<p>Right now in front of me there are like 6 books</p>
<p>“Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” (this is actually an academic book)
“The Quark and the Jaguar” (Murray Gell-Mann)
“The Science of Self-Control”
“A First Course in Probability”
“Probability” (Pitman)
“The Synaptic Self”
“The Quest for Consciousness”
“The Extended Phenotype”</p>
<p>And now I’m going back and forth between those books. arggh. I read a few pages, attention span dies, read a few pages of another, attention span dies, etc… I’m losing my attention span for them. And I’ll never finish anything…</p>
<p>the problem is - almost the entire parts of each of the books are very interesting. I’m 3/4 finished with some of them, and barely touched a few of the others</p>
<p>when my solutions to spivak arrive via interlibrary loan i’m going to have my hands full</p>
<p>choose the book that you’re the farthest in. you ARE going to finish it. put all the other books away. out of sight, out of mind.
after you have that done, take a walk. think about everything except those books. I would suggest about a half hour walk, but however long you need.</p>
<p>why are you reading all of them at the same time? choose one, read it, then move on to another. actually… why are you reading them all to begin with?? those are some intense books. do you have to have them read by a certain date or something? i don’t really get why you’re stressed out about it…</p>
<p>because i’m losing a lot of progress on math due to it… meh I never knew that i would get so much into all of those subjects - but they’re so insightful and useful. sigh… I was planning on learning abstract algebra at 17…now I think I’m going to learn it at 18. =/ and if i find more interesting books (geez they are SO INSIGHTFUL) I’ll have to delay it again…</p>
<p>…and I want to learn quantum mechanics sometime…I’ll have to delay self-studying that too…</p>
<p>…and I still have no experience in Matlab =(</p>
<p>of course the age difference of 1 year is almost nothing - but I’m sacrificing so much depth in my study of math for all this reading (and the depth is most important)</p>
<p>and now i don’t know what i want to go into - since so many fields are so interesting</p>
<p>if this continues i’ll have to cut back on grad level courses next year =/ </p>
<p>I just finished “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid.” Extremely insightful - captured a lot of my potential interest. I’m aiming on finishing Synaptic Self by the end of today - then i have to study for a test. =/</p>
<p>“Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them” - E. Wigner</p>
<p>worst of all, i’m not doing undergrad research due to this…</p>
<p>but i feel so impelled to read it all… before i get tied into too many obligations (certainly I can delay graduation, but there is no delay after that)</p>
<p>anyhow i finally finished synaptic self at 2 PM today. i had to go outside and walk some distance to a bench to kill distractions. on the way back i saw a roadkill squirrel. i almost stepped on it. =/</p>
<p>next up: quark and jaguar or the quest for consciousness. both by caltech profs. hmm</p>
<p>4 PM now - arrgh I lost 1 hour to NOTHING. now I have 4-12 PM to study for test tomorrow</p>