Well, that's new

I think I just bored myself awake. I wasn't very sleepy, but I forced myself to sleep so that my sleep pattern wouldn't start drifting again, and I just woke up after only an hour or so with my head full of trigonometry. I'm not sure when the last time I consciously needed the square root of three over two or any of the rest that cascaded through my mind just now, but it has been years.

I kind of wish I had some use for suddenly remembering how to convert radians to degrees and figure out sines and cosines. I spent a little time playing with a piece of paper and calculator to see if I was remembering correct formulas, and it seems I am, showing that my high school math classes weren't forgotten per-se, just misplaced. I just wish I knew why they suddenly dominated my thoughts. I also wonder if I will retain this tomorrow. let's see what happens when I try to go to sleep again...

And the results are:

I retain some of that knowledge. Of course, the primary piece I'm missing is what I would use this knowledge for, and I didn't have that last night either. For that mater, I'm not sure if I ever knew. This is precisely the sort of thing where I can't imagine a situation where I wouldn't just use a calculator. Sure, I can posit an instance where I didn't have a calculator, but I can't then think of a need that would make it actually worth the time and effort to do the calculation. I've run into situations where I benefited from being able to do simple statistics in my head, and others with simple calculus, but none so far with trig. Actually, I take that back. I have benefited from memorizing the ratios of the sides in 45 and 60 degree right triangles, but that's it.

Politics

Why is the fact that the latest Al-Qaida video is heavily edited news to some people? From the first description I heard of it, I thought in terms of a video spliced together from a cache of recordings made years ago. With enough forethought, one could record all the words and phrases that they would be likely to use on a given topic, and splice them together into "new" "live" videos for years. Hollywood is debating about the near term viability of completely digitizing actors at the height of their careers, and a lower tech version of this comes as a surprise? I know that fear seems to be the order of the day around here, but come on. The terrorists, authorities, and media should expect things to have to withstand some modicum of critical thought, and the average citizen ought to have some shred of skepticism by now.