[FRIAM] reasoning

[Santafe]

Ahh, Algebra teachers.

I think it was in 10th grade that I was allowed into some algebra class in high school.  There was only one teacher.  It could even be that we were limited to him in 10th and 11th grade.  Name was Eugene Cole.  I wish I could convey the picture of the man, but that would go into a level of mean-spiritedness that I don’t want to open.  Or maybe it was Algebra in 11th and Calculus in 12th; that would make more sense for the story I am about to tell.  You can get a sense of how backward public education was where I lived. 

In any case, he was the first one to teach me about certain kinds of Pavlovian conditioning.  I didn’t know it at the time.  Did appreciate how getting through each class with the droning and boredom was tough.  

The lesson came when I was driving with my father across the U.S. Southwestern desert to move to college in California.  Fine morning, pretty, bright, etc.  All of a sudden for no reason I could flag, I was hit by an uncontrollable, narcoleptic-like drowsiness.  Looked at the clock:  This was the hour the Algebra (or calculus?) class had usually begun.

Eric



> On Jul 1, 2025, at 6:06, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> IDK. I can't help but wonder if a walk through a reasoning process like this would have helped me at 17 or so, fresh off geometry, trig, algebra, etc and headed into calculus. Complex numbers were largely opaque, despite some exposure. I don't think they clarified until college. Add in the ability to raise the temperature parameter, iterate a couple times, and it may well have been helpful ... more so than my "teachers" who barely understood what they were teaching and my calculus teacher who seemed to believe she could telepathically push things into my head.
> 
> But I *definitely* think a few breaks in the reasoning to play with the dog or argue about whether pineapple or anchovies belong on pizza would have helped me pay attention longer. >8^D
> 
> On 6/30/25 11:25 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Blah, blah, blah.  He should have stopped at e^(i pi) + 1 =0
> 
> On 6/30/25 11:25 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> So conscientious!   There was nothing about being hungry or wanting to play with the dog.
> 
> On 6/30/25 1:05 PM, Santafe wrote:
>> wow.  Disingenuous performative much?  Who programs these things?  That level of smarm is malicious in and of itself.  Having just watched the thing on Alex Karp and who is running “things” these days.
>>> On Jul 1, 2025, at 3:02, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Inference was running slowly. So I decided to see if the GPU was actually working. It wasn't. So I had to shut everything down and restart the container. Then to test, I thought I'd ask Qwen3 a simple reasoning question. The attached is the result.
>>> 
>>> OMG. Please think more quietly. I feel like I'm at the pub sitting next to one of those super talkative people who just get worse as they drink.
>>> 
> 
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