Complex Numbers

Book Learnin'

What is your learning style? Do you prefer to learn through reading, images, audio, discussion, hands on, etc.? What is something new you learned in the last 30 days?

Well, first of all, let's talk about the idea of learning styles.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/...

Now that we've debunked that, let's talk about my favorite subject: Me!

It's probably because I went to engineering school that I have a particular system that helps me learn and retain stuff: reading then doing. Like, when I was taking a calculus course, I'd read the chapter and work through the exercises at the end.

Or, at least, that's the theory. In practice, I'd go out and have beers

Well... what passed for beers in college before I learned important stuff like what actual beer was

and then take whatever test whilst hung over.

I had to repeat a couple of calculus classes.

And yet, I remember. I don't mean every single detail, of course - I'd have to look up how to take the integral of, say, (sin x² / log_e x) - but I remember the concepts.

Now, this was before the internet, and just after people stopped programming mainframe computers using punch cards in the Fortran language, so we didn't have a lot of the tools available to us today, like video courses.

It's possible that this is why I fucking hate learning from videos. Doesn't matter what subject: cooking, getting past certain boss monsters in video games, how to count cards at blackjack, how to not get caught counting cards at blackjack, History of Beer, programming in something other than Fortran, or whatever.

Every purported training video I've ever encountered either goes too fast or too slow. And yes, I am aware that there are tools colloquially known as "pause," "fast forward," "rewind," and whatever; those annoy me.

No, give me clear, written instructions, and I'll learn the shit out of something.

Which is not to say that videos are totally useless. I sometimes like to use them to get an overview of something. Like, when I'm at the gym, to keep my mind as active as my body, I've been watching educational lecture videos

It's either that or watch the idiot boxes hanging from the ceiling, but that would expose me to ads, and I despise ads with an all-consuming, fiery passion

. Short on fancy graphics, these are mostly someone with a PhD in something or other standing there talking about their favorite subject. My current lecture series is about the quantum states of electrons. It's enough to give me a basic idea of how electrons work, but I could never actually calculate, say, the energy released when the outermost excited electron in a carbon atom drops down to its minimum-energy state. But I do know that this process occurs and has to emit a photon of a certain wavelength.

If I could be arsed to read a book about it, though, I could probably learn more. But most such books assume a knowledge that I just don't have, because the only actual course I took in quantum theory was at 8 am, and I don't do 8 am.

So, see, even though I find videos less than useless for most purposes, they work for me to some extent. A lot depends on the subject matter and my interest in it. Different approaches seem to work for different things. For example, in assembling furniture or a model rocket, I want text and diagrams. For learning more about spreadsheets, I want examples that I can plug into a workbook and play with.

These days, most of what I learn, I learn with the purpose in mind to somehow use it in my writing (the exception might be card-counting, if I actually studied that, which I will not admit to doing).

So - what is something new I learned in the last month? Well, it's a question that's been bugging me on an intellectual level and I'd never found a clear answer for: As you know, opposite charges attract. An electron has a negative charge; a proton has an equivalent positive charge. And yet, in an atom, the electron kind of hovers

it's actually way cooler than that

around the nucleus (which contains protons and neutrons, the latter of which are (wait for it) neutral in charge) without them getting together and having babiesannihilating their charges. So what is it that keeps the electron away from the proton? That was what was bugging me, and this course I'm watching explained it to my satisfaction.

The actual explanation is related to how white dwarf stars don't just collapse spontaneously into neutron stars or black holes.

Hey, what can I say? I write science fiction, and I want to at least try to get the science right.