qubex

Sheet music is no more music than mathematical notation is mathematics. (Indeed both notations have roots in the same kind of two-dimensional seventeenth century calligraphic tradition.) However, as you point out, mathematics is indeed the study of patterns, structures, and relationships, and music is not. It is a structure and has relationships, but it is not a “metaphor of metaphors” as mathematics is. Case in point: modern visual art post-photography is much more affine to music than mathematics is, because after depiction became not quite trivial but literally photographic from the daguerreotype onwards, the role of the visual arts became the solicitation of emotion and the conveyance of narrative. Music has syntax, indeed it has very many, but it is not the study of syntaxes in the manner in which mathematics is.

I’m saying that though argument by analogy is very persuasive, “math is music” is a metaphor that is fundamentally unsound as the grounds for reasoning from. I’m not talking about the mathematical aspects of music (which, as you correctly point out, can be found to exist) but that music is performative and aesthetic, whereas mathematics is all about internal consistency.

Ultimately, yes: governmental actions are backed by force in the case of noncompliance.

I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.

There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.

In a rigid lattice, aye.

I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.

And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?

The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

For what it’s worth I’ve started building a Mathematica-to-Python transpiler.

I remember reading this as an undergraduate student already enrolled in LSE. My God how the times have changed.

And they send them back.

How do you think currencies are established? By accepting chickens and cows in lieu of legal tender? That’s precisely the meaning of legal tender. This is the exact analogue thereof: information is required as value is required, information and value are required in a mandated standardised form, other forms are rejected a priori.

I highly recommend you give Haiku a spin… the remake 25 years in the making and counting (which is several multiples the actual duration of the system it is “inspired by”, but that’s the nature of emulators and reproductions, isn’t it?). At any rate, it really gives the look and feel of the system as it was back then. The design is somehow peak late nineties distilled down into a powerful concentrate. (Make sure you click and hold shift to move the yellow tabs on the windows around.)

“Le Mafie” includes Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia) ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia), Camorra (Napolitano mafia), Sacra Corona Unita (Pugliese mafia), Banda della Magliana (Roman mafia), Mala del Brenta (Veneto mafia) and others (but I’m no expert, I’m from Milan).

When you’re a government you can mandate the file formats (and versions thereof) you are willing to accept.

I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.

“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” — Simonyi

I don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.

Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.

Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.

Now I want to emulate my dual PIII-450 with an ATI Rage Fury 128 running Windows 2000.

The SAP architecture stores transactions (basically programs or business logic) in the database.

Oh, yet another CV rewriting service, this for the cheap cheap price of $299. Sounds like a steal.

No right at all, nor do I, and indeed nobody is asserting or exerting that right: market forces will adjust prices accordingly in order to ensure that customers will be able to make purchases at the market rate (through reshipping companies, for example).

Math isn’t music, even in a metaphorical sense. The argument by analogy fails at the first hurdle.

Have you ever heard of concrete, aka “the stone for projects too large to be assembled in blocks”?

Absolutely true: there’ll be folks who understand no mathematics at all and who will try to elbow their way in. There will also be (extending the metaphor) an ecology of instrument-makers and lens-grinders who somehow become party to the debate. But to be Frank (though I am James) mathematicians will recognise their own.

I never said one should not know the fundamentals of mathematics, I was trying to express it’s a damned lot easier when once understood you can delegate the lesser aspects to machinery. Abacus, calculator, computer, CAS, now AI: the mathematician’s understanding and intuition are still fundamental, but the instruments they can rely upon are levelling the playing field (and indeed, it is a great field in which to play).

Exactly. I learnt to haul the blocks myself, but it has always been an uncertain and effortful exercise; now I can move them around as effortlessly as if I were playing Tetris.