Re: Color Terms

On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 04:08:22PM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> No, I can't even visualize the darn things for the 3-dimensional case,
> though I'm fine with plain-vanilla Peano curves.  (I once met a mountain
> road that was a frighteningly good approximation.  My sister was about to
> throw up from car-sickness and my dad, who was driving, was looking
> pretty green, and they *both* were irritated at me because I wasn't
> affected at all!)
Haha, I suppose you're too used to seeing weird, twisty mathematical
shapes floating around in your head :-)

>
> I can visualize Menger sponges but alas, nothing of higher-dimension.  I
> do love looking at two-dimensional renditions of three-dimensional
> "slices" of four-spheres, though.  Quite lovely.
I think I've seen some computer-generated snapshots of a few 3D slices of
a 4D sphere showing how it's turned inside-out. And no, I do not know
*how* you can turn a sphere inside-out in 4D (even though I like to give
people the impression that I do know) :-P


[snip]
> "Gut feeling" has rarely worked for me in math.  :-/  I "internalize"
> things when I'm learning language with relative ease.  My German class is
> a joke, and I'm doing pretty decently with teaching myself Latin out of
> Wheelock.  For some reason my mind assimilates language-forms far more
> easily than math-forms.  (I don't claim to be a language genius; I'm
> better than average, but "genius" would go to people like my friend Abby,
> who's fluent in Arabic, Spanish, English, French and Korean and last I
> heard was working on Chinese due to a certain boyfriend.)  I'm loath to
> classify this as either "rational" or "intuitive."
Hmm, interesting. I find that I'm better at internalizing math (esp.
calculus) and scientific stuff, although I do have some ability to
internalize foreign languages -- eg., English has practically become my L1
now; I think in English, speak to myself in English, and do everything in
English. Only vestiges of Chinese remains in my everyday thinking process,
such as the multiplication table since I learned it in Chinese, or certain
words/idioms in my L1 untranslatable to English. Of course, this is just
English; I still find it hard to learn other languages. Much harder than
I'd find a new subject in math/science, for example.

> You are fortunate to have the ability to "follow your nose" in math.  I
> can sometimes come close (when I can't solve a proof, I write down an
> outline of approaches I might take; TA's sometimes give partial credit
> for such things) but it doesn't come naturally.  :-p  But that's why I'm
> a math major: so I can learn something from professors that I would find
> terribly difficult to learn on my own!  And I find that I know material
> best about a year *after* I've learned it, mainly because my mind has
> given up resisting it.  <laugh>
:-) On the contrary, being the lazy bum that I am, I've always avoided
courses that I know I'm not good at, in my undergrad years. For some
reason, I just *cannot* grok certain subjects (probability and statistics
come to mind; biology used to be an old enemy although that may not be
true now). It's so bad that during one assignment in a CS advanced data
structures course, I got perfect on every other question but nil on the
one question that was related to probability :~(

[snip]
> I've run across something similar to this this in tutoring writing, because
> while U.S. universities
> favor "deductively" structured essays, we run into international students
> who write essays inductively (among other things, you find their theses
> at the end, not the beginning, of the paper) and have to explain to them
> that the discourse-mode is different at Cornell U. (specific case,
> anyway).  Personally, I find well-written inductive-mode essays just as
> fun to read, and sometimes more fun because of the suspense, as
> deductive-mode essays.
Hmm... *I* like writing stuff inductively... even in the odd math system
that I sometimes work on, in my free time. I like the suspense :-) I find
deductive-mode essays quite boring, because to me, you're just making some
(possibly outrageous) claim and then twisting... ermm, discreetly picking
the right facts to make your claim sound plausible. Inductive-mode essays,
OTOH, presents the (hopefully) unbiased facts, and then show you how these
facts lead to the thesis. To me, it's better to let the facts guide your
conclusion than conversely.

Disclaimer: I've never actually gotten away with *submitting* an
inductive-mode essay, so I hereby disclaim any liabilities associated with
the loss of grades and grade-point averages, mental trauma, insomnia, and
any other loss resulting from the use of my advice. ;-)


T

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