I haven’t been writing. I’m applying to graduate school, to study something related but different from what I’ve worked on all these years, and between reading and talking to people and researching programs in psychology of language, psycholinguistics, etc, it’s consuming most of my time and energy. It’s very exciting though, because no amount of reading and talking to people and researching programs has made me any less convinced that this is really what I want to do. As someone who’s experienced numerous seeming breakthroughs about What I Want To Be When I Grow Up that only held up for a few hours or days or weeks, I find this incredibly reassuring.

A couple days ago, I was making a vague attempt to study for the GRE, and the prep book I was using included a reminder in the math section that anything raised to the power of 0 is 1 (x^0=1). Of course, this is something I learned in middle school and used in many subsequent math classes, but I realized I didn’t actually know why the answer is always 1. The GRE study book didn’t explain it, and I don’t think any of my teachers ever explained it either, which was a big problem in my entire public school math education. Math, even relatively easy math like algebra and geometry, was often presented as a set of esoteric formulas to memorize, not as a rational system we the students could actually understand. We were very rarely required to prove the formulas we learned, just to spit them back out on the exam.

So I texted Mitsu to ask why anything to the 0 is 1. And he called me back, from his car, where he was driving somewhere with Sue, and both of them tried to explain it to me.

“What’s x-squared times x-to-the-third?” Mitsu asked.

“x-to-the-fifth.” I said

“Right,” he said. And then he tried to explain why that same rule of addition of exponents meant that x-to-the-0 had to be 1, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Sue tried too, but I still wasn’t getting it, and finally Mitsu just said, “Write this down.”

So I got a pen, and he dictated the equation to me: x^(a+0)=x^a*x^0.

“Oh!” I said, looking at what I’d just written on the corner of my GRE workbook, “I get it now!”

The exact same words I hadn’t been able to understand over the phone, when written out in front of me, seemed totally clear.

“Text me if you have any more math questions,” he said.

Yesterday, I read this in an essay by George Miller, in the book Language by Ear and by Eye: The Relationships between Speech and Reading (which is actually the proceedings from a conference held in 1971):

“The written proposition is a tangible representation of an act of thought. It is a physical thing, an object, and it can be reacted to as any other object can. Thus writing made it possible to react to one’s own thoughts as if they were objects, so the act of thought became itself a subject for further thought. Thus extended abstraction became possible, and one of the brilliant abstractions recognized by the Greeks concerned the form of valid arguments. And so, out of writing, was logic born.”

Vanessa Gould: “I hope BETWEEN THE FOLDS might do a small part in helping to open up a more interdisciplinary dialogue about creativity in both art and science. It’s curious to me that we’re prone to drawing boundaries around our definitions of ‘science’ and ‘art,’ even though they investigate so many of the same basic things. Whether art, math, philosophy, religion, space science, poetry—the same intellectual questions are often at the root of it. So I hope a broader, interdisciplinary talk will grow. And I think the remarkable examples put forth by the artists and scientists in the film can really help in doing that.”

This documentary about modern origami masters of all stripes is fabulous, and it’s on Netflix Watch Instantly. I never got much farther than the crane stage in origami, though I did make many cranes, but my younger brother picked it up and has been making all sorts of more complex animals for years and even went to an origami convention here in NYC earlier this year. Origami is very cool.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica is also very cool, and available for streaming on Netflix. BSG is probably the best non-HBO television show I’ve ever seen. (edited: Oh wait, The West Wing wasn’t on HBO. But anyway, BSG is really good.)

Other things worth watching: The Social Network. I saw this the day it came out, at a matinee. It’s quite good, although Mitsu is (as usual) pissed at the lack of diversity portrayed at Harvard. A CS class with no East Asians in it! But I was totally thrilled to see someone blogging on LJ in a movie, and also to see a film about events I actually remember. The first time I encountered Facebook (The Facebook), I was visiting my high school friend Jessica at Columbia. She and all her friends were checking this site constantly, but I had never heard of it. That’s because Columbia was one of the first three schools to get access. I later got an account when it expanded to NYU.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook’s supposed mission to make the world a better place by encouraging sharing and openness. I’m quite supportive of this, especially when it involves being open about things that were previously considered to be shameful by the general public or personally brought shame to the sharer. It’s not just Facebook, the Internet in general was been helping to break down these walls between people for ages, oddly at the same time that it sometimes encourages them to sit at home on their computers rather than actually going out with their friends. My friend Meggy has a wonderful blog about living well with bipolar disorder, for instance, which shows what everyone ought to know already, that having the stigma of being “mentally ill” is not at all incongruent with being brilliant, thoughtful and quite self-aware.

Yesterday my friend Cathy got married. It was lovely. I posted the first photos of them as man and wife on FB, and have to admit I checked my page for comments several times before I gave in to my other friend Isabelle’s influence, got extremely drunk at the open bar, and danced for hours. I also had some near wardrobe malfunctions involving my new black Alberta Ferretti dress (which you’ll get to hear more about in my upcoming stint as a guest fashion blogger! stay tuned!) but thankfully all the many photographers and videographers in attendance were able to document was my terrible drunken dancing, and my trampling the adorable flower girl to catch the bouquet. (Actually, she threw it right to me.)

I previously stated that there’s no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. That was before I’d ever had 3 cocktails, champagne, wine, and two pints of beer in the same evening. I almost fainted during the Our Father, but I did in fact make it to Mass the next morning, so maybe my point is moot. In the future I will not test the limits of my ability to withstand alcohol poisoning right after getting over 2 weeks of pneumonia.

I love weddings.

You can now read the transcript of the online chat I participated in with Jonathan Franzen last month. Again: the Rumpus Book Club is cool.