Rabble

It is rather interesting/sad to realise that I am drifting ever so much further away from the people who are soon to be my colleagues. Really sad/interesting. I've long since known this, but today it struck me in a rather odd way. I guess that I'm seriously not considered to be "among my peers". For one, I don't really like drinking that much, and for two, I don't like parties/bars per se, and for three, I'm not some pure idealistic person who challenges everything just because I can, and for four, I'm not rich.

Damn the innate class system. Mildly infuriating? Perhaps, especially when I look around and realise that the folks whom I will have to call colleagues eventually are all nicely mingling together, while I am still the same old extremely geeky person who does things that everyone else thinks is completely useless. I hate it when folks diss/bash/ignore Computer Science.

But after a while, once these things have strike me enough, I grow numb to them. At this point, I honestly don't care about them anymore—they can go ahead and enjoy their youthful paradise and leave me out of it; leave me alone then, as they always do. No one bothers to try to talk to me most of the time, and I don't bother to try to talk to them either; no sense forcing the issue.

Call it a clash of the alpha folks. Besides, my life revolves around computers, machines, technology and other creative endeavours, while theirs revolve around parties, fun stuff and other money-burning exercises. If I couldn't gel with them before, then I cannot gel with them now because the circumstances have not changed much. And will I be able to gel with them in the future? That is a question that I don't want to answer right now, because the future is still rather uncertain.

And do not patronise me. There's absolutely no need to—I know I'm only seen as someone vaguely resembling a human in most of their minds, only to be summoned as and when they think that they can handle my rather idiosyncratic ways. And just because my chosen field is not one of the "glorified" ones like biology or physics, doesn't mean that I'm not "cool", "hip" or even "interesting". So, to hell with that; I walk my own road, much like what I've been doing before. There isn't a rule that demands that I must be friends with everyone from my batch, and so I won't care about it much.

So, hahaha, go ahead and leave me out of things; I'm used to being ignored anyway. Besides, I'm such a serious person that most of those trivialities don't really excite me.

——

In other news, I've finished optimising exp(), E(), PI() and sqrt() of that BigDecimalMath library that I am working on. The Maclaurin expansion of the exponential function was used with great success when combined with a decomposition technique which allows us to compute the expansion closer to the centre of the interval of convergence, thus reducing the number of terms that we need to compute from the series. The square root function uses Newton's method to obtain, and performs reasonably well, taking about O(log n) time where n is the precision of the output required. The computation for π is extremely fast—most computations take less than 10 iterations to obtain the designated accuracy/precision. The algorithm used is the Brent-Salamin algorithm, which is based off the results of Gauss and Legendre.

My goal for this project is to get the main math functions up and running before trying to further optimise them.