Childlike discoveries

As I was mentioning to my sis tonight, the rebuilding of my social life is going reasonably well. I've probably met more people in the past two months than I have in the past two years. Aside from work and professional circles, all the new folks I've met have two common threads:

1. Apparently, I'm quite nice but am a rather strange person
2. None of them are buying that I'm all "Sweetness and Light" (more on that later!)

*sigh* Rebuilding one's life is a trial sometimes. On that note, I was deathly tired last night and I tend to babble about physics or math when I get that way. I ended up completely confusing her with talk about M-theory and lower dimensional shearing. Overnight, the babbling serendipitously worked its way through my overtired mind into a method of fixing misaligned 2-ply toilet paper (don't ask). It's rather simple:

1. Ensure that the roll rolls out from the top, i.e. it dispense squares from the top, towards you
2. Since the two plys are already separated (misaligned), take just the top ply and gently flip it backwards (i.e. down through the "hole" between the roll itself and whatever wall/cabinet the roll holder is attached to).
3. Follow the bottom ply until you see the section where both plys are aligned. Tear off the misaligned plys + the first completely aligned square.

Of course, a simple Google search will reveal that other people have figured this out ages ago. My life is rife with disappointments like this - as a child, I had been rather proud of my perpetual motion machine that I had planned out on paper years before and saw it all crumble before my eyes upon learning the first law of thermodynamics for the first time. Or that time when I managed to figure out wireframe vector graphics via matrix transformations from first principles (wow, trigonometry actually had a use). Unfortunately, being just a callow child at the time, I had no idea what "rounding errors" were and watched in dismay as any object modelled on my computer shrank into nothingness after several rotations - I didn't figure out why until first year computer science in university.

I have been obliviously treading down a path that many others have already come and gone. Still, I feel a warmth and pride that I managed to work it out by myself from first principles. This isn't about bragging or patting oneself on the back though - childlike discoveries aren't common after we grow up and I'm *savouring* these moments of wonder when I encounter them. In the big picture, I guess what matters is that we all as a species continue to progress in our collective understanding. It doesn't take much to do good; we only needed one Isaac Newton (+ one apple) to have the math to touch the sky, one Alexander Fleming (+ some mould) to save countless lives. I do not count myself anywhere close to these giants - heck, I'm relearning trig just so I can make a perfect giant chocolate icosahedron (a d20 die) to bring along for my D&D group to eat. How totally useless and non-Earth shattering is that? :)

So why blog about something mundane like this? Well, let me ask a question: how many times have you had some great idea (or what you thought was great) but never pursued? Please note that ideas generated while drunk don't count! :) Seriously though, I suspect that those who make great discoveries do so not solely by dint of great effort but also by ruthlessly pursuing every path of inquiry they have, panning for that one single nugget of truth that will change the world. I remember flipping through a book that my sis has that showed the pages of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. It had beautiful sketches of fantastic machines of which only the tinest fraction were ever built and fewer still actually worked. Regardless, it's not the success or failure that counted, it's the *idea*. Da Vinci drew plans for an ornithopter that never worked but years later, the idea inspired people to build working helicopters. We are in an age of information overload and the low-hanging fruit, the "easy" discoveries are mostly gone. We are in an era where discoveries are so hard that it takes the joint effort of many to succeed. I, for one, am going to keep a tiny notebook by me as much as possible to collect these transient ideas for further investigation and I respectfully suggest that you may want to consider it too. Realistically, not everyone can be a Newton or Einstein and I have zero expectation I shall either. But if I can contribute just a tiny little bit to the betterment of all, then I shall have done good and in my opinion, it would have been worth it. Wouldn't we all benefit from finally jointly solving the mystery of missing socks in the laundry? ;)

After all that, I still maintain that it's very personally gratifying to discover something by oneself even if it's by accident and even if it's trivial. Is it vanity? Or stubbornness? I honestly don't know.

But I'm beginning to suspect that there may be some truth to the allegations that I'm strange.