I found ch. 7 pretty dense. A lot of the discussions involved so much movement that it was almost painful to have to look at the static pictures on the page in front of me. This would be the ideal type of topic to attack with the new technology--it just begs to be computerized, to be on-line so you can actually see the shapes moving the way they're supposed to be.
One interesting connection with my group's project, dimensionality in literature: we're going to be talking about flashbacks, and it struck me reading ch. 7 that flashbacks in themselves are kind of configuration spaces for the story they inhabit, since they define its parameters and test its limits. Plot itself is also a kind of configuration space for a story.
I was confused by the transition between discussing singular points and differentiables. Also, atlases and manifolds--could we talk in class about how these things all relate to one another?
I was glad I'd seen the movies at the Art Club, because they made it easier for me to comprehend the ideas of circles radiating out, ellipses warping into all kinds of curves, etc. However, one idea I'm still not quite clear on is the motivation of these movements. Prof. B said as we were watching the movie that it was a demonstration of what happens when a circle gets "struck", when a line gets "hit with a hammer." So, are what we are seeing shock waves?
This chapter raised a lot more questions for me than it answered.