Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: curious
  • Music: Jonathan Coulton, "First of May."

The first of May. Four months and counting.

One of the downsides to being a somewhat type-A math geek girl is having a constant awareness of the various numerical milestones unfolding all around me. It's the first of May! And quite aside from the various religious (Happy Beltane!) and humorous (Happy Jonathan Coulton Says You Have Permission To Do That, But Please, Not On My Lawn Day!) implications of the date, today marks the point at which we drop from "more than four months to Rosemary and Rue" to "less than four months to Rosemary and Rue." Yes, this is a big deal, if you're me. Also if you're going slowly crazy from trying to keep track of everything that needs to be accomplished in the next one hundred and twenty-two days.

Pardon me while I flail.

Also pardon me while I open the floor to questions. See, I want to give away a few galleys (and I'll have a longer post about why I have so many, and what's being done with most of them, a little later), and that means I need contests. Suggest things! What do you think would make a good contest? "One that I can win" is not a good answer, by the by.

I leave you with Sonnet 122, because I find structured poetry deeply soothing:

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz'd oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.

—William Shakespeare.

Whew.
Tags: math is awesome, poetry, promotion, requesting things, rosemary and rue
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  • 31 comments

the_s_guy

May 2 2009, 01:01:03 UTC 8 years ago

Huh. I thought I was the only person who noticed mathy things. It can be a distraction at times, and really no-one else wants to know that hey, that collection of numbers which just got shoved together over there are not only all squares but their square roots form a perfect right-angled triangle...

seanan_mcguire

May 2 2009, 17:37:53 UTC 8 years ago

I generally want to know. I love weird math, and I'm constantly analyzing numbers around me, looking for fun quirks. You are not alone!

the_s_guy

May 2 2009, 19:39:29 UTC 8 years ago Edited:  May 2 2009, 19:39:45 UTC

"Oh, the integral z-squared dz
From one to the cube root of three
Multiplied by cosine
Of three pi on nine
Is the log of the cube root of e"