friends. We feel happy when our wives become busy with other women.
I downloaded a new program to my computer. It is for listening Turkish radios and watching TVs online. It works perfect. This morning I listened some old Turkish songs from an FM radio station, listened the news in Turkish and some interviews with local people. It is like living in Istanbul, drinking my tea and being aware of everything happened in your home country. Is this why they call the world is getting smaller? It is another question whether or not I need this radio functions in my computer since I am supposed to live in Vietnam, not in Turkey. I should go out and discover the city, people, culture and the history.
I started to study Discrete Mathematics because I will teach this course after next week. I have one week to prepare myself to this new course. Because I have never taught Discrete Mathematics before, it seems a little bit hard to me. I am a little bit excited. The topics I am very good at were already taught and the topics I do not remember well are waiting for me. It will be a challenging job. I will learn graph theory, homomorphic and isomorphic groups, some programming skills and algorithms. Then I will teach! I did not study Algebra since 1998. I passed Algebra1 with DD in the university and never looked back again…
Yesterday, I was thinking if we can form a connected graph for people who can remember each other’s birthdays. Let’s imagine 5 people and let’s say that everyone knows own birthday. If we use vertices for each individual and edges for each remembering, there would be a loop on each vertex. If we continue fantasizing, we can think of a group of 5 people in which each member remembers one less than the other –left side of him/her in clockwise- person. This means, A remember 5 people’s birthdays, B remembers 4 people’s birthdays, C remembers 3 people’s birthdays etc… The last person remembers only his/her own birthday. This means we would have total 10 edges (excluding the loops). If you draw the graph, we can easily see that this is a directed complete graph (K5). However, to celebrate everybody’s birthday without missing, we don’t need a complete graph because it has unnecessary edges. A connected graph would be ok. This means everybody remembers two birthdays one of which is their own and the other is the birthday of the person on their left side in clockwise. This way is more economic because if A remembers B’s birthday and B remembers C’s birthday, A can learn C’s birthday through B. There is nothing wrong with this as long as connected graphs are concerned. If tomorrow is C’s birthday, B should tell this to A and A should tell this to E and E should tell this to D. Then everybody learns it if nobody ignores the job. If we think of n people in the group, we can easily prove that there must be n*(n-1)/2 edges to make it Kn (complete graph with n vertices). If we think that a connected graph would be ok since people communicate with each other in some way and it is fast enough when birthdays are concerned, we can only need n edges. This means we can save n*(n-3)/2 edges. So, if there are 10 people in a group of people, 35 remembering will be unnecessary. We only need 20 remembering which can save our group from the barbarian invasions of no-birthday-parties-organizations. For each individual, there will be saving of n-2 less remembering. For 10 people, this makes 8. Isn’t it amazing?
I had a good sleep last night either because of going to bed late or because of reading Montaigne in the bed. After reading an article from Russell (Why I am not a Christian) on the computer screen, I have read an essay from Montaigne (Idleness). The book (On Friendship) is a birthday gift from S in this year. This is what Montaigne says about idleness: Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds so that, if we would make them do their duty, we must subdue them and keep them busy with seeds specifically sown for our service; and just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept busy by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject, which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts.
He also adds this known point: When the soul is without a definite aim, she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When I read these lines I thought of myself. I can not be a kind of person constantly produces new things. If I can not produce new things, I keep saying same things. This is why I keep this journal. It is two different things to create new things and to keep writing. Right now, I only focus on writing. My main idea is to keep writing as long as possible until it becomes a natural part of my life. This is a difficult task but not impossible. Of course it matters what I write or how I write but if I can not write a beautiful piece of art, it does not bother me. At the end, I am writing by myself and for myself. I have no intention of publishing them other than posting them on my blog. And I don’t think anybody reads my journal entries on my blog unless I inform people. This does not bother me either. If I can not find a real topic to write on, I write on daily things which in detail have strong power to attract the attention.
I called J yesterday. She just arrived to Bangkok from her hometown. Today, there will be some people looking for a house to rent. They will come to our house. On the phone, I made a mistake by answering her question of “How are you?” with a sentence of “I am ok”. It is a mistake because it means I can be ok without you too. The answer should be “I am suffering”, “I need you” or at least “I miss you”. Even though later I said “I miss you”, I think it did not clear my first fault. I guess almost all women are the same or at least Asian woman since I don’t know about Western ones. They seem more independent and it looks like western women do not care their men can live alone or not since they can do it themselves. A good husband must give the impression to his wife that he can not live without her and he needs her constantly. If he is happy when she is way, this means she is unnecessary or this can make her feeling superfluous. That is another reason why women feel jealous when men go to see their friends in the bars to drink and chat. Men do not mind if their wives go to see their women friends. We feel happy when our wives become busy with other women.
I downloaded a new program to my computer. It is for listening Turkish radios and watching TVs online. It works perfect. This morning I listened some old Turkish songs from an FM radio station, listened the news in Turkish and some interviews with local people. It is like living in Istanbul, drinking my tea and being aware of everything happened in your home country. Is this why they call the world is getting smaller? It is another question whether or not I need this radio functions in my computer since I am supposed to live in Vietnam, not in Turkey. I should go out and discover the city, people, culture and the history.
I started to study Discrete Mathematics because I will teach this course after next week. I have one week to prepare myself to this new course. Because I have never taught Discrete Mathematics before, it seems a little bit hard to me. I am a little bit excited. The topics I am very good at were already taught and the topics I do not remember well are waiting for me. It will be a challenging job. I will learn graph theory, homomorphic and isomorphic groups, some programming skills and algorithms. Then I will teach! I did not study Algebra since 1998. I passed Algebra1 with DD in the university and never looked back again…
Yesterday, I was thinking if we can form a connected graph for people who can remember each other’s birthdays. Let’s imagine 5 people and let’s say that everyone knows own birthday. If we use vertices for each individual and edges for each remembering, there would be a loop on each vertex. If we continue fantasizing, we can think of a group of 5 people in which each member remembers one less than the other –left side of him/her in clockwise- person. This means, A remember 5 people’s birthdays, B remembers 4 people’s birthdays, C remembers 3 people’s birthdays etc… The last person remembers only his/her own birthday. This means we would have total 10 edges (excluding the loops). If you draw the graph, we can easily see that this is a directed complete graph (K5). However, to celebrate everybody’s birthday without missing, we don’t need a complete graph because it has unnecessary edges. A connected graph would be ok. This means everybody remembers two birthdays one of which is their own and the other is the birthday of the person on their left side in clockwise. This way is more economic because if A remembers B’s birthday and B remembers C’s birthday, A can learn C’s birthday through B. There is nothing wrong with this as long as connected graphs are concerned. If tomorrow is C’s birthday, B should tell this to A and A should tell this to E and E should tell this to D. Then everybody learns it if nobody ignores the job. If we think of n people in the group, we can easily prove that there must be n*(n-1)/2 edges to make it Kn (complete graph with n vertices). If we think that a connected graph would be ok since people communicate with each other in some way and it is fast enough when birthdays are concerned, we can only need n edges. This means we can save n*(n-3)/2 edges. So, if there are 10 people in a group of people, 35 remembering will be unnecessary. We only need 20 remembering which can save our group from the barbarian invasions of no-birthday-parties-organizations. For each individual, there will be saving of n-2 less remembering. For 10 people, this makes 8. Isn’t it amazing?
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