mathieutozer.com

Call me a tripper, but in the car on the way home tonight I shut my eyes to get a bit of rest, and then I could feel, I senced the mammoth task, the Chemistry SAC to the right of me (forward in time) and from this bulging mass of stress and worry, was the horrid, sick forebodeing that I feel when coming up to (particularly the night before) a big school thing. I dislike the feeling, it somethimes makes me woosy and feel sick with worry, I guess you'd call it. Anyway so I could feel it, and so I thought, I am this itty bitty speck tumbling through time to this thing, and there is nothing that I can do about it. So then my attitude turned to determination to absorb into my brain and mind all of this, and control, and understand it, what it is, and how I was going to deal with it. Whatever it is, I CAN AND WILL come to it. So with that ultimation, my attitude (I like to refer to my attitude as being an operating system, or even the hardware!) said, right! do not dispair, THAT will get you nowhere.
And you know what I did? I thought rationally and logically:
I thought, what is the question going to be tomorrow? On petrochemicals : Ethene : how is it extracted from crude oil : what are it's uses? : What are the equations used?
I can see that if I can just reel that information out of my data banks, my 'chemistry draw' (like a file) and think more about those things, I know the subject matter well. Does it not mean that?
Then I thought, well, don't start in the middle, start from the start! Crude oul, from Bass strait. Refined in distillation towers : light CH are at the top, heaver down the bottom because of molecule size and BP (dispersion forces)(Because of that little intstant when there are more electrons at one end of a molecule than at the other that makes particles stay together) then.... : catalytic cracking, a zeolite, and then lighter Ch from heavier ones. More control than thermal cracking.
Then I would talk about the uses of ethene in society, and well, I will just go from there, and use my chemistry file vigourously.
So I think the best thing for me to do tonight is to write out completely all the reactions for ethene and put them at the bottom of the revision sheet, and the have an early night. Since my chemistry knowlege is NOT on computer HD, it is in my boilogical computer, nestled right - inside - my - head.
Isn't that wonderful? I think I just have to improve the way that I access that data, and the way that it is stored. But I AM getting better at it, and my dream is that someday I (or should I say we) will never have to use a computer ever again, for our brains will be all the processing, RAM and disk space that we wiull need. Nice and free, with no micro sillicon chips to weigh me down.
I have been experimenting with this. I was listening to music in my head last night, and it reminded me of mp3's. The playback was not very good though, but even more entertaining than normal music, I got a real kick out of Utada Hikaru's "First Love". Ahhh I love that song even more now!
Also, I uise my own brain for reminders. Like, you just set a reminder, effortlyessly, with a thought, and more often than not it pops up when you set it! Like setting ICQ reminders, really. And rather than it coming into your vision like a screen with text, it just enters your thinking, and the task of reminding is directly done. No need for annoying and time consuming entering of data into a tiny PDA, just a thought, a little concentarion, and it is stored in your medium term memory.
Like, I set one in the morning "Be careful of your sandwhich today, the lamb is in little bits and you dont want to drop any!" And then when I was walking down to the common room to eat I thought (without even thinking about it ;-P) "Be careful of your sandwhich! Don't want to loose any!"

Ahhh but for now I must be content with having to write everything down to organise things - at least then I will loose no bits of data, as my mind seems to readily do... imagine remembering data, let's say mp3's, as a million 1's and 0's. Then you would be able to listen to CD quality music, if we knew what the 101010110100010110 like sequenec was like! (I would!) And then it would also be great to then be able to download that to a disk so that you can stop concentrating and then forget about them (if you so wished) before it was in your long term memory.

And to compress data, if you could see patterns, you could eliminate them, but you would have to be able to decode them, and then, perhaps, like there are differences between winzip and stuffit, each person would have a different compression style and ability, and they would be the only ones capable of decomressing the files, as they know where they removed the patterns!

The stress that I have for chemistry is like the love that Heathcliff had for Catherine. It is all I think, and all I see. When I look at the world and the things around me I see nothing bit the exam, and it swallows me, and my all other ideas and people around me.

Today I was busy, but my worries are still pretty damn bad. But they are not as bad as before. I think. They should be, however, no let me say that I was stressing too much and it was hindering me from studying to make me confident which would make me more confident and therefore stress less!
I am also tired. I am going to have to start getting good night sleeps, because of the Chemistry exam.