dzolob

Well, there are whole continents where people are treated as commodities. Working 16 hours a day for one or two dollars while living in unhealthy, unmerciful environments is not drastically different from being breeded for exploitation.

There is a whole lot of citation needed on this reply, not to mention you’re talking about consciousness as something that can be clearly defined and measured.

This is not physics. If you think it’s ok to breed beings that clearly look to avoid suffering and care for their offspring with the sole purpose of exploiting them, and that’s fine because life > death, there you have it. Just don’t try to push a pseudoscientific scale to vegans just to prove their fallacy.

As long as animals are treated as commodities instead of sentient beings, yeah, nothing is going to be enough for vegans.

Empathy is a great quality to cultivate.

Yes and no. What I meant was more like, you don’t need to fully understand rigid body mechanics to build a table, but if you build enough tables, you might win some knowledge on rigid body mechanics that you may have missed in class.

Of course, this is not always true, but a concrete example that comes to mind is integration. It’s very hard conceptually, but not so in technique. If you learn how to do it, for the most part you can skip the concept (to some degree, obviously). I didn’t understood Riemann integral until I learned Lebesque.

There is no absolute here. While I agree that a great degree of understanding is desirable, lots of concepts and techniques don’t sink in until hours, days or even years after being presented.

I still remember powering through lots problems without much clarity and achieving the right answer. Every attempt, failed or successful, got me closer to really understand what I was doing.

It’s ok not to understand a topic the first or nth-time time you come across it. If you follow through, something will stick, and sooner than later you’ll get a good enough picture.

They are like seeds, you know.

I knew a guy who built specific surfaces with plaster and threw marbles at them to find some special solutions to nonlinear mechanics problems. He thought of himself as an experimental mathematician.

Sure it was!

I think letting me do the algorithm and looking at the results was her loving way of getting me out of the way.

For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables.

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.

One also can think of transforms as the eigenfunctions of the continuous part of the spectrum of a differential operator. In differential equations (DE) theory, a well posed DE has a structure (the DE itself), a domain and enough independent boundary conditions.

Fourier transform will show up for an harmonic oscilator in the whole real line with incoming and outgoing wave boundary conditions, while Laplace will show up when working on semi-infinite interval whit initial conditions and proper convergence at infinity.

These are the most common, but not the only transforms one can build. There are also Melin and Hankel transforms, and by playing with the operator, the domain and the boundary conditions, we can construct the adequate transform for each given problem.

Spectral theory of DE’s is such a beautiful topic.

English is not my native language. I think you understand what I meant.

Publishing houses are not a middleman in the same way walmart is a middle man. Before you get your book, it has been edited, formed and designed. Plus, and again, we’re talking indie here, it’s most likely part of a concept. Don’t you have a collection, a compilation or had ever bought a book by its cover?

Not true. A publishing house is not meddling anything, is creating the “commodity“ along with the author. Creating a book is an art. It involves formation, sometimes translation, concept and design. It also fires a big productive chain that in some cases, for indie publishers at least, goes along with the ethos of the author. That’s why some very successful authors stick along with indies instead of penguin random.

People are putting a lot of heart into this industry.

At least in my country, publishers get a bigger cut when you buy your books in indie/local than amazon. They demand bigger discounts, are relentless with penalties, accounting maneuvers and all sorts of schemes to undermine payments, and authors get the same royalties whether the book is sold by amazon or other channels. So, yes, it makes a difference.

Please support your local bookstores and your indie publishing houses.