walter ong’s article presents literacy - the ability to read and write - as a technology for the restructuring of the mind, focusing on the way it changes our relationships with our experience, reality, and society. in this summary, i agree with his position that these changes are necessary for clearer, observant and intimate thinking about both our experiences of reality and objective reality. i also point out analogies between his descriptions of interfaces between man and the world, and llms as interfaces today.  ong begins this article with establishing his reason for calling literacy a technology. to do this, he implicitly describes its effects in the same way i would argue education works: organizing, elevating and empowering the mind and therefore, a more conscious experience. strenghtening my analogy of writing as education here, he states, “[t]he term "illiterate" itself suggests that persons belonging to the class it designates are deviants, defined by something they lack, namely literacy”. following such a claim, i must make explicit my disagreement with the subtext of education being analogous to wisdom or higher thinking. i believe ong also disagrees, because he mentions the wisdom of igbo traders in nigeria and of ubiquitous parables and stories in different cultures.  more exactly, i am saying that education is the internal development of systems that foster reflective, detailed and falsifiable thinking which enhance accurate understanding of life. these systems include, reflection - going back and looking at things, analysis - breakdown of specific parts of thought, experience and reality, storytelling - reorganizing tangential or parallel thought into sequences, nomenclature - coming up with names for parts of thought, experience and reality, rhetoric - skills for convincing, and more.   furthermore, i mean that literacy is the core engine of education, because it externalizies these systems and this is ong’s point in this article as well.  the above systems exist within us naturally, and i argue literacy is aimed at separating our consciousness from these systems, so we can use them as one does handheld tools. one example is grammar, where “rules or structures normally originate, live, and function far below the level at which articulation functions. you can know how to use the grammatical rules or structures and even how to set up new rules or structures that function clearly and effectively without being able to state what they are”. as observed in children, speech follows implicit patterns without explicit directions. i.e. a toddler developing articulation through english would likely say “car go” not “go car”. linguistic education serves to refine these natural observant and absorbing skills for language that we have been blessed with.  with knowledge of prepositions, adverbs and adjectives, the toddler moves beyond implicit understanding of language into contrived, constructive and creative language.  literacy making these skills explicit is crucial because when they are developed to an appreciable extent and embodied, they help us capture and “express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance”.  literacy is this important because it materially exposes our educational gaps and provides access to infinite sources of solutions, i.e. we can better see our wrong thinking on a page than in our mind and better yet, the plumbers of our mind’s leaks already exist in a 3 inch volume. but literacy (especially, writing) as a technology wasn’t always accepted as sunshines and rainbows as it is today. in fact, ong mentions plato’s arguments against writing, including: “writing,[…] is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind”. i would say effective writing successsfully accomplishes this to a satisfactory extent. “[w]ritten text is basically unresponsive”, which means it cannot answer questions about itself nor defend itself.  “[w]riting destroys memory”, because you offload ideas and memory onto bleached pulp. plato seemingly does this with the concern for thinking as you have to hold ideas in your head to think and offloading those could affect your thinking capacity.  i do not agree with this, i believe writing aids memory. describing some amorphous experience reconstitutes it from the ashes of the past and the more this is done, the stronger the memory is. ong also counters plato on this point with a mathermatical example, stating, “the fact that the computer manages multiplication and other computation so much more effectively than human beings do, shows how little the multiplication tables have to do with real thinking”. in fact, in mathematics, writing democratizes the best inventions by alien minds. i could not have come up with gauss’s summation of sequences as a child, but he did and because he wrote it i can learn it.   points one and two are negligible warnings. i am not sure how point three could stand in regard to writing. for all three points, however, ong humorously mentions, “one weakness in plato's position is that he put these misgivings about writing into writing”, and justifying the necessity, he says, “once the word is technologized, there is no really effective way to criticize its condition without the aid of the technology you are criticizing”, so we can forgive the unintentional hypocrisy. in regards to llms, plato’s arguments 1 and 2 are shaky at best - since llms can generate images, video and responses to questions - but definitely stands tall for 3. llms as mental crutches feed on the desire for less thought and memory, and gradually lead to the reduction of memory encouraging activity. it would not be far fecthed to expect the reduction of prompts and thinking to less descriptive phrases with extended untempered dependence on llms.  back to ong. his focus is on the methods by which literacy alone affects our thought, experience and reality. throughout this article, he makes his point that writing is a restructuring technology by contrasting oral being (experiencing reality in terms of sounds, stories and speech) and oral thinking (conscious self talk or other forms of internal monologuing) with their text based counterparts. for instance, he aptly captures speech as suicidal, saying, “sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” concretely, “[f]or the real word nevertheless, the sounded word, cannot ever be present all at once. […] by the time i get to the -less, the ne-ver is gone.” i loved this because it was a new way for me to see sound and speech elevated from my unconscious experience of them i.e. to appreciate the nature of units of oral communication as objects with being and character, an allusion to poetry’s beats and rap’s flow.  in contrast to this nature of speech and oral thought, writing extends the lifespan of sounds and words till the page ceases to exist.  this article with it’s exhortation of writing is not to discount the beauty of our nature for oral being, as he acknowledges,“[t]he mind trained in an oral culture does not feel the literate's distress [to keep things in tactile memory]: it can operate with exquisite skill in the world of sounds, events, evanescences. how does it manage? basically, in its noetic operations it uses formulaic structures and procedures that stick in the mind to complement and counteract the evanescent: proverbs and other fixed sayings, epithets, that is, standard, expected qualifiers (the sturdy oak, the brave warrior, wise nestor, clever odysseus), numerical sets (the three graces, the seven deadly sins, the five senses, and so on), balance, rhythms of all sorts ("blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven") — anything to make it easy to call back what homer recognized were "winged words"”.  all of these are characteristics of effective rhetoric, which would mean that the skills of a good orator are majorly aimed at the deft generation of highly memorable, ideally sticky, thoughts, stories and associated sounds. in doing so, there is leeway for both compression and variation, you can say so much with so little. contrast this with the nature of writing where the demarcation (or more colloquially, definition) of words from other words necessitate the concrete experience of each aspect of thought, experience and reality, and the detailed description of these as particularly as possible. for example, in reading the phrase, “the color of bread”, the word color must first be defined as an idea on its own in your mind, then bread as an idea, followed by the image which then concretizes its color, which means, you first constructed these words, then sound, then defined your ideas of them, before finally focusing on the color of the imaginary piece. it is why poetry is beautiful and why you know a word is perfect based on a feeling, because you have intentionally connected it to some part of your own conscious - and sometimes unconscious - experience. writing forces this focus on details one could easily glaze over. speech does not need this as it flows through feelings and reality smoothly, for this reason saying “the color of bread” causes a faster mental image generation process than reading it.   this demarcation or separation due to literacy is important for detailed, revisable and analytical thinking, because in ”[t]otally oral peoples, intelligent and wise though they often are, are incapable of the protracted, intensive linear analysis” characteristic of literate thought. i posit this is likely the case for primarily oral thinking because of the parallel nature of thinking. with one thought occurring while others are happening, this interruption makes extensive linear thought difficult as:  point (ii) gets at the core of ong’s argument, that you need some separation from your experience of reality or thought or more meta of experience, to get a better grasp on them. and of course you could favor other forms of this separation like video or audio, each of which ong ranks by saying, "i see what you say" lacks the depth of "i hear what you say".” extending this analogy to buttress the point of this article, i am saying, to make further depth of experience conscious, write on the experience or at least your understanding of it. or more simply, writing  separates you from experiences and observations, making you explicitly conscious of them.  in characterizing this separation, he describes many ways in which writing affects humans. i classify them into three main groups, viz:  mental separation how writing separates aspects of the mind and conscious experience. writing separates thoughts from sound. you can experience people’s thoughts through text almost as much as you can through the default of speech. almost.  writing imprisons moments, experiences and thought, and their corollary descriptive sounds, or as ong better describes, writing physically reduces “dynamic sound to quiescent space.” “writing separates the known [object or idea] from the knower”. “[w]riting separates interpretation from data. [p]ersons from a primary oral culture have difficulty in grasping what literates mean by word-for-word repetition.” compared to text, in speech, my interpretation of your speech is less clouded by my state of mind and other sullying sources, because i can read your tone, inflection and emotions. in writing, this is a bit different, you need more pieces of writing to make explicit your interpretation, be it through additional punctuation or imagery.  “writing distances the word [as a mental object] from sound”. as was recently illustrated in the investigation of claude’s j-space, we can also experience words in our minds separate from what we say. this happens in many decimals of a second, but on a page, this process is slowed down and you sometimes need to patiently work the wheels for it to literally sink into your mind - as i illustrated with the “color of bread”. material separation how writing distorts reality and our understanding of it. “[t]he alphabet [a core unit of literacy] dissolves all sounds into spatial equivalents.” to appreciate this, consider the “au” sound in maul. this is the same sound in the yoruba word for husband. this generally available sound has been understood and described differently by the two alphabets. writing separates words from other words.. “[t]exts force words to bear more weight, to develop more and more precisely "defined" — that is "bordered" or contrastive meanings”.  “writing distances the word from the plenum of existence.” this is evident in two ways: “[w]riting distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and in space”. i read of the experiences of afghani women from my mother’s shop in lagos, years after the illustrated experience had happened.  regarding this separation, ong mentions an even more contemporary version, adding, the “computer vigorously interposes even another consciousness […] between the knower and the known […], the programmer”. to know of things, you used to research them, which was an abstracted form of knowledge, but in today’s ai age, llms are even more distancing from the knower - as the citations must be explicitly requested and further reviewed for acknowledgement of authors - and worse from the known - as they quickly provide answers without the providence of articles, including exposure to novel or highly arcane methods, discussion sections, images, bibliographies and supplemental information.  modal separation how writing reorganizes society and its modes of organization. “writing separates "administration" from other types of social activities. [this is] unknown in oral cultures, where leaders interact non-abstractly with the rest of society in tight-knit, often rhetorically controlled, configurations.” here, "administration" can have two senses: (1) a distinct group able to oversee or (2) the work such a group actually does”. because the administrative class eventually separates from the proletariat as group size increases, the activity of administration becomes more text based and this separation leads to the enacting of aesthetically pleasing theories - nice sounding and seeming ideas - without the advantage of immediate feedback from the subjects of such policies. this is why written policy as is characteristic of today’s politicians is different from the dialectic, rhetoric based policy in the public space like the ancient greek and smaller local tribes in nigeria.  “writing can divide society splitting verbal communication between a "high" language completely controlled by writing and a "low" language or "low" languages controlled by speech”. this is quickly evident in today’s text based speech patterns. we adopt phrases primarily based on the kinds of media we consume - all of which are built on some text. llms are text trained, hence the suspicion of characteristic linguistic devices like contrastive phrases by the custodians of writing. social media is text based, because people on social media text like people on social media, which social media speech then copies and on recursively. human developed text has the ability to morph based on its training data, and this change affects the ideas accessible and communicable, further separating the informed from the uninformed.  “writing differentiates grapholects [the written dialects of spoken language], making [them] a completely different order of magnitude and effectiveness from the dialects that remain oral”. to conclude, writing-caused “separation ultimately brings reconstituted unity.” when experiencing a tree, the naming of the tree and its characteristics or one’s experience of it “sets up a relatively clear subject-object relationship. but this very relationship makes for a new kind of intimacy [with both the tree and one’s experience of the tree]. now, in certain ways, [one] can deal with the tree better on its own terms, rather than on terms unreflectively imposed by [one’s experience of the tree]”. with separating, externalizing writing, “[t]he original empathetic identification [with objects or feelings is restructured and thus,] becomes more and more [consciously] recuperable [,which] unites the knower and the known more articulately”.

Writing as restructuring technology.

what is math but a formalized set of nifty tricks.  braver has some challenges whose solutions tickled my fancy.  for example: diagonally slice the above parallelograms and rectangle and you end up with a triangle. turns out every triangle is just a quadrilateral cut in half, and thus the area will simply be half the area of it imaginary whole quadrilateral. the b \times h in \frac{1}{2}b \times h is sister to l \times b or l \times l of quadrilaterals. another, is this question: i was close to getting this but i was blocked in my mind by the focus on only the big square. turns out, the focus is the area of the big square, which can be seen as: the square of (a + b), which i quickly noticed or  (four times \frac{1}{2}(a \times b)) + c^2, which is just nice. equating these means:
a^2 + 2ab + b^2 = (4 \times \frac {1}{2} (a \times b)) + c^2 or,   a^2 + 2ab + b^2 = 2ab + c^2 \therefore a^2 + b^2 =  c^2 so nifty.  the equivalent of watching neymar at work.  this was based on his precalculus made difficult book. 

Nifty Triangle Geometry

question given the general quadratic equation: a x^2+b x+c=0
 derive the quadratic formula:  x=\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4 a c}}{2 a} solution \therefore \begin{aligned}& a x^2+b x+c=0 \\& x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{c}{a}=0\end{aligned} if complete squares are of the form: x^2+2 a x+a^2=(x+a)^2
 then, constant a^2=\left[\frac{2 a}{2}\right]^2 and complete squares become: x^2+2 a x+\left[\frac{2 a}{2}\right]^2=(x+a)^2 
for the second equation above, this gives: x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\left[\frac{b}{ a}\times \frac1 2\right]^2+\frac{c}{a}=\left[\frac{b}{ a}\times \frac1 2\right]^2  x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} + \frac{c}{a} =\frac{b^2}{4 a^2}  x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} =\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} - \frac{c}{a} now the left hand side is a perfect square.
\left[x+\frac{b}{2a}\right]^2 = \frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{c}{a} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{c}{a}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{4ac}{4a^2}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2-4ac}{4a^2}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \frac{\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} x = \frac{-b}{2a} \pm \frac{\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} voila.

Deriving the quadratic formula.

asking this question was based on unconscious ignorance of the shared aspect of a marriage with a real person you choose, instead implying a marriage with an amorphous amalgam of society’s implicitly communicated assumptions. with this implication, the hesitation and questioning was and still is reasonable. who would want to marry the many examples of terrible spouses you have heard of or seen. therefore, a better alternative is, “why marry this person you are choosing?”. perhaps there are benefits that bring one to a choice like this. an explicit discussion of a shared desirable future with a lover and friend. a desire for permanence in emotional connection with this person. economic and social benefits of being with them. what convinced me was the agency of the first benefit, since the desire for permanence of the relationship is implicit in my decision to be serious with the person in the first place, thus predating the choice of a marriage[1]and a focus on the economic and social benefits stems from a philosophy i am not interested in (i.e. using people). beyond that, a personally reasonable benefit is the elevation of your relationship. your friendship going beyond the less serious - yet important - relationship into spousehood is a personal, social, legal - and for those who believe, spiritual - testimony to the seriousness with which you intend to care for your spouse and your relationship.  if there is another way to proclaim this elevation that i am unaware of, i would love to know. therefore, it is not about the concept of a marriage, but the prospectus of a marriage to this person. the explicitness of this leads to a second question, what kind of marriage is worth undertaking such testimony? for me, only one is, me and my friend. me and my game, joke, drink, food, talk, serious, business, sex and pray buddy.[2] if i do not see the possibility of sharing myself in these ways with this person or wanting to know them in these many ways, there is no point to the entire enterprise. initially, i was asking the titular question from a purely epistemological perspective. i wanted to know why people did and do it, especially given the deluge of evidence against the choice. the good faith answer is that they do it because they believe in the person in front of them.[3] [1]: also, while marriage contains the promise of permanence, it is not an assurance of permanence, as seen by the normalcy of breakups and divorce. i am not certain how much this should weigh in consideration. [2]: it is why i propose asking out your good friend, not making your girlfriend your friend. not that that is not possible, but i have never fancied that.   [3]: i do not believe the primary purpose of marriage is begetting, hence the ignorance of children in this discussion. to me, they are a collaborative choice made after choosing a spouse.

Why marry?

Generating Molecular vdW Surfaces

it is crucial to be definite about tomorrow, to imagine a future worth living and wholly throw your self behind it. as i say this, i do not have the full idea or experience of what that is, but an attempt at this is likely better than having no definition. this thought was revived as i read peter thiel’s zero to one.  my receipt from this text is that specificity and optimism are learnable and important skills.   “if you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. but if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.” — thiel, zero to one, 2014. attempt a definition of a great tomorrow and be adaptably committed to it, it will make tomorrow easier and more favorable. 

Define Tomorrow

work on problems worth it. you know them, you can feel it.  get the problems clear. build solutions that are tractable, scalable and bold. these require you to become persistent, okay with ambiguity and undistracted.  after succeeding, move on to new problems.  how not to work work on problems you don't care about, without change. work on important difficult problems without changing them to important yet tractable ones.  continuously excuse this hesitation to change.

2026