It clicks into it.

Well, yeah I was indeed missing on Steemit for a few days…not really missing, I still comment, but as you can see my last post is indeed a few days before. Or uh, maybe a week, I lost count. If you are reading this from my blog instead, then maybe you can see that this is the first post on it, since I hardly made any progress on writing stuff after applying some custom CSS on the site…I can’t believe that I still remember the tags and syntax used for this page styling language, it’s been so long since I last touched it.

Well, I know, the entire site looks pretty potato for now. Just wait till I get my assets ready so that I can do the huge renovation, until now…probably just deal with it.

Oh, you’re reading this from Steemit or any other Steem UIs? Then scroll to the bottom for my SteemPress link, if you’re interested. :wink:

Anyways let’s get back to the post. I wasn’t up here posting for a few days because I was pretty much stuck with too little time left after revising for final exams. In fact, it is not over yet – I still have two papers to go, but I decided that I should just take some time to write something to solve my posting urge. I know that’s some strange addiction but maybe writing is really addictive, I guess. There are 5 papers in total, namely linear algebra, C programming, introduction to the constitution of Malaysia, advanced mathematics (or just call it calculus), and lastly introduction to computer science.

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The first three subjects are over, and now probably you can guess which subject took the least effort to prepare for? Obviously it’s programming, not because I’m good at it, but because you really cannot prepare for it. Which is the hardest? If you read my blog for a long time or is a friend of mine in real life, then you might guess that it’s linear algebra, because I always complain here and there about how I hate this subject. But no. It took me more effort to prepare for the constitution exam. It’s only an introductory course and the finals only have a weightage of 30% in the mark calculation, but I’m definitely not lying here that I put more effort on this subject than any others.

If it wasn’t for this course, I would probably still be posting throughout my exams. Spending four to six hours a day to read and cram it in my tiny brain is really not the most fun thing I could do, but it is that hard to memorize and make sense of to me.

Maybe we can all agree here that humans are not equally made. Let’s just look at this subject thingy – some students have absolutely no trouble crunching law books and absorbing every line of every page into their memory like a sponge with infinite capacity, while some others, like me, have trouble memorizing anything about it. Things just don’t click in for people like us.

I still remember that day in one of the constitution class. The lecturer who was previously a lawyer shared one of his stories with us. In a case, he had to find a way to prove that the plaintiff has no sexual relationships with the prescribed wife so that their relationship cannot be counted as marriage in terms of law, and hence can prevent paying the alimony (money paid to the other party in a divorce). He then asked us: How can he prove that in the court?

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The discussion started and many answers emerged. Someone mentioned about doing body checks, and the ideas mostly revolved around medical check-ups. He shook his head to all of our ideas, and after about 15 minutes, he revealed his solution.

“I just asked the wife, ‘can you name some special characteristics of your husband’s body?’”. The idea is, if she did had sexual relationships with the man from time to time over the course of several years, she should be able to tell at least some characteristics of the man’s body, such as a birthmark or scar. She failed to do so, hence she cannot prove that she really had sexual relationships with the man, and our lecturer won the case.

“It’s that simple, I don’t know why you guys went and think of such complicated ideas,” he laughed while expressing his astonishment to our complex and scientific ideas which are not really required most of the times.

See? Different people really think differently. He’s not the first lecturer to say so. Somewhere in last year, I remember some lecturer saying that we science students are boring compared to those arts students. Our opinions, our problem solving methods, our ideas, our speaking approaches, everything is different. He said that students from arts stream are more dynamic and natural when it comes to representation and ideas, while we are mostly stuck, “like your theories and research procedures”, he said.

Among my friends, there are indeed some that can click into these law stuff like almost immediately without using any effort, meanwhile some need some special methods to get them in. A few need to translate everything into Chinese before they can get them in, while a few others, like me, need to sink my head deep into the labyrinth of lecture slides, roll everywhere like a sushi, and probably scream a lot before the information is finally in the head, and it gets tossed away almost immediately after the exam. Honestly, I can already not recall anything that was tested last Friday. Awesome.

Well, despite some learn law stuff a lot slower and struggle a lot more with these law stuff, they tend to click into other stuff slightly, or significantly, more easily anyways.

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The dude that doesn’t need to put effort in constitution classes struggles with linear algebra. Well, it can be justified by the fact that he is a practical person. He does not really want to deal with things that will not happen around him, such as the fourth dimension or something like that. That’s why most stuff in linear algebra does not make sense to him – what the hell is a null space and how on Earth can you visualize a 6 dimension vector? I would just look at them as a bunch of data, but he needs the graphs and diagrams. Although I also rely on visual aids (like those wonderful videos by 3Blue1Brown on YouTube) to learn them, I find myself struggle less when facing things that cannot be visualized. Yeah, linear algebra is a strange thing. You can visualize most concepts, but almost all real life applications of linear algebra cannot be visualized by diagrams. I guess that’s why he struggled with it. When you are someone that visualizes everything to understand it, meeting something that cannot be visualized is really nightmarish.

What about programming? It’s another thing. One thing I enjoy about programming is that there is no specific solution to every single question you meet, either in the exam, or in real life. If you can do it this way, then someone else can surely find another way to achieve the same, or better result. This process of algorithm designing is pretty fun to me, but is a real headache to some of my friends. They can get all the input correctly, set up all the output methods right, but got stuck on how to process the input, calculate the output, and probably sort them to needs.

Designing solutions like these normally will require you to imagine and somehow “see” how the data flows and gets processed in the computer system. Visualize arrays of data, how the loops go across them, how your data gets dumped to the correct places, and many more. I recently read a Quora answer on why pointers in C and C++ seems to be causing a ton of headache to most students, and the reason seems to be the difference in everyone’s capabilities to deal with abstraction.

Generally, abstraction refers to making something not-that-straightforward, and it is quite a crucial ability when dealing with low-level programming languages, and sometimes higher levelled ones too. To make something work in your code, you probably need to wire it up in a way so that it accepts data in another way, and then you have to put the output in another way so that it can be read by another part of the program in some nice ways…it goes on and on and will create a big mess if you don’t wire it up properly. To prevent that, you need to imagine and somehow visualize and code it in a proper way. That’s when abstraction comes in, because it is really not that straightforward as normal people think it is. Some of my friends really cannot see how a piece of code works, while others can understand it on first sight.

Some may say that its experience, but some students with no background in coding will still understand things faster than the others. Maybe its talent, and it differs from person to person after all.

During the programming exam (that was actually significantly harder than what I expected), we were required to write a recursive function that does integration. I never knew that nightmares can jump from subjects to other subjects, but it did. Recursive functions are the hardest functions to wire around correctly and integration is just…uh, real pain. What we, the students did? Easy, some ignored the recursion part, some wrote something that cannot be understood, some skipped it, etc. But some managed to squeeze out the logic that works in the required way. I think I did, but who knows. I guess I missed out a variable anyways. But after all, we discussed and learnt a big bunch of different methods to solve it – some attempted to calculate it by adding up areas of rectangles and triangles, some attempted to use the Reimann sum formula in it, etc. If I remember correctly, someone even tried to use the trapezoidal rule in his code, and that’s some real dedication to maths, I must say.

But you can see, in a group of about a dozen of students, we get that amount of answers. It really shows how we all think differently.

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Among all these solutions and responses we see until now in this post, from the ones to prove the man is not having any relationships with his wife to the ones my friends made to solve integration problems with programming, you can see, and probably tell that it’s real that there are really some interesting unknown factors that affect how we perform and respond to things when we learn and face issues in life.

When the resonance happens, you learn better, understand faster, and do stuff happier. When it does not, things are just a big pain in the ass. I guess that’s why my mum made a dozen confirmations with me to make sure that I am really choosing computer science instead of anything else for degree. Because if it is something that clicks into me easily, then I can enjoy a happier life for the next four years. Else, I wouldn’t imagine. Heh.

Until now, I think I made a right choice. I guess that’s why I still remember my CSS syntax and stuff like that after so long then. It should be equally important to find a job that clicks into you too, so that you can be happy with the responsibilities you should do, maybe till the extent that it does not feel like a responsibility at all.

Since, after all, what’s meaningful when you can’t even try to be happy anyways?

Probably should end this right here, see you next time!

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