MrNepathy's Blog

             No matter how much I want them to, monsters do not really exist. Vampires, boogie men, wraiths and even Sully from Monsters Inc. are each aggregates of generations of mythology, bad science, misconception, imagination and folklore. They are flights of fantasy. As a rational human being, I know that everything, even the fantastic and absurd, can be explained by science. While I can suspend disbelief for the time it takes to watch a movie, read a story, to play a game or even ponder, reality always settles back in, if it ever left me at all. (more…)

              I’m the first one in my house to wake up to go to work and because my room is at the far end of the hallway, I try to walk to the bathroom without turning on any lights. The hallway is without windows of any kind, so I leave my door open. This makes it so the only light cast into the hallway is coming through my bedroom window. It’s usually a combination of moonlight and streetlights, filtered through the blinds. Long, dim lines of weak light stretched out along the carpet. I have only outlines and edges to guide me, but it’s enough to see and walk with confidence. (more…)

          Nature, despite all of the mythos surrounding it, is a lazy entity. Often nature is personified as Mother Nature, an omnipotent woman who is one-half Disney princess and one-half unstoppable wrath, such as “don’t mess with Mother Nature,” but perhaps it would be more accurately depicted as someone that cuts every corner. Lightning, despite traveling thousands of feet to get to the ground, will still strike a tree rather than travel an additional thirty feet to the surface. Force will exert itself in the path of least resistance so that if you create combustion in a cube reinforced on five sides, the blast will funnel itself through the weaker sixth wall. Wind will go around an object rather than push it down. Like these other aspects of natural laws, water too will seek the easiest route in its attempt to return to sea level and its normal state. (more…)

Square roots are an essential component to mathematics. In many formulas, such as for a parabola, a number is squared in order to plot the point on the graph. Any side of a right triangle can be calculated if the other two sides are known because of square roots.
                Those are simple applications of mathematics. As math takes on more complex things, the answers can have unexpected and rather insane results. I remember a few times in class wondering why I would ever need to pursue something, or I would come up with an answer that while correct was also meaningless. It was the mathematical equivalent of saying, “He can’t be president, because not all ducks are blue.” It’s an answer, but it makes no sense. One example of this is the square root of a negative number.
                Any number when multiplied by itself results in a positive number. A positive number times a positive is positive, just as a negative times a negative is positive. To find the square root of something you are looking for a number that when multiplied by its exact self results in the original number. The square roots of nine are three and negative three, for instance. So what happens when you want the square root of a negative number? It simply doesn’t exist, because only a product of a negative and positive number can be negative. But as nature abhors a vacuum, mathematics abhors uncertainty. So we have the mathematic value of i. It represents the square root of negative one. With this simple letter a world of uncertainty is transferred to certainty. The square root of negative nine becomes 3i. However it’s certainty born of irrationality because i is an irrational number.
                I have a lot of respect for mathematics so I firmly believe that sometimes in order to reach certainty, we must follow an irrational path. One should never set up an equation if one doesn’t want to reach an ultimate answer and “undefined” is not an acceptable answer.