The Days Won't Stop Passing By

12:32 AM

It is almost the end of the year. This has been the fastest year that has gone by in my entire life, mainly because it was extremely uneventful and stressful for me. I'm sure for other people it's been great. For me, this year will go down as the year of mistakes. It really seems like every decision I've made this year has been a bad one. Still, life goes on, and I am okay.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was like 18 or 19, and there was this YouTube video I was watching, some professor teaching math. This was in 2012. It seems like that was such a long time ago now, but back then that was the present. Everything was as present and as uncertain back then as today. We all felt extremely "advanced" back then as much as today. There were all these new sorts of technologies coming out, especially consumer phones, and those latest phones at the time are ancient history today, but back then they were new and revolutionary.

Anyway, the professor was teaching this math lesson. Man. Imagine trying to find any videos from 2012 today. It's a rarity. YouTube only shows you the latest videos, as does TikTok. They only show newer videos in the search results and not any of the older ones. It's not like the videos from 2012 are outdated or that the ideas are old. Many things are eternal, for example, it's good to keep your teeth healthy, this will always be an eternal truth, it was true a million years ago, and it will be true forever in the future, and videos made about this topic in 2012 are just as relevant today.

But yeah, this professor teaching this math lesson. He was around 80 years old, something like that, maybe 70s actually, or even late 60s, I don't quite remember. But he made a comment like "I'm 80 years old now but I remember when I was just as young as you folk, and it felt like 70 would be a long ways away, but comes much quicker than you'd expect," and it is true. The years just went by in an instant. An instant. I hope people stop killing animals, I have been advocating for them for over a decade and it's pretty insane to me how people still continue to mindlessly kill and torture.

Today I studied for over an hour. I did an hour of Godot lessons. Even though I got pretty much straight A's in high school, I had an above 4.0 weighted GPA, I never fully understood trigonometry, probably my weakest subject. There was this unit circle, and I never understood the point of it, pi and radians, what about the sin and cos graphs? Well these concepts clicked with me today. I understood how all of these things related to each other. It just clicked with me as I was following this Godot tutorial, and the guy put up the Sin graph pattern, and gave us a challenge to make this object move in a circular motion.

Say you place a box in a room. What mathematical transformations would you apply to make it go in a circle, moving a small amount every second? You would alter the X and Y position of the box every second. Say 1 second has passed, 2 seconds has passed, etc. Where would the box be placed every second tick? The formula would be that you would make the X position take the Cos of how many seconds has passed, and the Y position would be the Sin of how many seconds has passed.

Using that formula above, you can make the box go in a circular motion. It is kind of hard to explain, but the whole thing made complete sense to me after that. The radians make full sense to me now. I can probably fill in an entire unit circle just from memory now. After that lesson, and yes I did actually manage to figure it out on my own and get the box to go on a circle on its own without revealing the answer, but after that lesson, I just visualized the unit circle and the graph values, and they made total sense. It just clicked.

The Sin and Cos graphs are just the pattern given by the Y values given by a Sin or Cos of X. I don't know if that made sense. But both Sin and Cos just go from 1 to -1, and the X values for them are the values on the unit circle. I really don't know if that made sense, but the graph is just the values of the Sin and Cos.

They say unless you can explain things simply, then you don't understand the concept well enough. Maybe I don't understand it well enough. But I get it now. I understand it now. Why wasn't I able to understand these concepts in high school or college? It seems pretty easy.

Today my parents and I went shopping for some Christmas presents and also some groceries. It's surprising that I took 5k steps just shopping. It didn't really seem like it was that many. Then tonight, I went out and walked another 10k steps, totaling around 16k steps.

You just have to take everything day by day. This entry makes no sense and went all over the place. That's fine. Take everything day by day.

Anyway, that was my day today.