In which she rediscovers why it's useful to stay home when sick

[zeborah]

Working with a mild fever isn't conducive to concentration. Or indeed reliably staying awake. Granted I was attempting to read a chemistry textbook in an attempt to look less-than-stupid when students ask me for enthalpy charts, and... let's just say, what would really be useful would be a book that explains thermodynamics without formulae because I've forgotten large chunks of my high school maths and didn't understand it very well back then either, and also I keep having to flip back to remind myself what U and q and w mean. I just... when it's prose I can follow; when it's formulae, even once I've decoded it, it has no meaning for me.

Random things:

• Dried strawberries. So awesome.
• So half the grills around my house's foundations (intended to facilitate airflow while keeping out fauna) are all rusted away, and Dad replaced a bunch with new ones, but we never got around to the rest, so I've just got bricks sitting in them. But recently I've been hearing something under the house and it's kind of obvious because there's plastic down there trying to keep the moisture from rising. Turns out some cat has pushed the bricks inside so it could get in.
  
  So I arranged the bricks such that they couldn't be pushed in, but a couple of nights later I hear the cat again. Turns out it's levered the bricks out this time. So now I've added a larger heavier brick leaning against the lot, and we'll see how strong the creature is.
• Boots says, "tgggggggggfmn".

Comments

[ajk]

I don't think formulae are easy for anyone on the first read. Even trained mathematicians need to take a long time to figure out what a new (to them) formula means, to create a mental model for it. However, once you have deciphered a formula (and haven't forgotten it), you just need to look at it to recognize it and access the mental model you created. And, it becomes easier to create mental models for similar formulae.

One could do it all without formulae, in prose. But the equivalent of a formula in prose is even more difficult to read, it cannot be used to key a mental model, it is near impossible to manipulate correctly.

Of course, all this is beside the point. :-)