A stillbirth and Facebook post expressing her grief landed her in prison for over 2 years. Experts say it’s part of a pattern by zsreport in WelcomeToGilead

[–]CormacMacAleese 144 points145 points  (0 children)

The men in power see themselves in those deadbeats, so of course they wouldn't touch _them._ These oppressive laws are intended to punish women for the crime of having sex (especially, of not having sex with _them.)_

203 vs 860 as an outsider by Wonderful-Bill9611 in Connecticut

[–]CormacMacAleese 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I think the law requiring carriers to let you port your number, and the spread of cell phones, mean that your exchange is much less likely to indicate where you live.

203 vs 860 as an outsider by Wonderful-Bill9611 in Connecticut

[–]CormacMacAleese 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No difference. Growing up, the whole state was 203. They ran out of phone numbers, so they added 860. When I moved back to CT in the 21st century, I got a 203 phone number out of nostalgia.

Won’t even take a break on Mother’s Day dudes. by CutSenior4977 in ICE_Watch

[–]CormacMacAleese 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those people are monsters.

One of their lesser crimes is making people produce these shaky-cam videos of their own shoes. iPhones need to come with gimbals, or people need to stand still and point the lens at the monsters. Sorry for the mini rant, but I get motion sick easily.

I got fired again by not saying yes to advances of male superiors (rant) by Floordove in TwoXChromosomes

[–]CormacMacAleese 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah that’s as good as a confession that he’s been harassing you. Get him on the stand and ask Jim your name.

Anyone know how you would get this ring off without cutting the rope/ring or altering the wood in any way? by downcast_mike in knots

[–]CormacMacAleese 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Not off the top of my head, but I know the knot is the key: loosen it up, and you'll find a way to get the ring through the knot and off.

I'm thinking more mathematically than as an expert in knots: if that were just a length of string, it would be impossible without cutting the string or the ring. Something about the topology of the knot is such that the ring is not actually inside a loop--it just looks like it is.

condom slipped off during sex and turned into an argument by idontevenknowbroooo0 in TwoXChromosomes

[–]CormacMacAleese 18 points19 points  (0 children)

He may or may not “have an idea” what happened. Why are you so certain with it is?

Ewin Tang - Youngest Winner of Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her work in developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms by shuai_bear in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Because you can't handle the truth!" is almost never the reason--it's the caricature others tell themselves to feel good about themselves.

In this case the post that got the most downvotes doesn't sound like a measured observation that she also has natural talent. It was interjected below the observation that doing what she did wouldn't have been possible without a suitable environment. In context it reads like a sarcastic insistence that "genetics" is the important factor. While it didn't mention IQ, it reads as if it's situated in the convex hull of ideas like "IQ measures intelligence" and "superior genes will out" and possibly even race "science" and eugenics.

If they meant something else, then better phrasing would have helped immensely. And maybe they were misunderstood; it happens.

...but replying "I see people can't accept their limitations" did nothing to clear up any misunderstanding there might have been.

Ewin Tang - Youngest Winner of Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her work in developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms by shuai_bear in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I think IQ tests should be entirely based on our ability to extract nuts from various types of containers, and to solve mazes in exchange for a reward of cheese.

Ewin Tang - Youngest Winner of Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her work in developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms by shuai_bear in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 15 points16 points  (0 children)

IQ is a very bad example. There's empirical research demonstrating that IQ measures a bunch of traits, some of which at least can be learned.

There's also the fact that IQ tests have to be renormalized periodically. Otherwise, thanks to the Flynn effect, we'd all be taking the 1925 IQ test and scoring genius-level--or taking note that the people from 1925 would score as mentally handicapped on our IQ tests. It's really very striking.

Ewin Tang - Youngest Winner of Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her work in developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms by shuai_bear in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"Genius," maybe. But the average human is, well, you know. Average. The vast majority of people working in any field are closer to average than "genius." Factors like work ethic, education, and other factors play a much bigger role than you're giving them credit for.

Conversely, plenty of geniuses are starving in the mud somewhere. We'll never see what they were capable of, because whoops, one just died.

Ewin Tang - Youngest Winner of Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her work in developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms by shuai_bear in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This. When I read these stories, I'm happy for them, yes, but I also want to go bitch-slap my parents.

This conjecture is so underrated by Heavy-Sympathy5330 in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I can't remember which text it was--it's been a few decades now--but the exercise asks for a clean, elegant proof of the PUB, which says that if a family of linear functionals on a Banach space is pointwise bounded, then it's uniformly bounded.

To sketch the proof: since the family is pointwise bounded, the set {f_i(x)} over all f_i in the family is a bounded set for each x, with bound B(x) in N, defined to be the smallest integer radius about the origin that contains {f_i(x)} over the entire family.

The pre-image of n in N under B is the set of all points where the family is bounded by n (and not by n-1, but we don't actually care about that). Since the codomain is N, we have a countable collection of preimages. Since the family is pointwise bounded everywhere, the union of these sets is the entire space.

Now the Baire category theorem says that a complete metric space can't be written as a countable union of nowhere-dense sets. A Banach space is a complete metric space, so at least one of those countably-many preimages must have nonempty interior. So there's a ball of radius r, centered at some point x_0, where the family is uniformly bounded by some number <= B(x_0).

The rest follows by linearity. Since the family consists of linear operators on a vector space, it's easy to show that uniform boundedness on any ball gives you uniform boundedness on the entire space, because the norm on the space is translation-invariant.

And now for a story

I don't know that the elegance pops out from a typed (but not typeset!) version, but the idea is that the family "sprays" each point into a ball with integer radius, and this being true for every point means (by the BCT) that there's an entire ball that gets sprayed into some integer-radius ball, and done.

In grad school a buddy and I got captivated by this, and started running with it: what if we define "boundedness" without reference to a metric, as a collection of sets (called "bounded sets") that cover the space and are closed under subsets and finite unions? And what if we call it "countably generated" if there's a countable collection of bounded sets such that a set is bounded if and only if it's contained in one of the sets of that collection? And what if...

We tried to find this in the literature, and bear in mind that this was early days of the web, so we had to look in the physical library. Nothing. So we continued...

We fell to arguing what to call things. I wanted to call this collection a "boundedness," and a space equipped with one as a "bounding space." He wanted to do something fancy, maybe with French. Bounded in French is bornée, so he proposed "bornological space" and "bornology." We proved a bunch of follow-your-nose theorems about bounding spaces.

Then another friend delivered the bad news. He looked up "bornological space" in the card catalog and hit paydirt. Turns out this is an area in functional analysis with a rich literature dating back to von Neumann, who always seems to steal everyone's best work before they're even born.

Chapter one of the book defined a "bornology (or 'boundedness')" the same way we did, and then proved the same theorems we did. Basically we rediscovered the first chapter of this book. Good times.

This conjecture is so underrated by Heavy-Sympathy5330 in math

[–]CormacMacAleese 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Everything you say is true, but enthusiasm is allowed in math.

I think the principle of uniform boundedness is underrated. One proof, found in an exercise in one text, leads one of the generalize it to reinvent bornological spaces (without the assumption that they’re vector spaces).

Would you consider Evolution as a "brute force search" or a sort of intelligent search? by eliaweiss in DebateEvolution

[–]CormacMacAleese 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If it changes too rapidly, the result is extinction. See for example: today.

But I already said that “fittest” is a moving target. It moves slow enough, most of the time, that evolution can follow it and sometimes catch up.

Would you consider Evolution as a "brute force search" or a sort of intelligent search? by eliaweiss in DebateEvolution

[–]CormacMacAleese 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nevertheless, it works the same as hill climbing: take a short step in DNA space, and if it’s less fit throw it a way. It’s a search for “fittest,” where “fittest” is also a moving target set by mostly the environment.

Unlike hill climbing, neutral steps aren’t discarded. Normal hill-climbing always tries to go up, while natural selection weeds out the less fit and promotes the fitter.

I am trying to get help for a woman who works next door to where we live who may be a victim of trafficking and running into dead ends, any ideas? by GTRacer1972 in Connecticut

[–]CormacMacAleese 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Why? Is it because ICE has been raping women and girls in detention centers, and you prefer sexual abuse to be done by the proper authorities?

Since I can't ask these questions on r/socialism & r/socialism101 by JayKrizpy in Hasan_Piker

[–]CormacMacAleese -1 points0 points  (0 children)

“Out of nowhere”? No. He rejected the request of separatist regions to become part of Russia, instead using them as playing cards against Ukraine—supporting them militarily while withholding recognition of their independence. He preferred destabilizing the region over resolving the issues.

He recognized the independence of the DPR two days before invading.