I have to admit, I had a quandry. Was it better to turn up with a broken foot and a cough like Typhoid Mary, or not turn up at all ? Tough call.
I turned up, and smiled a lot between coughs.
They didn’t have a desk ready for me. Or a phone. Or a computer. Or any time to teach me anything. But I grabbed a pile of brochures, and spent a fair proportion of the day on Wikipedia (check out CPAP – it’s not as boring as some of the other stuff I poked into).
I had another maths revelation during the day. Reading about human biology is fascinating. All the respiratory stuff was enthralling, and I think my retention rate for the new information was pretty high. But when I came across maths, my mind went blank, and I literally found myself nodding off. The word vector was a trigger for me. I know what it means in art, but in the context of a biological explanation of electricity in the human heart, my eyes glazed over. Very peculiar.
Perhaps if I can name it, I can conquer it ? Let’s hope so. I know Mark will get a job soon, but in the meantime, I am feeling a lot of pressure to excel at this job.
On the upside, I sold something today. I think I got the client contact details right, and even the products they wanted. Thank god I didn’t have to discuss pricing!
And for todays entertainment, here is a clip of Frank Zappa being interviewed by Norman Gunston. If you don’t know Frank, do yourself a favour and get acquainted with Sheik Yerbouti. Or at the very least, go to you tube and do a Zappa search.
Frank Zappa once said, in response to criticism of his very public smoking, and the possible effect on impressionable youth, Frank took a long drag of his cigarette, and said, “you see to me, this is food”.*
*Please don’t smoke. Smoking is bad. It may make you look cool in the short term, but your knitting will smell bad, and only other smelly people will have sex with you. And you will die young.
Disco Knitter 
There’s a couple of meanings to the word vector.
In disease, a vector is the way the disease is transmitted. ie, Chook would like to be a vector for bird flu, particulary when I won’t let him bite me.
In physics, it’s a way of descibing speed, and direction (aka velocity). If you’re driving your car at 60km/hour going north, the speed and direction is described by a vector.
I can, on a good day, translate from science geek to human.
By the way, Billy Connoly uses a CPAP. Australian invention, very useful, great for quality of life. Sleep apnea is a horrid thing to sleep besides (ask me, I know. An ex used to stop breathing 60 times an hour while sleeping.)
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When it comes to electricity in the human heart, and vectors, though, I’m buggered if I can think of any examples.
If I have another glass of red, I’m sure it will come to me.
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Continuing on from Emma, in Maths it’s like the physics def. but in any number of dimensions, instead of the physics three (or four). Like all things mathsy, there are axioms, and anything that suits them is called a vector. It can usually be represented as a series of numbers (an n-tuple), a 1xn matrix if you will?
Computer science borrows off that, making it a 1-dimensional array, kinda like a bunch of things in a row.
Now I think I should look up the art definition, I’ve never heard of that one.
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