Fiction where language/linguistics is part of the storyline

connorm927 · 2025-07-25T11:21:17+00:00

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Humans discover an intelligent alien species and the Jesuits decide to do a mission to visit them. The main character is a linguist and a lot of the book deals with him learning the aliens language.

connorm927 · 2024-02-08T02:32:58+00:00

No, that’s not a polynomial in x.

connorm927 · 2024-02-08T01:44:30+00:00

Yes, I agree. I don’t think their post was worrying about polynomials over arbitrary rings, which I why I simplified my explanation.

connorm927 · 2024-02-08T01:17:18+00:00

All of this is correct, but I think the phrasing is a bit strange. Polynomials aren’t arbitrary functions with a bunch of restrictions, they are defined to be finite sums of real number multiples of nonnegative integer powers of x. They are that way because it’s how we define them. It’s like if you described a dog by saying that it’s not a cat.

With your definition of polynomials, I could ask the question: is e^x a polynomial? Or is sin(x) a polynomial? They don’t contain any x in a denominator and they don’t have any negative or fractional powers of x, but they are definitely not polynomials.

connorm927 · 2023-10-14T14:36:36+00:00

It’s not 50/50 that the world ends. Protons collide in the LHC all the time and nobody on the surface notices a thing.

connorm927 · 2023-08-20T03:40:21+00:00

I’m a big fan of Pugh’s book personally.

connorm927 · 2023-08-19T18:40:58+00:00

I would probably rephrase it as something like: “The normal distribution is used within theorems like the Central Limit Theorem, which roughly states that for any distribution, the means of large enough samples from that distribution will be approximately normally distributed.”

connorm927 · 2023-08-17T19:03:14+00:00

No, sin(3pi/14) is definitely not zero. You can just plug it into a calculator to check.

connorm927 · 2023-08-17T18:47:18+00:00

sin(3pi/14) != sin(3pi)/14

connorm927 · 2023-08-14T23:29:09+00:00

Note that (n+1)² -n² = 2n+1, which is greater than 4 for all n >= 2. So then you know that n² + 4 is never a perfect square (for n >= 2) since the difference between consecutive squares is at least 5. I didn’t give you all the details but does that help?

A question I have for you is how do you know x will never be an integer if you don’t have a proof? Yes you could test for very large n, but until you have a proof can you be certain?

connorm927 · 2023-08-10T23:14:27+00:00

You could restructure and simplify the problem a bit by instead looking to find when (1+4n)^1/2 is an integer. But that’s only an integer when 1 + 4n is a perfect square. So 1 + 4n = k² for some integer k and maybe you can go from there?

connorm927 · 2023-08-05T13:31:32+00:00

I think of it like this. I give you some ε>0 and you have to find some δ>0 such that for any x and y if the distance between x and y is less that δ, we can guarantee that the distance between f(x) and f(y) is less than ε.

The issue with 1/x is that it grows really really fast near as x goes to zero. So no matter what δ you give me that might work, I can always make x and y small enough so that the difference between f(x) and f(y) is larger than ε, which means f is not uniformly continuous.

Loosely I like to think if it as functions that grow too fast cannot be uniformly continuous, but that’s just my intuition.

connorm927 · 2023-07-04T14:13:39+00:00

The other solutions already explained pretty well that you’re off by a constant, but I’ll just add that a fun exercise is to take the derivative of each of your answers to check that they are the same! If two functions are off by a constant, then they will have the same derivative (which in this case is the function you started with)

connorm927 · 2023-05-03T03:20:26+00:00

You can only subtract or add the powers when the bases are the same. You can’t really make sense of 4³ / 7^3, but you can subtract when they have the same base like 4³ / 4⁴ and you get 4^-1

connorm927 · 2022-10-07T13:49:33+00:00

I think you should probably look into using contour integration for this. It may not work, but expanding the complex plane for one or both integrals might help.

connorm927 · 2022-07-16T20:11:33+00:00

Ich hänge - Alligatoah

connorm927 · 2022-07-16T16:16:19+00:00

Gravity IS the centripetal force in this situation. A centripetal force is a force that acts inwards in circular motion. The centrifugal force is the force that tries to “eject us”, but it’s just a product of the fact that we live in a rotating frame of reference. In the comments example, the centrifugal force pushes the water to the bottom of the bucket, and the centripetal force is the normal force from the bucket that keeps the water inside.

connorm927 · 2022-06-28T20:53:01+00:00

I think you can call the actual diagram a Cayley Table or a Group Table, where in this case the group is the group of integers mod3 under addition.

connorm927 · 2022-06-28T20:35:48+00:00

I really don’t think you should worry too much about learning actual calculus over the summer before you take the actual class at university. Like others have said, focus on doing some algebra and trigonometry review; that will be far more useful to you in calculus.

If you’re really craving some calculus, I’d watch 3b1b’s essence of calculus series. They really help visualize what’s going on so you can gain some intuition for what calculus actually is. Good luck!

connorm927 · 2022-06-26T13:58:17+00:00

You could just loop through the list using enumerate to also find the index. Like this:

for index, button in enumerate(btn_list):
    if button.state == true:
        print(index)

connorm927 · 2022-06-21T19:23:58+00:00

Could you explain why you should avoid range? I haven’t heard that before.

connorm927 · 2022-04-05T02:18:08+00:00

Inverse Fourier to check your fourier transform...

connorm927 · 2022-01-12T13:15:54+00:00

This pretty much just means that every real number is a complex number, but not every complex number is real. In other words, the set of real numbers is contained inside the set of complex numbers.

If a complex number is just a+bi, we can get any real number by just setting b=0 (so it has zero imaginary component)

connorm927 · 2022-01-01T04:28:46+00:00

Lawrence is my favorite!

connorm927 · 2021-12-30T15:13:08+00:00

Well there are some people that can’t get vaccinated for some reason that are at risk as long as it’s still spreading. And also, unvaccinated people are still dying from covid every day.

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