F(x), F(-x), and a long tangent
Been doing the work but not finding time to blog about it. This week I've been studying from Calculus Lifesaver Tools which is super well-written and so far has taught me a lot about functions and the inverse of functions. Where is this going? Good places, I'm sure. Also on Tuesday I took a break from the harder stuff and spent time with Secrets of Mental Math which is just plain fun to both read and do. Calculating stuff in my head has always been fairly easy and reading these tricks reinforced some of the things I already knew and then taught me some awesome new tricks.
Doing the rapid mental math reminded me of a time, so very long ago, when I was at Concordia and my girlfriend and I volunteered for a psychological study on female friendships. We didn't tell the researchers we were actually dating because we were broke students in Montreal and we needed the pizza money ($15 each for 3 hours buys a lot of pizza in 1996).
The test was conducted by putting Abi and myself in a room with two video game stations, probably Atari or a nearby relative. Prior to playing they attached sensors to our skin to measure our various body signals, and then we were left to play the game which turned out to be a very simple math equation quiz with two answers displayed (left and right). To get points you just had to choose the correct answer with your controller.
I admit, my first reaction was probably something like "I'm going to kick ass at this!". But then we started playing and...I DIDN'T. The most frustrating part was that there were answers I KNEW were right and I was getting big red X's on the screen and my score was being negatively affected by wrong answers. It drove me nuts. To make it worse, one of the researchers (oh, they were both women too, btw) came in, sat on the arm of my chair and started to criticize me as I played. "You didn't know that one?" "Wow, you suck at math". Things like that. She left the room and got into a heated argument with the other researcher while Abi and I kept playing the game. Then the argument took a turn for the worse and she stormed out.
At some point during their arguing Abi and I glanced at each other and realized that we both had picked up on the fact that the 'fight' happening in the other room was being staged. When the researcher who didn't leave in huff came back in she apologized for her colleagues' behaviour and took us into an interview room for questioning.
After we answered all their questions we got to ask some of our own. Turns out that yes, the fight was staged. Yes, she was mean to me as part of the experiment. My reactions to the treatment recorded as being elevated but Abi's were apparently through the roof - she told me later that it took all her will to not get up and slug the woman. Here's to a fiercely protective girlfriend :)
Also, it turns out the game was rigged. The station I sat at happened to be the one programmed to make the player fail. I needed to hear that so badly. It shook me to suck so badly at something I thought I was good at. That experiment stayed with me for a while, we told all our friends about it over 99 cent pizza slices or cheap beer at the Miami. Eventually I forgot, until Tuesday when I was doing the mental math tricks and was reminded: "Hey, I'm good at this, why did I think I wasn't?".