the week explodes

I really want to post some Derpy pictures for you, after pushing to get her finished Sunday night. (There comes a point on a project where you kind of reach a fever-pitch of "I'm so close to having this done" and you push on even though you're tired...my hands paid for it yesterday, even with the ergonomic hooks I should not crochet for that long at any one time).

But my life is going crazy right now.

I actually thought I had double-booked myself for meetings today (I have my grad student coming in for stats counseling, and I thought I had scheduled the meeting to get the new online book-ordering-for-the-library training - as library liaison, I can now order books for the library directly, which could be a dangerous thing), but I don't.

And I have a meeting tonight. And I have to do an Advent workshop Friday where I do a program on making Chrismons - and to my great dismay, when I checked over at church before the CWF meeting last night, someone had thrown away the templates I had made several years ago so I will have to make time to make new ones....(and this time, store them at my house)

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I did start another hat off of the Jane Brocket pattern (The one that originally disappointed me when I made a hat for myself). BUT I am using a needle two sizes smaller (I found a short circular size 3 - yes, I know you can do magic loop but I don't care for it) and I'm going to do fewer pattern repeats to make the hat less gigantic and poofy. Because it's the gift-exchange gift for my AAUW group, and most of them are older and more conservative dressers than I am. (And I'm not even all that outrageous in how I dress). I think it will be pretty, though - it's a very pale blue-green, kind of a robin's-egg blue, which is a color that I think looks good on most people.

I also have the same yarn in navy, with plans to do a hat for my sister-in-law. If I have enough time. (Well, I have 10 days before Christmas that I'm at my parents - I can probably knock one of these hats out in a couple days if I work fairly consistently on it, the AAUW hat is the one where there will be time-pressure).

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I started reading a new book last night. I had finished a couple I had been working on (I don't think I'm going to read any more of the Scarpetti novels. They are interesting and all, but this one - Port Mortuary - was sad and claustrophobic and for a goodly part of the book, the main character - the narrator - was in the dark as to what was really going on. And I find that distressing to read - not good bedtime reading).

The book is called "Number: the Language of Science." It's actually a reprint of an older book - it's a revision (I guess) of a book originally published in the 1950s. It's sort of a history of how we figured out mathematics. I'm just at the veriest beginning of it (I am one of those people who plows through all the prefaces and stuff in non-fiction books, so reading those took a while).

The part I'm on right now might be called "the discovery of numbers." A lot of this is kind of speculative, as we can't really know - probably can't even really think like - how early peoples thought about math. For example: there are "cardinal" numbers and "ordinal" numbers, where cardinal numbers are sort of a category - three cows or three days, they have the quality of "three-ness." But they don't really put that "three-ness" in relationship to any other numbers. But ordinal numbers, well, order things. So when you say "Eleven. That's one more than ten," you're using ordinal numbers. But in our modern way of thinking, cardinality has kind of collapsed down into ordinality so we don't really think about them as separate things - we so much think of numbers as how they are in relation to each other that we don't think of a number or an amount as a category.

I love books like that, I enjoy the speculation on how we came to be how we are now. Yes, I know, a lot of it is what is sometimes referred to as S.W.A.G. speculation, but it's still fun to think about.

Another interesting fact about the author: Tobias Dantzig came from Eastern Europe (Latvia, I think) to the U.S. Before he went to school to become a mathematician, he worked as a lumberjack. (I admit, reading that in the introductory material, my brain immediately started going: "He's a lumberjack, and he's OK. He sleeps all night and maths all day" but I'm quite sure that Dantzig never skipped and hopped, pressed wildflowers, or put on women's clothing and hung around in bars. Then again, one never knows.)