Overwhelming failure to make progress...

That's right, three weeks in and I'm already behind!!

I finished Unit A1 of M337 only a day or two after the schedule said I should have done, at least. As for M381 though, well, I'm still ten pages from the end of the first book! It's fairly sad to be behind so soon in. Especially considering I printed out the first two units way back in the autumn with the good intentions of getting ahead.

The timetable has me starting the third unit of each course next Friday so there's still time. However, I think I need a reassessment of how I'm going to approach the Open University this year, bearing in mind both the fact that it's level 3 now, and that I can probably assume work will continue to be busy throughout the year. After all, it has hardly let up since the start of November.

As a side note, can you believe I'm still waiting to be paid for some work I did way back then? Translation agencies have various payment schedules. One that I do the odd job for pays roughly 45 days after the end of the month following the month in which the work was completed. This is kind of harsh at the best of times, but the job in question was a long one that started in November and ended just after January started. That means I have to wait until 45 days after the end of this month (so mid-April) to get paid for all of it, including the work I completed right at the beginning! Madness.

Anyway, back on topic. It's looking like I've got nothing on over the weekend, so I have planned a hardcore catch-up session. Beginning tomorrow with the rest of Unit 1 of Number Theory, and maybe as a bit of revision, by redoing the Exercises at the end of Unit 1 of Complex Analysis. Then Saturday and Sunday's plan is to get past the half way mark in the second unit of each (which in M381's case is onto mathematical logic), which should put me roughly where I'm supposed to be. Ideally, I'd like to be slightly ahead, but as much as I love maths, I'd be surprised if I manage to do quite that much!

I'm quietly confident that I can get my head down and do the studying necessary at least. If nothing else, the amount of work I've had on recently has helped me learn to just get on and do something, and face the fact that it might mean long days and late nights. Last week for example, I had a friend coming to visit from Thursday to Saturday; we went to see the Sisters of Mercy at Leeds Metropolitan last Thursday, which coincidentally, is where my tutorials are (didn't stop me having a bitch of a time getting there in the car!). Anyway, to clear all the work due in over the period before and during his visit meant, a very busy week, culminating on the Wednesday with 9am right through to 3am (excluding dinner, dog walks etc.), then back up at 8am to start again on Thursday, and working right until his train arrived at 3pm.

Now, if I can just tap into some of that! Unfortunately, I don't have the fear of missing a deadline, never being given work by that agency again, and not being able to afford to eat or pay the bills!

Mandelbrot set on the Casio

Back when I was still at secondary school and my brother was at sixth form college, he showed me his graphing calculator which had been programmed to show the Mandelbrot set. My memory's a little hazy about the details, so it might not have been my brother, or his calculator, but anyway, a few years later when me and my friends were at college, and I was doing A-level Maths, this became something of a legend. Not that we knew what the Mandelbrot set was, just some pretty picture that you could zoom into over and over again. I doubt you could zoom on the Casio one, but still, we really wanted it on our calculators!

No-one thought I was lying (well I wasn't), but we never managed to find anyone that had the program, or could work out how to do it. Of course, that was the dark ages as far as the Internet was concerned. A quick search just now, and I immediately found a program someone had written for some Casio calculator or other. However, my poor old calculator never made it past the day of the final exam, well, it barely made it through the exam. Who's stupid idea was it to have a battery cover that you couldn't get through without a screwdriver.... or a knife, anyway?

I got my new phone last Friday. After literally months of not making calls following a mishap with the washing machine, I was finally due my upgrade from Orange. So I got an Android this time, and quickly got hold of a couple of free fractal viewing apps. I say quickly, but it took me over a day of messing around with the settings to get any of the downloads to actually get started (a common problem apparently, luckily I finally found a solution that worked). If I remember correctly, it took about an hour for the calculator to grind through the computations to draw the Mandelbrot set... now my phone does it in a flash, and lets me zoom too (one even lets me choose coordinates to draw Julia sets)! Not bad for free. I also downloaded a graphing calculator by the way, as the phone's built in calculator made the one in Windows look sophisticated (unlike my cheapy old Nokia which at least did the trigonometric functions, as well as e, log and so on).

So I've been having a bit of a fractal renaissance recently, probably inspired by starting M337. It's just so amazing how simple the rule behind the Mandelbrot and Julia sets is. I hope one day to do the OU's masters level course on fractal geometry. For the meantime, I've been playing around with the evaluation copy of the rather cool looking Ultra Fractal, reading bits and bobs, and of course, watching various YouTube videos of some the deep zooms and other cool animations people are making these days (try "Mandelbrot Fractal Adventure 1010011010" wow!).

Such a shame Benoit Mandelbrot passed away last year. I can't imagine how it feels to be a pioneer in a field like that. One day maybe... one day.