Pensives & Ruminations

The Carnival of the Elitist Bastards has set sail again and I hope to get on it one of these days.
I need to start writing more and come up with somethting that is longer than 100 words to do it, but I am getting there.

I found this in the second article today:

Ignorance is not just bliss. It’s all too easy. Learning requires the use of the brain, and the very thought of this particular organ seems to stir terror within the hearts of other kids my age. I justify taking the risk and using this brain power because of my curiosity. I want to know what those funny lights up in the sky at night are. I want to know how the Solar System formed. I want to know how the beautiful and complex forms of life arose on Earth by natural selection. I want to learn vector calculus so that I may someday understand Maxwell’s tantalizing equations.

I’m no more special for possessing curiosity than I am for possessing knowledge. I believe that all humans are capable of learning. I believe that we all come into the world hungering for knowledge.

“You’re weird,” is the reaction I get from my fellow classmates when I express this curiosity.

I was a pretty bad student. Not because of intelligence or curiosity, but because of boredom and a general disinterest in doing homework. I typically would read the course work by the end of September, ace all my tests, and get zeros for homework & assignments because I just did not pass them in.
This generally left me with a C or B and I was good with that. In college, my sole math class was based on studying Venn Diagrams, Probability and I think maybe some statistics (its been almost 20 years…).
There were four tests, including the midterm and final. The professor did a straight grade curve, so if the class average was a 68, he added 7 points to everyone to get it to 75. My first test score was 108. I went to the class 3 times, missed on of the lesser tests, and got an A-. Easy way to get around my math requirement, but now I want to learn calculus.
I took Trig and Algebra and a pre-Calc class in high school, but since my college degree was destined not for math or science, I just wanted to get it out of the way.
However, as I have explored Science in the past few years (I love being able to read so much online), I have realized the limitations of my knowledge.
Calculus is one, but Chemistry, Physics, Biology, all hold interest. Recently, I have been reading a great deal on evo-devo, mostly due to an urge to combat some stupidity around me (IDiots for example) and even more recently because of the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s positing of his original hypothesis.

So, how about you? Anyone realizing later in life they wish they knew Shakespeare or Arp or …?