On being a nerd
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
Computers have the uncanny ability to do literally what you told them to do, but rarely what you meant. So when someone says something (even in poetry) we tend to temporarily suspend our humanity and we read it in this exact literal sense, out of sheer habit, and respond just like the machine would respond to us to any inconsistencies or ambiguities.
"Tea or coffee? Yes, please."
Little children sometimes go through phases of this kind of behavior too, and as a programmer I can usually have a lot of fun with them by playing the game right back and watching their responses.
2 | 1
-----
0 | 1 = 1
1 | 0 = 2
1 or 0 => 1
0 or 1 => 1
2 | 1
-----
1 | 1 = 3"Would anyone like tea or coffee?"
"I'm sure someone would."
"Would you like tea or coffee?"
"Yes please"
"Which one?"
"Coffee, please"
As evidence, I provide the fact that court cases rarely come down to ambiguous phrasing in the legalese portions of the law.
And, are you suggesting legalese to lawyers is like python to us?
Even if it was: I can't execute a python module in my head!
I can read it several times and I might have a guess at what it does, but I can never execute it as well as a machine does. Also, I would invariable end up with bugs that I can only fix by inspecting how the machine executes the code, for example by stepping it through a debugger, or running portions of it in an interactive interpreter (aka REPL).
If one and 1/16th is born, then certainly one is born!
Though I am concerned about men being born, instead of babies.
When you say half a person is born, "born" implies the birth process has finished and we ended up with half a baby. And that doesn't make any sense.
Best contribution to the pedantry discussion so far.
I contend that if a given baby is eighteen inches long, then in a period of time when three inches of that baby exits the appropriate orifice we have witnessed the birth of one sixth of a baby. Put six of those together and you have a whole baby.
Every few moments dies a man, Every few moments one is born.
But that's not the case, because born is present tense as well, not only past tense. "Babies are being born".
Every few moments one is (being) born.
Alternately, born is a variation of bearing - a woman carrying a child around is bearing it from A to B. Afterwards, it was born from A to B. In that sense as well the original wording makes sense, with a different meaning.
Surely that would be borne, not born.
And, moment doesn't have to correspond to an SI time unit 'second'.
And no, a poem doesn't have to be an accurate description of reality (if so it would hardly qualify as a poem).
And my point is: stop trying to make it more accurate, because your attempts are futile; you're only destroying the poetic beauty without any gain to justify that.
I consider myself a nerd (obsessed with computers, technology, programming), but I'm not of "great computational ability", in fact, I hate crunching numbers, and I hated highschool math. The value of PI never fascinated me, I never tried to memorize any portion of it (other than 3.14).
I'm an 'INFP'[1] so I tend to look at the big picture and ignore the details. I only dive into a detail temporarily, on an as-needed basis, to fix a bug or improve performance, or something like that.
Point is, not all computer nerds are math geeks.
The only math I loved was elementary math, first degree equations, and from university: discrete math.
He didn't say they are, he merely said math geeks are nerds.