nyc111

But this is how it works:

= definition = identity = equality = proportionality

When this subject comes up I always think that the equality sign is loaded. It can mean, definition, equality, identity, and proportionality. How come this state of the equality sign is not mentioned in the paper?

""People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says."

This seems correct. Our mind goes into autopilot. But the article does not give practical solutions to break the habit except to say that change your environment.

This is fascinating, I really enjoyed it. I found it crazy too. All the fine details done with wood.

For some reason, the video also reminded me of the blind watchmaker parable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker. There was a recent submission about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40379784

It is hard to believe for me that blind coincidences in time will be able to create an apparatus like this. There needs to be a designer, although not necessarily god.

"According to Physics Central, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … only equals -1/12 because the mathematicians redefined the equal sign."

Strange. The equal sign is already loaded. It can can be used to indicate equality, proportionality, identity and to make definitions.

"This is because the watch is way more complex. Similarly, the highly complex structures of plants and animals must have been created by an intelligent maker rather than the forces of nature. Hence: God."

"Hence: God" doesn't follow from this argument. An intelligent designer doesn't have to be the ultimate, all knowing, all powerful designer. Humans are intelligent designers. A modern passenger plane is a sophisticated design. Of course, "God" may be outsourcing or delegating some of "his" design work to lower level designers.

Classic site but I noticed this claim about Euclid's proof of infinitude of primes which is always disputed:

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Prime_numbe...

This is one of the first proofs known which uses the method of contradiction to establish a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

Euclid is often erroneously reported to have proved this result by contradiction beginning with the assumption that the finite set initially considered contains all prime numbers, though it is actually a proof by cases, a direct proof method.

He is talking about physicists’ “bad habit” of reifying abstract mathematical concepts, like spacetime. I’m surprised that a physicist is pointing this out.

I liked the coding font. Anyone know its name?

Given the difficulty of keeping a straight line course over the Atlantic without any visible landmarks, these birds must have an incredible sense of direction. Also there must be some ancestral memory of their destination passed from their parents. Otherwise how would they know that their journey will end.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063555

It may be misleading to look at only to the design of the feather. Flight and such a long and sustained flight can only happen because of the sophisticated programming. Evolution must be a great programmer too.

The article is about how higgs field gives mass to particles. This process is so complicated that in order to explain it to laymen physicisits developed a “spherical cow” method. Prof. Strassler thinks this explanation (he calls it a “phib”) is wrong. I agree. But I think the real problem is that in physics the concepts of “particle”, “field” and “mass” do not have universal and precise definitions. So Prof. Strassler uses a concept of “giving mass to particles” but what he calls particles are really waves or maybe a statistical bump in data and we have no idea what mass is. So before the higgs we need a clear definitions of particle, field and mass.

Is there a way to publish my emacs org-mode outline interactive like this page?

“As we build theory we adhere to the following basic rules: […] (5) every statement explicitly states all of its assumptions…”

This is great, but is it possible?

The title says “A wikipedia of algebraic geometry” but the site is organized more like a book not like Wikipedia. Do we know what publishing platform he is using?

There is a section at the end "How did we figure all this stuff out?". Really amazing.

And the scale invariance of nature is clearly visible here. The cell is "small" compared to human scale but it is as complicated as any machine existing in human scale. There is no absolute small or big in nature.

In the NewScientist interview he said, I tried “to understand really well the simple things.”

The writer is considering the subject as a physicist might. Euclid’s figures are ideal objects, they don’t have errors. It’s assumed that your construction is an approximation. Euclid might have drawn his figures on sand with lots of “errors”, still the figures are idealized no matter how you draw them. For instance, Euclid represents numbers as lines. There are not units and no errors. His proofs are still valid if I don’t draw his lines exactly as he drew them (I’m talking about Book IX where there are propositins about numbers).

Main page of his opinions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39056900

Those phones contain all the knowledge the school pretends to teach the students. Techers are worried because they see telephones as competition.

This would be a nice experiment: Divide the students into two groups and let one group come to school without phones and let the other group stay home and learn the same material from their phones. If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students staying at home with their phones will learn the material much faster.

The only good thing about the school is that you get to hang out with your peers. The education system is not good for teaching.

I’m not sure about his insistence on teaching comme rule in class. I don’t think knowing comma rule is fundamental. And anyone who wants to learn grammar can look it up. The information is freely available online.

But I agree that education is not about teching it’s about creating jobs for academic professionals. Money is the most fundamental topic in our society. But I don’t remember ever being in a classroom where how money works was explained.

I think the article is more about professional mathematicians communicating among themselves, not teaching in a classroom.

Probably they mean we cannot prove. A real time trap...

All surfaces are definitional. A surface exists when you define it.

Not directly related but I noticed that I can be most productive and focus best in a cafe where there is a continuous white noise. Why doesn't this happen in an open office? Also as I see in 40's movies, the newsroom of newspapers were open offices and I can imagine concentrating there. That must be an interesting collection of noises, typwriters, telephone conversations, joking around etc. etc...

Paywalled

They emphasize several times that “this was all before Bill Gates”.

I never used Shazam. What is its success rate? Does it guess or give options?

What is “pool”, I don’t have such a link on my orange band.

İt depends on how number is defined. Euclid defined number as multitude of units. Zero does not have units so zero is not a number and cannot enter arithmetic operations such addition and subtraction. (Division is repeated subtraction.) For the same reason one was not a number in Euclid.

I’m trying to find out when did Euclid lose his authority. By 1901, Bertrand Russell was defining number as an abstract relation, namely, as a one-to-one relation between two sets.