Still trying

Here I am, still trying to paste Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last to this blog. Even pasting just one part would be success. So let's try again:

Users/johnlast/Downloads/Janet_Wendy_Text.pdf

Nope. None of the painstakingly followed directions has done the trick. I've had bucket loads of advice from experts and I've followed the instructions as meticulously as I could, but all I seem able to achieve is to get the coordinates to appear here. The text and pictures obstinately refuse to display on this screen. So let's change the subject.

What happens to parts of the brain that aren't used for a long time and then get summoned back into service? Once upon a time I had a good grasp of what was called higher mathematics long ago in my youth. I could understand and apply the principles of trigonometry, fairly advanced algebra, solid geometry, probability theory, statistics, set theory. I haven't used any of them for many years. But I decided that I'd bring myself up to speed in modern cosmology by reading a new edition of Stephen Hawking's book, The Nature of Space and Time; this new edition was a collaborative effort with Roger Penrose as co-author. I should say here that I understood all of Stephen Hawking's best-selling earlier book, A Brief History of Time; the mathematical physics in that book were entirely comprehensible. Maybe it's the influence of Penrose, whose writing in earlier books struck me as opaque compared to the crystal clarity of Hawking. Maybe it's atrophy from disuse. Maybe it's a previously unnoticed consequence of the TIA (little stroke or brain infarct) that I had in Canberra in 2005. That completely knocked out my other languages: before that TIA I had been able to understand and speak a little each of German, Italian and French, in that order of proficiency. After the TIA, all three languages were utterly gone. A few words have come back, even a few sentences, catch phrases and the like. But I can't follow the dialogue in movies, simple slowly-spoken conversations, or the libretto even of a familiar opera like Don Giovanni or Zauberflote, can't pick up the few remarks of Angela Merkel before the translation kicks in during TV interviews. Has the same thing happened to my formerly adequate mathematic brain? Was part of it disabled in that same TIA? Or is it a function of memory, that utterly incomprehensible intellectual function that seems to be part electrical impulses, part chemical reactions? Has my mathematical memory, unused for decades, just been buried under a myriad other kinds of memories? I never understood enough neurology or psychology even to know what questions to ask about this aspect of the human mind, let alone understand the answers. Maybe this blog post will provoke a response from someone younger, brighter, better educated than I am in this domain.