Janeth Canama

A while ago I watched a video of Jack Conte  about creativity. There are two things that stood out. The first one is about writing for pleasure vs writing to publish. That one really resonated with me because I create stories in my head but I don't write them down. Self-indulgence. It would be cool to write it all down but that takes a lot of work. So this is the thing that I've been thinking about--having the right vocabulary. I've been having this conflict with myself and now that I saw that video I finally have terms that I can use to express this conflict. It's the same with math research, I think. I have some idea of what the result is but not having the right terms and notations to describe it is challenging. When I stumbled upon that 2015 paper by Araujo, et.al, everything opened up for me. Another thing is about funnels. The first connection that I can think of is about collaboration. I've been thinking about my sandwich program for a while now. And honestly...

I will talk about how I became a math major and the circumstances that led to it. As I was getting a screenshot of my COR and covering my ID Number because of privacy reasons, I was debating whether or not to cover my CGPA too. It's not information that can be used for identity theft, so why hide it? I realized that what I'm feeling is SHAME. Photo by  Andrea Piacquadio  from  Pexels Yes, my Cumulative GPA is 1.95267. Yes, I didn’t get a Latin honor. Some of my professors were surprised because they assumed that I did. I think it’s time to share what I’m ashamed about publicly so that it doesn’t have this power on me anymore. So what happened?  In the summer of 2010, I got hooked on PBB. I got invested in one of James Reid's loveteams. I was eighteen then. My teenage brain couldn't help but get attached to these personalities who weren't even aware of my existence. Now I know that there's a term for this attachment — parasocial relationship. I was watching live...

Photo by  ThisIsEngineering  from  Pexels Maybe it's time to talk about being an advocate for your future self. I guess the difficulty with this idea is that your "future self" is abstract. She does not exist yet. It's hard to empathize to someone non-existent.  My initial idea is that I should help Future Janeth (FJ) to get there. How can I help FJ to realize her existence? The rationale behind this approach is that I seem to do more when I help other people than when I help myself. Maybe it's the lack of accountability when I let myself down. Or maybe it's my people-pleasing tendencies. Whatever it is, I seem to be more motivated when I'm helping other people than when I'm "helping" myself. I go out of my way to help someone any way I can. So why can't I extrapolate this idea to help the "future me"? The one that doesn't exist yet. The one that I can't visualize and only see as a haze. I talked about it when I studied ...

These are my notes on  transformative tools for thought (haven't finished it yet) which reminds me of the book "A mind for numbers" by Barbara Oakley. What's really going on is that they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology. It's difficult to understand quantum mechanics when you're unclear about every third word or piece of notation. Every sentence is a struggle. Same with math. If you don't get what notations really mean, even if you have conceptual understanding, you will get lost. In caricature, they say: “Why should I care about memory? I want deeper kinds of understanding! Can’t I just look stuff up on the internet? I want creativity! I want conceptual understanding! I want to know how to solve important problems! Only dull, detail-obsessed grinds focus on rote memory.” That's me. I'm caricature. ...when an expert learns new information in their field, they don’t make up artificial connections to their memory palace....

  Around this time, three years ago (July 2017 to be exact), I was also in this same room. Although the circumstances are different. My mindset then was desperation, now it’s abundance.  The jeepney realization Don’t just ride any jeepney. Choose the one going to your destination. I’ve waited so long… The waiting started during the summer of 2017 when I received a call from the principal of Mainit NHS. But I didn’t really end up there, did I? I had other options. Anyway the wait was so long that I remember riding on a jeepney with ICENHS students in it and thinking that “these are the kids that I will be teaching.” As the jeepney passed ICENHS, I thought to myself “that’s the school that I will be teaching at.” It was a surreal moment. My emotions were a mix of impatience and excitement. Oh how easy we forget. Maybe it’s true that the chase is more exciting than the reward. I guess that’s what I needed that time. I was bored with nothing to do. I needed to contribute. And so ...

  I always appreciate timestamps on long videos. One, it's a time saver. Two, it's like a table of contents so i have an idea of what's in the video. In the absence of, I scan the comments to see if there's any timestamp that viewers left behind. Bits that they find interesting. Otherwise, it's highly likely that i will exit the video and move on to the next one unless I get the gist of what the video is about in the first few minutes.  And then I decide if it's worth finishing. This is my "hobby". I waste my time doing this, instead of watching tv or movies.  I feel anxiety when I know that there are so many more videos that I can watch/listen to but have no time. FOMO but for information consumption. Mostly consuming, no creating. I tried leaving timestamps to videos I find insightful, but not consistently. I should do it more often. I create twitter threads where I attempt to document my (social) media consumption. I hope I do it consistently. Becau...

Today I typed out the proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory. I'm almost done but I took a break.  Well, today felt good. I finally wrote that Pascal's triangle  article. It wasn't so hard. Took only an hour to do. And doing illustrations was fun too. Even if that project won't go anywhere, at least I had fun doing it. Next agenda is to read the articles downloaded and see if there's something there.  Catalan numbers. Manhattan distance. And so on and so forth. I don't really think I've done anything substantial today. Because I know I can do so much more in a day. But should I? What if I burn out? While writing the Pascal's article I had this realization that that problem is all about efficiency. And this connects to the " optimize before synthesize " post that I wrote a while ago. Or the "embrace the mess" post that I've been meaning to write. What's this obsession with efficiency? Is efficiency always good? By tr...