Age is a number,,, sound on— 𝕮𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖆 2A 🥧🦃 (@Arkiegirl01) November 23, 2019
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Right.
Systolic, diastolic numbers. Heartbeat numbers. Deductible numbers, co-pay numbers. Life insurance numbers. Alaskans relate age to an imagined fixed number of sunrises. Age is your number of visits to your GP and to specialists and to labs. Age is the number of ambulance rides you've taken. Age is your social security number. Age is your cholesterol number. Age is your creatinine number and your glomerular filtration rate number. Age is the number of friends you've outlived; a system that's beaten by friendship avoidance. Age is the number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Age is the number of real teeth still in your mouth. Age is the number of senior discounts you manage.
And numbers are just concepts humans imagined to comprehend the material world. Music is just numbers.
This is really stupid.
Self-evident, actually.
But for me it was a profound earth-shaking insight.
One day I experienced a conflict of interests.
I was preparing for a party at my home. The place had to be cleaned up. Had to be spotless. My friends are all super-critical.
Soon, I would host and cook and be the bartender.
I also had Algebra homework that had to be finished before everyone started drinking and before I would be left with a huge after party mess to clear up before a new week begins.
So timing was critical. I had to do the Algebra homework after the last fiddling around with hyper-house-cleaning. And I'd be doing it right up to the moment guests will arrive. And everything had to be in place for a fairly large cocktail party.
The formulas were simple enough. But they did take a bit of intuition to narrow down. First go too high, then go too low. Boom. Nailed it. Intuition first, then maths to prove it. We were figuring the shape of parabolas. Our professor insisted this is a most useful skill. One he uses everyday. And one that I've yet to be challenged to use in real life.
What a butt.
But as I sat there figuring the numbers for the formulas it occurred to me the numbers are mere symbols the exact same as algebraic symbols. Numbers and function symbols are identical. The symbols for numbers; rational, real, irrational, imaginary, decimal, binary, and so on, are all symbols just like the operational symbols such as multiply, add, square and so on.
It's all symbols.
All maths are just symbols.
*dramatic sound* Duh-duh D-U-U-U-H!
I can test this new awareness by substituting Egyptian symbols for our numbers and operational symbols.
I was pretty well aware of all the Gardiner Hieroglyph Sign List. This was before the internet, so it wasn't so simple as opening Wikipedia for the full list. I went by memory and chose Egyptian symbols that were similar to the mathematic symbol; a hand for 5, a snake for 2, a "was" for 1 and so on. I made things up where hieroglyphic knowledge failed. This was before I could read them.
All I had to do write the original problem in made up hieroglyphs instead of writing in numbers. Then stick with the hieroglyphs throughout instead of sticking with the numbers to solve the formula problem in hieroglyphs.
This filled the pages with hieroglyphs.
They were very beautiful pages. I really liked drawing my math homework in hieroglyphs. That made it all a lot more fun.
I was so happy with them.
I took the hieroglyph solutions and translated them back to numbers to check my work in regular numbers and it worked!
I was so pleased that we can change the code and the math still works just by sticking to the rules we apply to symbols.
I had zero time to f around but there I was drawing pictures along with doing my Algebra homework. It was ridiculous.
I couldn't turn in my hieroglyphs, I had to re-write the whole thing in regular numbers.
Bing bong.
First guests arrived. I showed them my pages of hieroglyphs.
"That's very nice."
"It's actually my Algebra homework. I tested to see if it works using any pictures at all. And it does! It actually works."
"Algebra. Yuck."
What an odd reaction. The guy I showed my pages to designed Allmilmo cabinets. These are high-end kitchen cabinets mostly with European style hinges and pulls. Very expensive cabinets for snobs. His office was in Cherry Creek and he was more spectacularly successful than most other people I knew at that time including doctors and lawyers. (Two actual people, a doctor and a lawyer who were also his friends. He was more successful than they were.) Talented as he was in many ways he was also a big butt hole. The strange thing was he used math all the time. I saw him similarly time-crunched drawing schematics, using stock cabinets and custom cabinets, designing kitchens using math. Basically, doing his homework as I arrived. He was heavily reliant on math. Yet he said "Yuck" to my Egyptian hieroglyph algebra. That type of butt hole.
Age is just a number. All three of these people are dead. The Allmilmo kitchen cabinet designer, the doctor friend and the government lawyer friend. We were all friends. The youngest died first of lung cancer. (Never smoked). The second youngest died next of colon cancer. The oldest died last, an oncologist who could not save the previous two.
3 comments:
High cholesterol ain't necessarily a bad thing...or number. As usual the experts have scared the bejeezus out of a lot of people who are basically healthy. Possibly even healthier with high than low.
As I understand that, the Yurp-eans have it correctly.
There are two basic types of cholesterol. A "going to" and "building up" at the site of damage, and another "clearing out" type. American doctors measure both as one thing.
But then, American diet is distinctly different from all others. All other across the entire globe and all others across all of historic time. Right now, we are different from everything else. Ever.
And I think that's the most serious part of our problem. Not just the way our doctors view and treat cholesterol. There is something to all this obsession about organically grown produce, uni-culture farming, pesticides and fertilizers and so on. I do not dismiss all that hippy-talk.
I am the person who's lived in this building the longest. I think maybe I can switch to the apartment that gets the most sunlight on its balcony. I really need to up my own gardening game. I need more direct sunlight. Maybe it's time for me to get greedy for direct sunlight. I love my apartment, but I might love another one even more.
Maybe I should say, "When that cop moves, and he will, I want his apartment. I have balcony sunlight envy."
Talk to the trees, who manage to age and mark the seasons and years of their lives without numbers.
Numbers are markers. Markers provide information. I've survived 65 winters with no ambulance rides, few senior discounts, all my teeth (except for two removed during my teens), and lovely recent cholesterol reading. Am I old? Yes, several other body parts are losing function and/or compromised to the point where they are less reliable and effective compared to the way they were 30 winters ago.
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