Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: Tutorial level advice; spelling out things that some people find tacitly obvious and others haven't thought about and still others aren't shaped to naturally accept.) It never gets easier - you just get stronger. If you don't get stronger, you'll have to settle for living small. ...Alright, that's going to require a lot of additional background to make sense. There's this idea in the game Go of "living small". You settle for less, for making a tiny shape worth very few points, because you know you're not strong enough - as a player, or in a fight - to get anything more. This is often the right move. However, you can't win a game this way. At some point, unless the game is going very strangely, you need to be large, take up space, and make points somewhere. For another bit of background, there's the common refrain that "it gets better", or that something desirable about you is "not true yet... growth mindset...

(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG, JM, and PR.)   The path to my old hunting grounds (as pictured above) is long and twisty and winds through a lot of necessary math along the way. You'll be best served by carefully going through the parentheticals and answering the questions I ask, so as to keep track of the blazes and to keep your footing. You'll still get something out of this if you move more quickly, but you might end up lost further down the line. You might find the pace a little slow if you already know the territory - test yourself by answering those same paren...