Preface

My entries are from my school days. This would be quite weird for post-internet people, but there was a time when the Internet is harder to come by.

Libraries existed, but I for one always get overwhelmed by the sheer number of things on the shelves. It gave me sensory overload. But I still discount the possibility of me finding out about the following from just browsing a school library. You kinda need to already know what you're looking for in libraries, and I'm the type to browse around. Libraries just don't work for me.

So what I discovered below might already be in the library books, but the books and me are never destined to cross paths.

1. Equation of time

I noticed the way muslim prayer times (aka sunrise and sunset times) drifts throughout the year. It goes up in time, then down, then up, then down again. I plotted the times from the prayer timetable in calendars. It formed this kind of curve:

I thought it's just the seasons making the days longer and shorter, but that can't be it, all points of solar time (sunrise, noon, sunset) also shifts the same way at roughly the same amount.

Later on I learned it's the equation of time. It correlates really well with the prayer times (sunrise and sunset times) on the calendar because we're really close to the equator and seasonal variance plays little role, so it rules out my schoolboy self's hypothesis from years ago.

This is not taught in neither science nor religious studies because, of course. And also because clocks ticking at a constant rate wasn't a thing for most of history.

2. Bezier curve

You know the mathematics notebooks with the squares? I used to draw this pattern, connecting the dots on the pages. I thought it looked cool.

Sometime later, I was reading about Bezier curves and it occurred to me years ago that I did something similar with it back then.

In middle school, I created a mathematical formula to calculate how many unique handshakes exist with a given number of people.

Absolutely fucking useless but worked.

This is REALLY silly but that would be me making the absolutely unsurprising connection (to academics) between Russian and Sanskrit because I was trying to learn basic Russian and learning their word for man is basically distant cousins along the language tree to the Malay "manusia".

Anyway out of that I learned that the etymology of punch comes from the Slavic languages' word for five (because five fingers = a whole dang fist) which is of course related to Sanskrit as well and survives in Malay in words like "pancaindera"

Sekian terima kasih.

Still haven't found a bed sheet that is basically a giant pillow case. It would be easier then the diaper sheets that curl off the dam bed