User:Cepstrum/DumbnessExplained

Intro
Anyone who knows me here also knows I've made one stupid mistake after another. And I can't seem to get any better. Here's a little story that illustrates how my poor judgment and stupidity are not exclusive to MA.

The story
I've read only two Trek books so far. One of them is Cohesion. It's a Voyager book about B'Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine crash landing together on a planet (hilarity ensues), while USS Voyager gets stuck in Subspace. Maybe it was a Subspace compression anomaly. Or a Subspace inversion. Or a Subspace rupture. Who knows.

See, during my time as an electrical engineering undergraduate student, I only took a few solid-state physics/quantum mechanics courses (the ones that teach you just enough to understand quantum theory for optics and transistors; you know, all that silly stuff about electrons jumping up and down in different energy bands and their spin etc. I like to call it "Quantum Physics for Dummies"–er, engineers, I mean.).

So I skipped the more theoretical quantum mechanics, which I suppose would have taught me more about useful things, such as special/general relativity theory, time dilation, and, most importantly, Subspace. (I'm not sure, for I never checked out the syllabi, but I'm pretty sure it was taught.)

Instead I made the brilliant decision to take as many advanced abstract multilinear algebra as I could for my electives (and even extra courses), until one day, while I was sitting in a room full of PhD math students (and me, the only non math major, and I think the only undergrad) as we were studying tensor products and sigma-algebras (or whatever), the professor announced that from then on, we'd only be dealing with finite vector spaces and the like, and that our study would have no conceivable practical application. (The prof was trying to get us to enroll in the next course in the sequence.)

I quit paying attention after that, though I continued to write about 3--8 pages of proofs using LaTeX (meaning the actual amount of source code was at roughly ten times as many characters) three times a week. I still got an "A", though to this day I don't understand how that happened.

And to think I spent all that time studying everything from group theory to how to prove what the image, kernel, etc. of some weird homomorphism were, to proving ..... when I could've been learning useful EE topics outside my specialty (comes in handy for jobs).

This point of the story is that I'm as bright as a Pakled, so please: bear with me as I'm bound to make the same gaffes/mistakes as an editor as I have over and over and over here.