Simple psychopatic questions from a newbie

[Harry S]

Hi guys 

I`m working in 3dSMax for over a 10 years now and recently started learning Houdini. And at the first day of learning it the fact that you cannot apply the scale attribute to a mesh object but you can apply it to a point made me not only confused but pretty mad   I remembered some friends say "when you learn it more it will start to look pretty logical and intuitive". Well, it means that I haven`t learned it enough yet because wherever I look it just pure illogical hell to me.

I hope someone will explain at least any of these things to me, I will appreciate that :

1)  Why points have wrong coordinates on some geometry objects like spheres and tors and ok on others like grids and boxes  ? When I create a sphere from scratch on a new scene and turn on point visibility and numeration I see the points 0 and 1 appear to be the highest and lowest point of the sphere and in a viewport they are placed in the 0 coordinate of x and z axis (of course). But when I open geometry spreadsheet their coordinates are -2 , 0.5 , -5 and 3.6 , -0.5 ,  9.7 respectively.

When I do same with grid or box everything is ok.

What`s going on ?

2) Why normal N attribute is 3 float by default and not vector ?

3) Why when I declare vector parameter with a channel by typing "vector freq = ch ("freq");" and press "Create spare param" button it creates a non vector but single value float parameter ?

4) See attachment . Why when I type @P.y=sin(@P.x); in an attribute wrangler attached to a horizontal line it gives me spiral (like it should)  but when I do same in point node's VEXpression field it gives me some weird line in viewport (and its P.x coordinates are changed for some reason as I see in the spreadsheet) and I need to type @P.x=self;@P.y=sin(@P.x);@P.z=cos(@P.x); in order for spiral to appear forcing P.x to stay same (not to be changed change by Point node like before). Meaning that point node affects P.x component even when I`m not touching it while wrangler only changes what you tell him to. It was tested on different versions of Houdini.

Thank you