Also, the “video games make people violent” argument rears its ugly head.
There is an argument to be made that gangsta rap made a generation of impressionable kids much more rough around the edges, as it defined the new “cool” for them. Even though it wasn’t “supposed to be for them”, they knew all the words, which are loaded with expletives and misogynistic lyrics, and sowing distrust of the police etc.
Maybe I am just a social conservative but I agree with this lady who tried, in vain, to fight against the capitalist machine that is ths music industry: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA
Kids are impressionable — the Merchants of Cool documentary clearly shows how capitalist industries exploit that to sell more stuff: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showscool/
It also helped shape a rift, in my opinion, between the Black and the White youth that grew up now, which had been closing thanks to Liberalism and efforts to move past it.
Why don’t we set aside the rap battle and Mathematica concerns and focus on well known human society features failing people.
Cut the crap with the pearl clutching “there’s an argument to made other peoples behavior did…” and consider yours as a member of an implicitly caste based society.
Treat yourself like the subject of study instead of abstractly focusing on the flock, dad.
Western psychotherapy role play is the worst personality trait.
Music is a reflection of culture, and when there is violence in culture, artists make art out of it to cope. If black music seems more violent to you than white music, please meditate on how much more violence black people experience than white people, and why someone would presume one genre is reactive and another genre is causative.
If you want to hear the arguments against gangsta rap and the exploitative music industry (exploiting externalities just like any capitalist industry)
Listen to me do it in rap form, from 2015 … and please comment
Why has Blaxploitation became not ok but gangsta rap is still considered “just art” with misogynistic and violent lyrics portraying Blacks self describing themselves as materialistic thugs, they were role models “poppin bottles”? Are women not 50% of the population, why is it OK? Why is it OK to have lyrics about mistreatinf Black women etc. as “just art” and Ice Cube who uses B’s and H words about women in his music comes on to Bill Maher’s show to lecture him about how using the N word even about yourself in a joking way is “not cool”? Yet it is cool to be a non-woman and using slurs against women? I think both are uncool.
[1]https://www.flavorwire.com/489278/25-of-musics-most-obnoxiou...
Edit: Thanks for your Soundcloud link. I like your flow. You make fair points, but I see no evidence that any of the issues you raise are worse in hiphop than any other genre. (Or that hiphop's issues are internally generated, and not amplified by an exploitative industry that makes bank off stereotypes.)
Ok, then make the argument. There must be a mountain of evidence if this is true.
Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe NWA caused the LAPD to brutalize Rodney King.
I think Monster Hunter World was the first time I worked out a dynamic programming algorithm in anger.
Care to elaborate?
If there is, then it's a genuine grievance.
But if there's not — what's wrong with paying for a good product? I have yet to see an equally good alternative to other software products, like Excel, Photoshop or Logic Pro. There are alternatives that have the same functions, but none that have the same level of quality.
After all, most of us here on HN are being paid to write code. It's really weird that we would expect to use someone else's software with thousands of years of developers, designers, testers and other professionals without having to pay for it.
Between SageMath, Numpy, scikit-learn, Pandas, Folium etc. Python can probably match Mathematica feature for feature and even beat it in some cutting edge research areas.
However Mathematica makes it a lot easier to get started if you don't know how to program. Just start Mathematica, enter the equation like it looks on the page in your math book using the equation editor GUI, click solve and you're done. Also since everything is built in you don't have to worry about working out which package implements Moving Median or Facial Recognition.
Mathematica also comes with a bunch of real time data sources which are really fun to play with. Want to plot Germany's GDP vs Natual Gas prices or Gold prices vs global average temperatures? The datasets are there and ready to be explored.
The only place where Python is better if you need to share your code - not everyone has Mathematica license.
For instance in SageMath, to get the eigenvalues of a matrix M, you have to do A.eigenvalues(). What is that supposed to mean? To a programmer, that means A is an object (in the sense of OOP), and you are calling an internal method on it.
But that's not how you think about mathematics. Mathematics is functional. A mathematician knows that eigenvalues(A) means, to choose an appropriate eigenvalue-finding algorithm and apply it to the matrix A.
The mathematics program should conform to how one should think about mathematics, rather than forcing mathematics students to think like programmers. Mathematica does that.
Haven't tried Folium, but from people who are familiar with both: The number of ways Mathematica has an edge over Sage (in terms of math capabilities, not interface), significantly outnumbers the reverse comparison.
Sage is better in a few ways. Mathematica is better in many ways.
Still, for the typical undergrad curriculum, Sage is probably good enough.
You can pay to get access to Mathematica, but you can’t pay to get the freedom you would get from open source. No matter how much you pay, Mathematica is still proprietary. There is, indeed, no price for freedom.
Here is an editorial from an American Math Society journal that expresses very well one aspect of Mathematica that lots of us find troubling: http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf
Nothing in principle.
But if we teach people to do math with Mathematica, and they graduate and don't have access to Mathematica any more, how are they going to do math?
Most of the practical lab skills you're taught for doing "wet" biology require quite an expensive lab, and doing computational biology often requires a much more expensive supercomputers.
But the MATLAB skills I honed in university have seen little direct use after graduating - because it's faster to teach myself to do whatever it is in Python than to get an employer to adopt MATLAB.
But sure! Take the limited motivation and effort the student's got and make them go through 16th century tech to learn it all.
It's such a nice, accessible environment for learning. My daughter is still too young to begin exploring SageMath, NumPy, SciPy, etc., but we've had fun together plotting things in Mathematica.
Can't stand this kind of rhetoric. Arguments aren't scary monsters.
Obviously you might want to get a nice recent version of the Pi and splurge on getting the max memory, but...it's the cheapest way into Mathematica (and the Wolfram language) other than winning a copy.
The first time I had a problem and received a technical fix via support email, I was sold on being a subscriber. Whether I could justify the commercial license to an employer is another matter…
For anyone not familiar with SymPy, check out this short tutorial I wrote: https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd... ; also available as notebooks https://github.com/minireference/sympytut_notebooks#play .
You can use it for free if you use a Raspberry Pi (non commercially)