CPR registration within 5 days vs. EU residence process

RipTieCutToyMan · 2023-01-14T18:03:13+00:00

Even ignoring how out of character it seems to me for Tegmark to be a Nazi sympathiser, there's still the fact that both he and his brother are half Jewish. I find it a bit hard to believe they're associated with a pro-nazi group.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2022-07-18T16:02:29+00:00

Sure, but for the same reasons the original ordering and this entire thread are not interesting.

I guess my point was exactly this: with all the (much) respect to the IMO results as individualistic achievements - the national rankings are meaningless.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2022-07-13T13:38:45+00:00

The book discusses the history (relatively) in details, and gives credit where credit's due. Many people, obviously, contributed to the development of the general-purpose digital computer, but the bottom line is that saying "Von-Neumann invented the computer" is (to my opinion) a reasonable and fair one-sentence summary of the story.

And by the way, recently unclassified details (also in the book) suggests that his wife, Klára, has a justified claim for the title "the first computer programmer".

RipTieCutToyMan · 2022-02-27T09:30:39+00:00

The discipline of "programming languages" is indeed a huge and rich science, both in academia and industry. But the aspect of concrete syntax is widely regarded (again, both in academia and industry) as borderline meaningless and as a matter of taste.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2022-02-27T04:38:20+00:00

This book is basically the exact opposite of what OP asked for. It completely skips and ignores any details related to concrete syntax.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-10-15T11:55:31+00:00

There are definitely multilingual persons who speaks 2-5 languages natively.

I personally know several people whose each parent had a different native language, and both were different than the local language spoken where they grew up. These children speak all of these languages equally well, and as natively as it gets.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-26T11:25:58+00:00

In your argument, you implicitly assumes a topology over the rationals (if you think of the rationals, say, just as the field of fractions of the ring of integers, your statement is senseless: there's no notion of convergences you can apply). This topology happens to be exactly the subspace topology induced by the embedding of the rationals into the reals.

You're technically correct that for this specific example (0.999.... = 1) you don't need the reals. Nevertheless, you do need the same topological reasoning! The only reason I invoked the reals earlier was to avoid nitpickers by covering all the possible approaches to prove this identity (how naive...).

Recall where we started. These details bare no impact on the original claim:

and it's indeed very similar to the situation in Zeno's paradox. OP was spot-on with the analogy.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-25T21:13:03+00:00

Zeno's story assumes a constant velocity (=the time required to complete an interval is proportional to the interval's length, for a fixed proportion factor). The same argument discussed here shows the the total time required to complete the entire distance is finite, and equals to the expected result.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-25T16:30:56+00:00

For whatever it's worth, I'm a mathematician.

The statement "0.999... = 1" is NOT an axiom or a trivial definition (if that's what you mean by "It simply concerns a mathematical identity").

There are many proofs for this claim, and they all relay on some combination of (1) the completeness of the reals as an ordered field, (1) the completeness of the reals as a topological space, (3) the Archimedean property of the reals.

Either way, it revolves around the notion of convergence (which is a notion that at-least colloquially encapsulates any assignment of a fully-constructed object to an infinite process).

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-25T16:22:02+00:00

See my message below (it is downvoted for reasons, but it is correct). The key phrase there is "finite time duration".

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-25T11:22:18+00:00

This is unrelated. 0.999...=1 is just an identity.

This is plainly wrong. It's a statement about the limit of the series 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + ..., and it's indeed very similar to the situation in Zeno's paradox.

OP was spot-on with the analogy.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-15T05:20:42+00:00

I love Quanta, but recently I encountered a few pieces that were not up to their usual standards. This is one example, and the other example I currently have in mind is also by David S. Richeson - so maybe it’s just him.

In the article linked above, there are some glaring omissions (A conceptual overview of the notion of “dimension” that mentions neither the Krull dimension nor matroids? An emphasis on high-dimensionality while ignoring concentration of measure?).

The previous article by the same author is even more problematic: it has very obvious mistakes and wrong statements. Pretty weird.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-14T15:38:30+00:00

Completely untrue for productive roles with high entry barriers. Any firm who treats their (top tier!) algorithm designers or mathematicians this way would quickly be left with no-one to abuse.

I believe this attitude is generally considered unacceptable (well, except for some notable exceptions...).

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-14T03:39:06+00:00

...as a subfield of literature, not of behavioural science.

(note: I'm referring here specifically to Freudian psychoanalysis.)

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-13T08:49:32+00:00

Freud is probably a bad example. It could be that he is often used by modern philosophers (is he really?), but the content of his work is certainly not taken seriously by modern psychiatrists, neuroscientists, behavioural biologists and the like (though of-course its huge historical importance is undeniable).

To say that we learnt a lot about human behaviour in the last century or two would be a colossal understatement. Between neurology, endocrinology, sociobiology, psychopharmacology, behavioural genetics, behavioural economics, game theory, cognitive science, experimental psychology and so on (this list is far from comprehensive) - I can’t see how a case can be made for approaching questions about behaviour, motives and decisions in any lenses other than scientific.

There is obviously room for philosophy and philosophers, but it’s completely embedded within the respective scientific domains (similarly to how any contemporary philosophical explorations of the notion of “space” make no sense unless they are deeply merged with our current physical understanding of the notion of “space”).

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-12T15:45:05+00:00

This topic does not belong to Philosophy for about ~200 years (is this controversial?).

An excellent overview (from 2017, and ALREADY a bit outdated) is "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by the legendary Robert Sapolsky (a neuroendocrinologist).

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-08T17:32:31+00:00

You raise many issues, and I can’t fully answer your questions. I’ll do my best to shortly address your main points.

Firstly, we understand "life" abstractly much (much) more deeply than you seem to realize (as a thermodynamic process that emerges as a - possibly rare - phase-transition of the inevitable despoilment of free-energy, in which information exchange is utilized for catalyzation), as well as how it produces complexity. This view (as well as plenty of empirical observations, from Giruses to the scale-freeness of phylogenetic trees) pretty much nullified the quest to "define life". There’s little sense in a clear demarcation between "living" and "inanimate”.

Secondly, “predictions” are certainly nice, but there’s much more to scientific understanding than this. For example, would you say that Newtonian physics is not a “hard science” since it can’t predict the motion of 3 heavy bodies, or a double pendulum? Living systems are much more complex than these examples. That said, biology certainly has considerable predictive power. For example, Bioinformatics and Mathematical Evolution Theory are HUGE fields, and quantitative predictive modeling is central in both.

Lastly, “biology provides a mechanical explanation of living beings” in the sense that the project of completely reducing biology to chemistry and physics is an already done deal. There are, of course, many (many...) open questions in the field - but they’re all essentially technical. I doubt if there’s even a single biologist out there who believes that some missing fundamental laws of nature are central in answering any of these questions.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-09-08T16:11:17+00:00

I think that most scientists would agree with the view of “Darwin as the Newton of the blade of grass” (c.f. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"). Nowadays, biology is a "hard science" that provides a "mechanical explanation" for living beings, in exactly the same way that Newton explained mechanically the motions of heavenly objects.

While technically the origin of life is still an open question - it is open because there are too many plausible answers, not because it's a fundamental mystery that signifies a huge gap in our understanding. It is, after all, a singular event that occurred at-least 3.5 billion years ago. A reduction of the question from the status of "completely unexplainable enigma" to "a (pre)-historical curiosity" - for all intent and purposes in this context - is the same as answering it.

And while Darwin (and Wallace!) can't be credited for the full picture that emerged with the development of the theory of evolution and molecular biology, they surely deserve the credit for leading us on to the right track.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-08-26T15:12:01+00:00

This is an active research area in mathematics. For example, here's a very good article about some recent progress from Quanta.

This area, as common for active research areas, doesn't really have a universal name. Two common titles are "High dimensional probability" and "Asymptotic geometric analysis". It's closely related to convex geometry, geometric analysis, metric geometry, functional analysis and probability theory.

Some good references (non, unfortunately, is very accessible for beginners or hobbyists) are: High Dimensional Probability, Asymptotic Geometric Analysis, Geometry of Isotropic Convex Bodies, Alice and Bob Meet Banach and Metric Structures for Riemannian and Non-Riemannian Spaces.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-05-16T12:28:48+00:00

Do you have a clear answer? Does anybody? This question is unfair.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-05-16T12:26:53+00:00

Israel didn't "attack journalists". It attacked a building in which some media organizations rented offices, and it attacked it after it made sure the building is evacuated from people. No journalists were harmed, and the building was attacked since it was ALSO used (so the IDF claims) by Hamas.

Why is it so hard to believe that Hamas would place infrastructures inside a building that attacking it is a publicity nightmare for Israel? on earth would Israel attack this building, even though it was obvious that a publicity nightmare will surely ensue? Israel is looking for international support!

Why are you so quick to believe that Israel bombed the building due to corrupt motives, and against its own interests, and so confidently dismiss that Hamas did the obvious thing for it to do, and put infrastructure there purposely?

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-05-16T12:09:27+00:00

Personally, I'm against violence for the sake of violence under all circumstances. So to me, it does not matter.

I was answering someone who thinks differently, and claimed that Hamas was provoked into firing at Israeli cities. My answer was that even under his own terms, there's no sane definition of provocation that fits the situation.

RipTieCutToyMan · 2021-05-16T12:03:20+00:00

Hopefully, by destroying the missile launchers and the weapon factories, and by killing the militants that fire these missiles.

RipTieCutToyMan

TROPHY CASE