When professor Hinode and I had classes outside Japan, I usually stayed in the classroom even though it was not my turn to give lecture. Listening to professor Hinode lecture was quite an amusing thing to do, and sometimes, I could also just keep myself busy with plenty of things. Reading scientific journals was one of the examples (only sometimes, when the mode was on :-) ), or I could use the time for daydreaming (more likely :-), but hey, that’s not my working hour, so it’s officially permissible for me to do that :-) ). Sometimes I even tried to solve questions that hanging on my mind, like what I did during one of the lectures this year. The question was, what was the derivative of x^x^x^x...x^x (the number of x in the sequence was 100) with respect to x (I think I can hear some of you shouting ‘geek!’ there :-) ). To solve this, I turned to the last page of my note, and started scribbling there. And this reminded me of a habit that started as far as my elementary school days.
During that time, I have a general rule for using a paper notebook in a class: start from the first page to write a note of a lecture; start from middle pages to make paper aeroplanes :-); and start from the last page to write anything in between (i.e. any mumbles that I want to keep record of :-) ). I think most of my childhood friends had more or less the same rule (I don’t know how about the girls, whether they also made paper aircraft - I can check later if you wanna know :-) ). That’s why when I found an old paper notebook, rather than reading from the first page, I prefer to read from the last page, because the content would usually be more fascinating. Of course sometimes I just found fuzzy doodling there (thanks to my ‘artistic’ handwriting :-) ), but sometimes I also found some written chat with my old friends that would unlatch tons of sentimental memories (and yes, if you have never heard about it before, there was a time that had been long gone, when the bird still sang in mellifluous tone, and there ain’t no hoaxes neither dumb smartphone :-), and thus you could do chatting with your friends using paper notebook instead, even though there’s almost no point in it because you’re just several inches away from them :-) ). And the most important thing was, the last pages sometimes also contained ideas and dreams that I jolted down there, which sometimes I even already forgot about because it had been covered by dust of time.
I haven’t done any statistical analysis on this :-), but I believe that the dreams that I wrote down had a better probability to come true compared to those that I just kept on the back of my mind. Those dreams on the back of my mind would be easily washed away by the rain of new dreams that pour from time to time, while those that being kept in a note (even in the trifling last pages :-) ) would spring up from time to time, flirting me to bring them into reality. Sometimes it took time for them to successfully get my attention and put me on action :-), but as time pass by, the possibility would be high for me to finally sit down and take a time thinking about realizing those dreams.
Anyway, I think it is better to keep on dreaming and jolting them down, because dream is what my future made of, so what’s it gonna be if I ever stop dreaming? I wouldn’t worry about running out of pages to ink my dreams on, I believe there would be another new note, with empty last pages, ready to be scribbled upon once I finish the note on my hand :-).
By the way, back to the ‘initial topic’, the derivative of x^x^x^x...x^x (the number of x was 100) with respect to x is (x^98+99*x^98*ln(x))*x^x^x^x...x^x (the number of x in the last x power sequence is 100). And yes, you can call me geek now... :-)
