It might be that one functional definition of a friend is “someone who can say stuff that would be insulting, but you mostly don’t mind”. I had been chatting with a friend who wasn’t aware of my little blogging effort here, and gave the front page URL. My friend claimed to get a headache “from just a casual perusal!”
I know what’s intended: an acknowledgement that the writing I’ve been doing has been at least math-flavored, and that’s got almost universal acclaim as something really hard that stresses the mind to think about, and delivered in the form of a joke. It’s an overused joke, to my tastes, but an overused joke can serve several positive purposes. It can be one of the landmarks that one is in an emotionally comfortable place, or mark that the people sharing it share this in common, or that whatever is being joked about has connections to other times the joke’s been used.
Still, the joke is a bit of a complicated insult too: it insults both the writer, for not being understandable, and the reader, for not understanding. But I know that it’s not meant to insult, and I’m hardly in a position to turn away compliments when I can find them.
All this muttering I mean, largely, to warn that I am working out whether I’m good enough to write a couple pieces towards a question that really is somewhat head-spinning in a way that someone who isn’t a math or physics major would have a hope of following. I might not be; as I do research I realize I’m hitting questions I can’t fully satisfy myself about. If I can, I may go forward and you’ll see what perusal headaches really look like.
