I was telling some friends of mine about a mathematical modelling competition I plan to take part in next weekend. It’s a 96 hour contest. They describe two different systems to you at 8pm on a thursday night, and you have until 8pm that monday to come up with equations describing one of the systems, model those equations using some sort of computational process, and write up a paper. It sounds pretty entertaining to me.
They mentioned a ‘day of dialogue’ on the iraq war that is happening that saturday at 9:30, and said I should go. This is probably due to an incident where I went with one of them to a viewing of an anti-wal mart movie, from which I was thrown out because I lost my temper when some dirty liberal kid kept accusing me of working for wal-mart. My friend told me that after I got thrown out, they were much more receptive to his arguments and that the net effect I had was great. I, however, felt pretty embarrassed about the whole incident and figured this Iraq thing would give me a chance to engage in political discussion without making an ass of myself. I also told them it’d be a great way to get my mind off the modelling thing, so that when I was ready to go back to thinking about it, i’d have a clear mind.
They seemed to think this was funny – that I’d ‘clear my mind’ from one intellectual activity by engaging in another. They thought that going to a bar was a good way to clear your mind. I’ve never been to a bar, so I have no data from which to draw a reasonable conclusion, but something tells me I’d just want to sit and think about the problem under consideration. I feel as if my mind will always be thinking about something, and there’s nothing I can do about that fact. What I do have some control over is the subject which is under consideration. Going to a bar wouldn’t give me anything new to think about, whereas the political debate would cause me to stop thinking about the math, allowing me a fresh perspective when i returned to it.
Are there really people who can turn their minds off? Who can just not think about something for a period of time?