It seems that I get into math difficulties after midnight. And by three or four AM, when every other rational, normal, hard-working human being should be fast asleep, I am sitting at my studio table staring at my book, wondering why I am stumped by a totally simple problem I should be able to solve. Now the obvious answer is, if I had been asleep at that time so I could study at some decent hour, I wouldn't have that problem. But I still would have the perplexity.

At this point I would love to ask one of my Friendly Scientists or Mathematicians, "Sorry to bother you, but, uh, what is this all about?" But they, being human beings with real lives, are asleep. I will have to leave my problem at their virtual doorstep, like a newspaper, until they are ready to pick it up and help me with it. But then, this is Internet World. I have co-workers and friends whose lives are so entwined with the Internet that they see nothing unusual in having a circle of friends all over the world. They have intimates in Australia they have never met face to face; they trustingly sell to and buy from people thousands of miles away. If I had a Friendly Scientist who was, say, in Europe, I could e-mail him at 3 AM here and find him perky and fresh with morning energy, reading (and answering) his e-mail before or during breakfast. But I don't. Nor has the Virtual Artificial Intelligence Physicist I described in an entry last year been invented.

I encountered yet another one of those sliding block problems in Sawyer's text. In itself it is rather irrelevant, used as an "aside" to illustrate an introduction to accelerated motion. But it brought back all that work I did on the sliding blocks, with the normal force and the static friction and the kinetic friction and the weights on the pulleys. I hesitate to quote it because there is something really simple about this I have missed. Newton's second law is implicated somewhere, but in the gloom of the pre-dawn hours I do not have his enlightenment.

Posted at 2:55 am | link