I used to peruse Pokemon-related Geocities and Angelfire sites as a 10-year-old! Wild to read this.

Long, but a good read!

Made a new post about maps and navigating without GPS!

wow that sounds like a fun adventure! i have the same ideas about gps, especially when i drive, i never use gps and only rely on signs. urbex is so fun, i wish i had friends to do that with X﹏X congrats for your job btw!

Fantastic, can't wait to sit down and read this!

I mostly share the sentiment!! I will never understand my friends who won't walk further than a 5 minutes walk away from their own homes without the gps telling them where to go. In their home cities nonetheless... Even though I'm the Spend The Day At Your Dumbputer kind of person I still walk a lot for fun and could probably reach any point in my city while only knowing the address, even the most "ebenya" spots.

I use a combination of methods. I'll sometimes use an old GPS in my car for the final leg of a journey to somewhere I'm unfailiar with but I prefer to rely on paper maps and my own hand-written directions. I cycle a lot so visualising the route before hand is most useful. Too many people don't have a clue where anything is in relation to anywhere else.

I don't think the divide is as big as it seems. I'm in the algebra world (algebraic geometry to be precise) and there are so many applications to physics (even though I'm not a big fan of physics either). What I'm researching relates in part to Mirror Symmetry, which is a massive project at the intersection of algebra and physics. representation theory and lie groups are also areas of algebra used a lot in physics

the other thing i'll say is that the more analysis intuition you can get as an undergrad, the better. modern algebra since the 60s uses a huge number of homological methods, which have their basis in algebraic topology. undergraduate analysis and differential geometry (very useful for physics) can help a lot in understanding this stuff.

while it does suck, getting corralled into studying an area your less interested in as an undergrad is extremely common. it happened to me and many of my fellow grad students. it's a lot easier to research what you're actually interested in once you get to grad school

I feel you. But try to look on the bright side. You will learn things you would have avoided your whole career. At best, you will start to like it the more you dive into it. At worst, your area of interest will not change, but your head will be filled with unusual concepts that you can use when you go back to algebra.

As for the man-machine part: It is not silly, but I would like you to discard this image of yourself. It implies that you ignore your feelings, but they are an integral part of every human being. This sounds like a thing that can escalate into burnout over time. Take care.

Made an RSS feed and a mailing list to notify about the new blogposts :)