Monday morning / Friday afternoon thought inspiring blog

What is the difference between a teacher and a student? Answer: a teacher is someone who has finished learning. Of course this is not strictly and generally true, but I do believe there is some merit to this thesis. Teachers should feel confident with the material they are teaching and thus feel no incentive for further study, at least not for the material they are teaching. Teachers have a rounded message and a clear vision of the field in question, whereas students do not want to impose their view on others but want to know the view of others. Exploring the views of others is an essential part of the learning process. Furthermore, a teacher must be convinced that his teachings are worth the effort to bring them across. Generally it takes far less time to absorb clearly presented ideas then it takes to present ideas clearly. That is why I currently still feel myself being more of a student than a teacher: though I like to help people understand ideas that I have mastered, I prefer learning new ideas of others. When people explicitly show interest I am very willing to explain them what I know about the subject, but teaching more at less at random seems to be a waste of energy considering that I could have gained far more by learning something new myself. This is why I doubt the future consistence in updating and even existence itself of this blog: it takes a lot of effort to put ideas into words and when it is more or less randomly directed there is very little pay-of for the effort. As long as I feel far more a student than a teacher, I believe this blog stands little chance of long term survival.

Welcome to this new experiment of mine: a thought inspiring blog. The idea is to have something published every monday morning and friday afternoon, so people can warm up for or wind down from their working week with some stimulating thoughts.

I have not figured out for what audience I want to write exactly. In the first place I’m writing for myself, but stimulating the thoughts of other people is important to me as well. My initial thought is that the topics should be comprehensible, at least at a global level, for a broad audience. Also, I’d like to incorporate topics that in some way relate to my own research.

Coming up with something twice a week is a hefty challenge. Please forgive me if a miss my goal. I should be able to come up with at least a single interesting link for each post, but I’m not averse of input by others: if you have an interesting link or topic, please let me know so I can share it here again and reach even more people.

I might not be an expert on every topic I choose to discuss. Actually it is very likely that I’m not an expert in most of the topics I choose to discuss. Please share your critical thoughts and ideas. This blog should not be about me or any single person for that matter, but about sharing ideas, stimulating thoughts and learning. Though this blog is in English, let the lack of English writing skills not stop you from commenting: Dutch is readily understood by myself and, I expect, most of my audience.

Another thing: this blog supports formulas in ! That means I can insert nice-looking mathematical terms and equations once in a while! See for yourself, the famous Eulerian identity:

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In case you did not know, the in this equation equals . Yep, even though they might have told you the opposite in high school, it is possible to take a root from a negative number. One way to interpret this equation is that a rotation of 180 degrees over the unit circle brings you from 1 (=) to -1 (=).

Lastly: off course it is not very cool to use the default style for your blog. Changing this is on my TODO-list, but it does not have first-class priority.

Historic note: this blog existed briefly as a science-oriented blog. I quickly realised that the audience that would be interested in that original scope would probably a subset of those of the current scope. Also it should make my task of coming up with new entries easier because now I can write about virtually anthing as long as it can be interpreted in some twisted or perverted way as intellectually interesting. I hope the blog does not devolve into something vulgar and easy, but only time can tell.

Matthijs Sypkens Smit