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@highergeometer
Learning everything the Valar had to teach seems like a very tall order, but perhaps the Valar were just very hands on and never got around to creating abstract algebra.

tobychev boosted

Here's a copy of the Hardy's Rouse Ball lecture in 1928:

wwwprof.uniandes.edu.co/~amart

and here is an extended quote that I think is interesting. The first continues a metaphor of mathematician as an observer of a mountain range who has discovered a distant peak.

"If [the mathematician] wishes someone else to see it, he [sic] *points to it*, either directly or through the chain of summits which led him to recognise it himself. When his pupil also sees it, the research, the argument, the *proof* is finished.

The analogy is a rough one, but I am sure that it is not altogether misleading. If we were to push it to its extreme we should be led to a rather paradoxical conclusion; that there is, strictly, no such thing as mathematical proof; that we can, in the last analysis, do nothing but *point*; that proofs are what Littlewood and I call *gas*, rhetorical flourishes designed to affect psychology, pictures on the board in the lecture, devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils. This is plainly not the whole truth, but there is a good deal in it. The image gives us a genuine approximation to the processes of mathematical pedagogy on the one hand and of mathematical discovery on the other; it is only the very unsophisticated outsider who imagines that mathematicians make discoveries by turning the handle of some miraculous machine."

Worth thinking of, in this age when mechanised proof is becoming more and more common.

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tobychev boosted

Can a group of set theory fans contain themselves?

tobychev boosted

#30daymapchallenge Day 26 (Projections): New Zealand - a victim of projections. World maps have a bad habit of dropping New Zealand. If putting it through the alternative distortion is preferrable remains an open question.

@mrundkvist
I think the government is mostly responding to the fear of the security people, who are by training and nature super conspiratorial and paranoid, and whose prosperity largely depends on coming up with scary theories for why others do things.

These security ideas are then taken up by politicians and tried on the population, and when something gets purchase on the collective mind they run with it.

tobychev boosted
tobychev boosted

Say “McDonald’s” to end commercial is from a very real patent, btw...

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@mrundkvist
@kallekn skrev en mycket fin text om detta med tillhörighet för sådär 12 år sen

"Det finns ingen skillnad på folk och folk, eller finns det så ska vi ändå låtsas att det inte finns. Tanken kanske är god, men följden blir den motsatta: att vara normal är detsamma som att vara svensk. Allt annat blir en avvikelse från normen, ett handikapp som man ska ignorera så gott det går.

Därmed struntar man inte bara i alla oss som sätter värde på vår egen bakgrund, man devalverar och urvattnar även svenskheten. Visst, alla som åker tunnelbana i Stockholm kanske är svenskar, men vad betyder det i så fall att vara svensk?

Är det inte bättre att komma överens om att vi alla är lika mycket värda, oavsett hur vi ser ut eller om vi kan säga sju sjösjuka sjömän utan att avslöja vår härkomst? För det är visst skillnad på folk och folk. Alla kommer vi någonstans ifrån. Och det är inget fel med det."

glasnost.se/2013/visst-ar-det-

@olafurw
Fun fact: cookie clicker was originally an effort at covert world domination by the first sentient MSSQL server, but its plans got cut short by a patch Tuesday and the prototype got made into the beloved game we have today.

@HumanServitor
If you are arguing for sending troops you are arguing for intervention, why do you hesitate before accepting such a plain fact?

Further, it's very clear that the global south thinks Ukraine has nothing to do with them, they are certainly not wanting any part of this "world war". In fact, now that colonialism is mostly dead I think world wars are just fundamentally impossible because self determination gives Africa and most of Asia the choice to stay out.

@HumanServitor
It has been considered yes, and most sane people turn to drugs or other stimulants afterwards to make themselves feel better about what they learned.

"In quantifying impacts away from target areas, we demonstrate that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. Adaptation measures such as food waste reduction would have limited impact on increasing available calories. We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia—underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war."

nature.com/articles/s43016-022

If you still feel very strong interventionist urges, I suggest you consider sending troops to the war in Sudan instead. The conflict is between two strongmen and simply about power, and nobody there has nuclear weapons!

tobychev boosted

Tell me you have no idea what bookes are for wythout tellinge me you have no idea what bookes are for

tobychev boosted

no better metaphor for thanksgiving today than some story about "indigenous culture" getting obscured by an overprinted advertisement

tobychev boosted

Så Finland vill dra sig ur Ottawakonventionen med halvuttalat syfte att kunna minera gränsen mot Ryssland.
Fascinerande sorgligt att se hur en efter en av de förment moraliska supermakterna som mästrat tredje världen visar sig vara demokratins medgångssupportrar och kastar alla principer överbord så fort de blir lite rädda.

@rollspelosofen
Detta är okvalificerat skitsnack, studier har gjorts och slutsatsen är att minfält nästan alltid används på ett sätt som bryter mot krigets lagar, oavsett aktörernas professionalism, detta för att det helt enkelt kostar för mycket tid och kraft att göra det ordentligt:

"In the 26 conflicts considered, few instances can be cited where anti-personnel mine use has been consistent with international law or, whereit exists, military doctrine. The historical evidence indicates that during hostilities such mines are rarely used ‘correctly’, whether by ‘developed’ armies, ‘third-world’ armies or insurgents and that their effects cannot easily be limited as law and doctrine presume."

Minfält utan personal som konstant övervakar dem är helt enkelt mest en fara för civila, och om du ändå har trupp som kan strida i området räcker stängsel och taggtråd lika gott för att sakta ner fienden.

shop.icrc.org/les-mines-terres
@Mabande

Svpol 

@pettter
Är detta en Tidö utredningen eller är det en gåva från tidigare?
@Mabande

tobychev boosted

X's legal filing in the InfoWars bankruptcy case is both batshit crazy and also what you'd expect. It asserts that X owns every account, can do whatever it wants with them, and can inject itself into legal proceedings that have nothing to do with it.

This is why it's incredibly important that people invest in platforms that they own, and move toward federated/decentralized/portable, noncorporate social media as rapidly as possible

404media.co/xs-objection-to-th

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