Vampires and Arithmomania | Hacker News Reader

Vampires and Arithmomania

oddathenaeum.com

36 pointssigna1125 comments

What if https://mathgenealogy.org , which purports to document who was bitten by whom, is a fraud? All mathematicians are actually vampires, and to cover their tracks they periodically "die" (stop publishing under a given name) and pretend to be someone else's "student" (starting publishing under a new name). This hypothesis would certainly explain the mathematicians' conceit ("recall...") that, instead of learning knowledge, we are just remembering what our souls once knew.

Fake picture!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao#/media/File:Paul_E...

Crafted on the CSIRONET CDC Cyber 205 to hide the passing of torch ... https://csiropedia.csiro.au/csiro-computing-history-chapter-...

The amount of sigils and occult jargon math invents on the spot is very weird in context of most sciences: imagine creating entire fields/theories and gaining followers, like a religious sect, in a field like geometry?

I can't find the title, but there was some short-story where all physics was actually magic, and it was finally revealed to the public when a nuclear physicist was caught chanting incantations over a warhead--the security guys thought it was Russian and arrested him as a spy.

Technology is magic.

A chatbot is a rock that has been enchanted to think and talk.

I don’t want to oversimply!

First we had to flatten the rock and then trap lightning inside it.

> It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

-- Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

There's a nice short movie about that, it's in german but has english subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPwXNFU7oU&t=469

Seems like https://medium.com/luminasticity/sufficiently-advanced-techn...

>The advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic because our bodies, our physiological and psychological ways of interacting were evolved in primitive environments and so complex technology asserts itself upon us like all the uncontrollable phenomena would dominate the minds of the non-modern human.

> [Taiwan] A singular place on earth where silicon wafers are endlessly etched with arcane symbols 4 nanometers in size, engraved by the light of heaven; life breathed into sand to help shoulder the burden of the world.

-Roon

Bram Stokers Dracula also has something at its core about obsessions in particular time and timetables, planning etc as highlighted by user gwern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39512188

Dracula is obsessed with the modern world and meticulously plans his trip to England including using tide charts, the telegrap and railway timetables. But he is unable to properly adapt (or overcome the obsession) into becoming modern. The good guys are able to use (and not become obsessed with) modern timekeeping, bookkeeping, etc to defeat Dracula.

Worth to say that he isn't defeated by being trapped into counting things literally.

I know this is not relevant to the post, but I had to comment for the sake of my username!

I bet you were counting on this.

I was hoping for little more follow up about how maybe this was how people with OCD back then were viewed. Or some connection between how people with Arithmomania back then, were turned into folk stories about vampires and witches. Besides the title, there wasn't much connection between how maybe real people with the condition, became a story told to kids, and passed on. Or why did Romania have so many people with Arithmomania that it became a folk story about vampires.

This seems like something that would also be a cool addition to Blindsight. Some further 'realistic' characteristic about how vampires are a real thing. (in that fictional universe of course)

Are those with psychiatric illness such as OCD not vampires in a way, emotional vampires of a sort, whether intentionally or not?

It kind or makes sense: I always thought, if we were take an undead corpse for real, lacking any élan vital, this wouldn't be driven by hormones or reproductive drives (as in popular fiction), but may rather be an abstract, crystalline existence. Or in other words, with Augustinus, the pursue of primordial intrigues, as portrayed in fiction, should be a mere ornament to such an existence. Which leaves counting as a worthy activity and as an attempt to persist basic object relations in due abstraction…

> It’s a joke hidden in plain site.

Is that a joke I'm not seeing or just a misspelling of 'sight'?

Vampires have to stop and point out the typos.

We do no— They do not!

No but has anyone in actually life has gotten their blood sucked by a bat? like a legit flying bat? on reddit i read this one post where the family saw a single bat that was as big as a fully grown street cat. and then they saw the group of them all the same size?! do they actually suck blood or is it just some movie thing?

Vampire bats do suck blood, but they're not very big and would only ever target a sleeping human from what I've heard. There are a few pretty large bat species, but most of the big ones are found in tropical regions.

My understanding is that they don't 'suck' as such (like a mosquito), but rather create a wound and lap at the blood which emerges.

The big ones eat fruit

When I lived in PNG, fruit bats were fairly common. You could see them roosting in trees all over the place, and they are huge. They're harmless though, and a great source of protein, if you're any good with a slingshot.

New crazy paramyxoviridae combination here we come!

Uh oh! Better not teach your children math! Lol

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