Janeth Canama

If you think about it a hyperlink is the coolest thing ever. You mean to tell me that I can go from one place to another place in an instant? Only time travel can beat that. We take it for granted. But imagine if we can be transported from one physical place to another in an instant. Wouldn't that be revolutionary? It's like magic. I guess my frustration comes from the inefficiency of travel. And the difference between Euclidean distance and Manhattan distance. Or the difference between distance and displacement. The Euclidean distance is the length of the straight line connecting two points. But travelling from one point two another is another story. There are barriers--manmade and natural. So in reality the distance traveled is significantly longer than the Euclidean distance. But we don't have this problem with "places" on the internet. We can go from one link to another by hyperlinking--transcending physicality.  And even if the internet connection is slow, we...

I wish academic writing was more fun. I'll give you a story of algebra. This is the story of Alex. She wants to know where she came from. Alex grew up an orphan. She didn't know her biological parents. Now that she's older, she wants to find them. She wants to know why they abandoned her at such a young age. This story is a story of identity. What is the essence of a person? Why is it important for us to trace our ancestry? Why do categories exist? Why does it matter at all? What if she's "divergent" and doesn't belong to any existing tribes? Does something like that exist in mathematics--like an amalgam of identities? To figure out where she came from, Alex is gonna ask the help of mathematicians like Galois. See? That wasn't so hard. And now I'm intrigued.

Why is it sometimes easier to start over than to edit an unrecognizable writing? So the downside of the free writing technique that I used is that if I don't edit it immediately, I don't remember what I meant when I wrote it. I f there are so many errors and mistakes then the task of editing it would be overwhelming. So sometimes it is easier to just start over with just the gist of the idea. The white ink method will be helpful in overcoming writer's block but it's quite challenging to edit what you've written. I guess the lesson there is that sometimes it's easier to start over than to fix something  unfixable .  It's a headache. This applies to life in general, not only writing. Sometimes we just have to let chaos take over and let things be, you know. I observed this when I tried to compile tweets so that I can write a post based on them but since my account is private it's time-consuming to try to collect them or to compile them into a coherent bod...

Oh this is easy. It's web surfing. Reading tweets on twitter. Browsing reddit.  I don't know why. Maybe it's just boredom. But there's something else there too. I want to dip in the stream of humanity. I want to know how they live. Or maybe I want to hoard information? No, it's not that. Maybe I just have an insatiable curiosity. I even wrote a poem about it-- what are you staying up for? Maybe I just want you to tell me something I don't know. This space of not-knowing is so vast that I don't think I'll ever get to the bottom of it. But it's fun. But since I can't finish reading all of it, I waste a lot of time trying to be satiated. I usually feel awful about it. I guess the dissatisfaction comes from collecting disconnected information. I jump from topic to topic. There's no narrative that ties them together. So I don't feel satisfied at all. You know what, that's actually a good thing because then I can stop.  Because the problem ...