Math (or Maths for the Europeans, why is it that both sides of the Atlantic agree that it's mathematics, yet we Americans routinely call it Math?) constantly and consistently blows my mind. However, I've just read something that I find particularly disturbing.

If you've never watched Joeseph Campbell interviewed by Bill Moyers, you are missing out. But one of the most universal things he talks about in one of the segments was how people often misplace the denotation for the connotation . Which is quite understandable, given the relatively lazy attitude average joe has for thinking about such things. Even special joe probably never thinks outside of practical experience to see the meaning of practical experience.

But why is this important? Well, one conclusion I draw, not necessarily from Joeseph Campbell, is that if you truly believe that, say, Mary was an actual virgin who actually had a baby who actually was the son of God, as in God actually put his sperm, or whatever a deity of that caliber would put, into Mary, you are missing some seriously important literary points that the Bible is trying to make.

Denotation: Mary is the virgin mother of God
Connotation: Well who cares? I sure don't, but I think you get my point. The point is, it's not important to having faith that Mary actually gave a virgin birth to Jesus in the year 1. There is no reason to expect that archeological digs will support the virgin birth as a "fact," nor is there any purpose to having forensic evidence of that fact. "Be excellent to each other" is as true today as the day it was written.

Now how does this apply to the question: does 0.999~ really equal 1?

First off: read the aforementioned thread. I promise, it's relatively low key. No trolls, all genuine individuals struggling against their ignorance of the concepts of compact sets and a radix.

Maybe it's just sooo obvious to me, since I have spent probably months thinking about that very question, making sure I understood everything about it and never got the answer wrong. But thinking about it like "well, if there's no real number between reals X and Y, then X=Y" shows that you don't understand the disconnection between numbers and decimal representation. Or even the more subtle distinction between numbers and quantities.

Denotation: 0.999~, 1
Connotation: Multiplicative Identity Element

That's all that's really necessary to understand. That's the driving force behind:
X = 0.999~
10X = 9.999~
10X - X = 9X = 9
X = 1
You pick 10X because of how we represent numbers in any radix. Basically, we start with X as the repeating "decimal" of the largest symbol for radix n. Then we multiply X by the radix n and subtract X, which then gives us the largest symbol times X equals the largest symbol. If we were using hexadecimal digits, the same would hold:
X = 0.fff~
10X = f.fff~ (Remember 10 in hex is 16 in decimal)
10X - X = fX = f
X = 1

But that brings me to my bigger question. About society in general. Are we teaching math completely wrong when we ask little children, "If I have 5 apples and I give you 3 apples, how many apples do I have left?" Isn't that the start of the confusion between the denotation and the conotation?

Abstraction is more than a programming visualization tool to me. It is a way of life: keep searching for a bigger abstraction to explain new experiences, yet also cover old experiences. So I have thoughts along the lines of:

Existentialism -> Religion and strictly not the other way around(religion does not make room for existential beliefs), ergo existentialism is a more "correct" theory, or religion could be considered a subset, a "kernel" if you will, of the set of existential ideas. But in general, they are both ideas, so I have to abstract a model for ideas, so really, the relative "correctness" of existentialism vs religion "doesn't matter." Much in the same way as the "distance" between 0.999~ and 1 "doesn't matter," or more appropriately, "doesn't exist."

Isn't tying mathematical knowledge to practical experience, specifically tying numbers to quantities that one can count, preventing others from being able to make their own abstractions? Isn't that why algebra is such a turning point in adolescent education? Isn't that why people have such a difficult time with calculus, and in general, believe calculus/differential equations to be the end-all be-all of "hard" math? Isn't that why dumbasses, like meteorologists say, who can't guarantee a forecast within +-4 degrees F, will laugh at the math major who mistakes 32 for 16 when multiplying 8 by 4? Doesn't this type of "practical" thinking reinforce things that shouldn't necessarily be reinforced, like the importance of the bottom line or how fast your car can go?

Or is this really the best of all possible worlds? And I'm just lucky to see what most people can't see in math.

I work for one of the major weather graphics and data providers here in the US. I will leave it as an exercies to the reader to find out which one.

Anyway, sometimes when I'm bored at work, I go to medialine to see how the company's public persona is perceived.

Alright, you got me, I am addicted to online, pseudo-anonymous bilboards. :-P

I came across this thread there. Man, mets are some weird nerds. Earth science doesn't give much training in abstraction so met nerds are a very pedantic bunch. Ethics of calling something live? Puh-fucking-leeeeaaaasse!!!

I mean, we're talking about a fucking Tee-Vee show here! This is a construct designed to sell "viewers" to "advertisers." Where are the ethics involved in local news broadcasts? For christ's sake, you're already misrepresenting yourself as an outlet for information, when in reality, you just want to keep people's attention to the used car salesman's ad. Local news is inherently un-ethical. It's not important that you know precisely when it's going to rain, or what the relative maximum temperature a thermometer at the nearest airport will read. The local news makes all that stuff "appear" important, so viewers will watch advertisements.

But, none of that should be news to anyone.

I think a better question is: Does karaoke qualify as a live performance?

I think the best answer is: It doesn't even matter since it doesn't affect my enjoyment of life, or karaoke.

I think I hit suburban stoner nirvana this past Thanksgiving weekend.

Here's a summary of my last 5 days or so:

No work Tuesday - Saturday. It's now Sunday, and I'm back at the grind, and that's kind of a bummer, but c'mon. . .5 days of R&R.

Called, and hooked up with, the drug dealer on Wednesday. Out of college for 4 years now. Never got it right while I was in college, or out, but this year I remembered to buy dope before I wanteded/needed it. This is key people. So many years before, I failed at this step along the path.

Treated Tuesday and Wednesday like any other, normal weekend. My girlfriend and I smoked up, got the munchies, baked cookies, etc. I mean, we got high, but nothing really special since we weren't really celebrating/observing any fake holidays at the time. Also talked to the drug dealer on Wednesday, as I mentioned before, and that was key.

Thanksgiving day: 2 families, 2 dinners, 3 houses, about 3 hours of driving, 10 hours total of non-marijuana activities. Really not so bad. Woke up at 11am. Went to bed at 1am. Lots of good food in between.

Friday. Well, you know what they say about Friday: "It's Friday. You ain't got no job. And you ain't got shit to do!" Well, Friday and Saturday. It was like a fog. Like the beginning of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . I'm not even sure what I did. I ate lots of leftovers, watched TV and some movies, slept, showered a couple of times. Oh man it was great. Ooohh, I for got to tell you, I talked to the drug dealer again on Saturday, and hooked up with an ounce of keif, which, if you can afford it, is excellent.

So, to recap, I spent several hundered dollars on marijuana and some processed marijuana, and smoked much of it in the comfort of my own home, which is a fairly decent condo on the lake here in Madison, WI, with an excellent couch for such an activity. No fiending for dope. No fiending for good company. No fiending for a nice place to sit. No fiending for food. Everything was all taken care of in a way I had never seen before. I even got some recording done with my band Saturday afternoon in my basement.

The real question is: where do I go from here?

I think I've done it all. I should just get a better job, buy a better condo, and buy better recording gear.

I could even get a job with drug testing.

I guess I'm thinking I've hit the top of the mountain. There's no one on the face of the planet who does more drugs more responsibly than myself. . .so there's no more reason to do drugs.

Sometimes, I'm just so proud to be an american</sarcasm>

Here's a really neat email my girlfriend received at work from one of her peers, posted for all to enjoy:

This one is impossible to believe. Scroll down for the text. If there is one thing you forward today.....let it be this.
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of PanAm Flight 103!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the military barracks in Saudi Arabia!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the American Embassies in Africa!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the USS COLE!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001!
REMEMBER all the AMERICAN lives that were lost in those vicious MUSLIM attacks!
Now the United States Postal Service REMEMBERS and HONORS the EID MUSLIM holiday season with a commemorative first class holiday postage stamp. REMEMBER to adamantly and vocally BOYCOTT this stamp when purchasing your stamps at the post office. To use this stamp would be a slap in the face to all those AMERICANS who died at the hands of those whom this stamp honors. REMEMBER to pass this along to every patriotic AMERICAN you know.

I modded this up +1Insightful. Just cuz. I guess I just feel that way right now.

Anyone care to comment?

Update: Well it was insightful for about 20 minutes :-(

Maybe I should have put it here.

The weight of the world has become so great recently, that I don't believe I can keep it from crushing the dreams of my youth.

Weed is scarce, and more expensive everyday.

Work is boring, and limited to what is profitable.

I haven't the strength to continue this yuppie by day/hippie by night lifestyle anymore.

Even though, as far as computers go, I don't believe that there is anything I can't do, just things I don't have time to figure out, time is running out.

The longer I sit here, and work, the less time I have for anything else.

I'm done for. . .

I'm waiting for the warm embrace of. . .mediocrity.

I got one of my AC "trolls" modded up Insightful defending Noam Chomsky. Hope is not lost for the progress of ideas.

Ahh, a breath of fresh air!

I just read this comment by gmhowell, and I am, for the first time in a long time, filled with hope for the current progress of ideas.

Marx may have been many or all of those things, but at least a concession is made for, what I believe, to be the main problem with capitalism:

All value of a good stemming from the input of labor

is, at the very least, an arguable idea.

The only account of this idea I have ever read was by David Schweikart, who is a prof. somewhere(not a lot of info on google). His argument starts out with a classical example:

O(x,y) = P(x) + Q(y)
where x and y are factors of production and O(x,y) is the ammount of whatever produced using x ammount of factor x and y ammount of factor y. Let x be labor and y be land, and pretend that you're farming corn.

Assuming economies of scale, the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of labor is P'(x) and the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of land is Q'(y). Thus the equation can be rewritten as:

O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
So there is a clear distinction between the contribution of labor and the contribution of land.

The next question is: What is the contribution of the owners of land? And then you make a few logical connections about the ethics of compensation related to contributions made to production, and it is quite clear, at least to me and David Schweikart, that the owners of any means of production contribute nothing to production soley through the act of ownership.

Basically how is the equation:
O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
affected by increasing or decreasing the number of owners of y?

It seems to me that it isn't, therefore ownership is not a productive activity, thus not entitled to compensation from production.

David Schweikart goes on to make more arguments for cases that more closely resemble the real world, but this example for the classical case is the starting point.

Are there any other thoughts out there on the contribution of labor vs the contribution of owning a means of production? Or do you think that I'm just out there?

Note: I'm condensing 10 pages into a few paragraphs from memory. The main thing to consider is Euler's theorem as the most politically charged mathematical theorem in history.

I want to talk about this thread. You will need to set your thresholds to 0 to read it all. As of the time of this writing, there is nothing that would normally be considered offensive in that thread, and there are only 9 comments to read.

Now that you've read the thread, on to my discussion:

Figure of Speech

If you don't already know what a figure of speech is, here is a good start.

If I were to say, "I'm sooo hungry, I could eat a horse," do I mean, in a literal sense, that I could consume an entire Equus caballus, bones and all, weighing in excess of 1 ton at the next meal? NO. Will I think less of your intelligence and world experience if you DO believe that I mean to consume an entire horse at my next meal? YES.

If someone says, "Information wants to be free," do they mean, as the first reply to the parent of the above thread suggests, that information is an animate object with complex desires and a social life? LOL NO. Are the owner of the first reply and the moderators who gave him +2 insightful, pedantic shit heads? YES.

Don't like that analogy? Well tough. You and that dude are still wrong. Why? Because you are misplacing the denotation for the connotation. You probably don't understand the difference between the two if you still think it is some sort of logical fallacy to say, "Informaiton wants to be free."

This argument extends to other absurd applications of pedantic, semantic, bull-oney arguments.

---------------------------------

Tounge in Cheek

Now, what I need help with is the following: Who in that thread is being serious, and who is trying to be funny by appearing to be serious, and thus laughing at those who believe him to be serious?

Here's how I see it:
Thread starter--being funny, not trying to be serious
First reply--seriously pedantic with serious problems
First reply to the First reply--me, so I know I wasn't being serious, yet trying to appear serious while being absurd
All replies to me or my children--seriously pedantic with serious problems
Second reply to the first reply--serious, but stoneder than me?
Third reply to the first reply--seriously funny about being pedantic
Second reply--seriously funny, and rightly moderated so.

Am I on track here? Are there a lot of people here on /. who take themselves too seriously? Or was the first reply merely a joke on me, since I recognized it as a serious reply?

Can someone fill me in please?

So now there's a self-referential " FortKnox Inner Circle"??

That IS funny.

teheheheheheheheh

Suddenly, I feel no guilt or shame for being a chronic masturbater.

At least masturbation is OK and normal.

Which do you think is easier?

Convincing the population at large that the Enlightenment is dead, and Foucault was right

Or. . .

Getting someone(a daywalker, 9-5'er) who doesn't work 3rd shift to cover for you when you are really sick

Based on my experience, it would be easier to convince the general population that postmodernism has all the right answers.

--------------------------------------------
BTW, have you checked out Surak's latest journal? It would appear that he has lost, big time.

Don't you hate it when you dream "in computer"?

The other day, my girlfriend asked me about SVG, as in scalar vector graphics, and wanted to know what it was all about. Specifically, she wanted to know if SVG was some sort of "other" Flash type thing for the Web.

So I read all about it, well no ALL about it, but you know what I mean. So I told her that Flash basically was SVG for the web, and that SVG, in general, was a specification that one could build a program around to render other graphics, like chemical structures, etc.

Well, I was pissed off about scheduling issues at work. When I went to sleep after all that reading, I dreamed in XML. No plot, no events, just one XML file, that basically held all the data about what I was pissed off about.

I don't have vivid, memorable dreams very often, so I was quite disappointed with this one. Of all the possible things to dream about, I get an XML file. WTF??

Well, I'm banned again. Or my address/subnet is. Oh well. It only took me 2 days of crap flooding.

Why so down, you ask?

I've been in a band for the past 3 years and the drummer decided this weekend that he was done with the band. So done in fact, that he didn't feel it was necessary to inform the rest of us of that fact.

We've been brothers on the stage, putting things on the line in front of lots of people, and I'm not worth at least one form of mass communication, informing me of this. So fuck that, I say. I'm gonna crapflood /. while wasting time at work and try to get banned.

I learned some interesting things while trying to get banned.

This is funny

This is a troll

What do you think? I think it was the cheap shot at Mr. President, but I dunno or really care.

This thread in response to the funny comment mentioned above, is ACTUALLY funny. I'm the AC arguing about stolen concept. I actually got a few bites on that one. Heirarchal knowledge indeed.

Another thing I learned is that mods/editors don't like it when you give posts the subject:

Linux???

I have about 220 Simpsons episode in Real Media on my harddrive. They take up about 7.25 gigs. Some are unedited, some are syndicated. Only one has any commercials. I made a playlist for Real Player and put it on continuous, random play.

All I have to say is FUCK WATCHING TV!!!


-----------------------------------------------

My Other Tee-Shirt is Clean


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Actually, I have several computers(maybe you assumed that?). I just love being able to play all those wonderful Simpsons episodes while fully hauling ass, working on another computer. So I'm not just sitting on my ass watching the Simpsons all day, if you got that impression.

If you feel like /.'ing my 433Mhz Celeron on ADSL from SBC, Click here.

This whole debate was quite disappointing. I was on vacation at the time, and I have a policy of not reading /. at home, only at work.(I have an addictive personality) Of course I knew the debate was going on while I was at home(I couldn't help but peek), but I was excited at the prospect of something interesting to read when I returned to work. So I waited until I returned to work to read the whole thing. That was a waste of time :(

The whole thing can be summarized as:

Non Twirlip Dittohead: But I wanna watch DVD's on Linux

Twirlip: But that's illegal so let's just drop it m'kay?

Twirlip Dittohead: Yeah, you tell 'em.

Then Twirlip decided to reduce the debate to an objectivist vs. reletavist debate, which just lead to more of the same.

I really thought all the viewpoints expressed were quite myopic. There was only one comment that scraped, though not very convincingly, what I think the issue is. I really don't think the issue is intellectual propery at all.

What is happening is a clash between 2 orthogonal components in the nature of computers, which jcast was I think trying to get at, though the point was cast aside by Twirlip.

The first component, the one most talked about, is the fact that computers* ARE consumer electronics. As such, content providers, whether they write software or publish DVD's, need a recourse to stop, deter, limit, whatever, piracy. They, computers and content, are all part of the same capitalist machinery and would not exist or continue to exist without incentive for self-interested individuals to innovate and create. Even if you hate M$ and don't use any of their products, their innovations and marketing are responsible for the widespread availability of hardware to run your alternative software on. Based on those observations, it is reasonable to conclude that content publishers deserve to continue publishing in an environment where the incentive to innovate and create exists.(Wheter or not the DMCA accomplishes that goal is irrelevant, it is definitely an attempt at that goal)

The second component, and what jcast was alluding to, is the fact that computers* ARE much more than their consumer electronics functionality. They are Turing machines. They are algorithms. They are programs. They are a class of problems. They are designed to do what ever I am clever enough to get them to do. Regardless of platform, I can compile C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, etc, and BAM!! the computer does my bidding. That is what it is supposed to do. That is the way computers ought to be. So why, oh why, would anyone, in their right mind, want to neuter a product designed to be the most configurable, flexible tool ever designed? IOW, I am more than willing to legitimately acquire(ie pay for) content, why can't I watch DVD's using DeCSS in the privacy of my own home, and why can't someone help me do it(through publishing the procedure on the web, etc)?

So, instead of a "property rights" problem, the problem is a new kind of device, never before seen in history, whose practical potential will always be greater than the limited consumer functionality they are marketed for.(That seems to imply that knowledge is the problem. Hmmm. . .)

I wish there had been more debate on the role computers should play in a consumer driven capitalism. I guess that I believe more good would come from the way computers ought to be rather than preserving they way content creaters currently create content. But what do I know. I'm just a dope smoking 3rd shift computer operator with a BS in CS and Math. Maybe I need to get into politics ;)


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* By computers, I mean PC's. I know that there are other types of computers, but they aren't as widespread, as ubiquitous, as PC's. And they definitely aren't the source of all the piracy problems.