Mathematics - Advisements of the True Mathematician

#1.  A true mathematician is a pattern-seeker.  The majority of math concerns patterns in numbers, but a skilled mathematician finds himself well equipped to deal in logic and philosophy as well - because it is not numbers, intrinsically, but patterns, that concern him.  The better you are at noticing, conceptualizing, defining and explaining patterns, the better you are at mathematics.

#2.  A true mathematician relishes challenge.  Never work out on paper what you think you might be able to do in your head.  Take ten seconds to think about it.  If you aren’t sure, then check it by working it out (when you’re being graded, always work it out).   Likewise, only use the calculator to save time!  Never use it as a magic conch!  If you can’t explain to yourself or someone else how the calculator got the answer it did, you are doing divinations, not mathematics!

Philosophy - Ethics - Scientific Prescription

The very beginning of ethics must have been a prescriptive beginning for the prescriptive variety to come be known today as “normative”, a word that is used in many fields to describe the typical or expected.  There certainly could not have been meta-ethics, as that discipline requires a number of established ethical systems to compare and contrast.  And descriptive ethics seems to be a purely modern “science”, concerned with pointing out to would-be prescriptive ethicists the anthropological limits of what they are allowed to propound, denounce, prohibit, and exhort, if they wish posterity to view them with anything but flabbergasted curiosity.  Where the prescriptive ethicist is concerned with possibility, potentiality, and the experimental probing of conventional habit, the descriptive ethicist is content to observe passively and take note of what has been the case, then report back to the rest of humanity with their data, in much the same way that a physicist might matter-of-factly record the natural laws of gravity, insofar as they have observed them.  So the question that leaps to my mind is, which of the two is most truly deserving of the adjectival accolade “scientific”, which the descriptive approach has seemingly won for itself?  
Let’s investigate. 

General News - A Blog Is Born

A warmest welcome extended to thee, 

o great and gaping chamber of echoes!  

Your welcome is a silence, extended to me - 

for now a cherished sympathy.

For in not knowing whether I am to die or grow, 

not wishing any wayward hope to show,

I must suckle the myriad breast of quiet curiosity.

What greatness might herein lie?  

What failures, what foibles, what pretentious guise? 

You cannot know any more than I, 

yet I may dream

Of relevance and wit, and a will to let me scream.

Scream! Scream, scream, 

until some wandering god sees fit,

to direct an echo back to me, 

and that I may happily hear it.