I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
...the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty...
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
(I struggle with Hebrew, where some of the letters are just too alike.)
India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages
Off the top of my head, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. There are many others.
At a guess, there are a fair few powerful men who enjoyed what Epstein had to offer, from both parties. Trump is one of them.
It didn't occur to him before that a real investigation would be bad for him, because he's stupid and entitled.
He's now saying that any "credible" information should be released. "Credible" here means "not implicating Trump".
I think we could debate the merits of a policy in a civilised way, even if Trump favours it.
What, in my recollection, Marty found no sympathy for was the notion that voting for Trump might be a defensible action. Since Marty now hopes for, rather than expects, democratic elections, it seems that the rest of us were right in saying that it was not.
I had a lot to say about the transgender issue and found myself very aligned with GftNC's point of view...
I mostly agree with GftNC's viewpoint, but didn't find time to write a carefully phrased comment when the question was live.
If this is a suggestion that we should have political shibboleths for commentators, I'm against it.
I don't mind discussing whether Trump lost the 2020 election - he plainly did, but I see no harm in demonstrating the fact in response to an honest enquiry.
My long experience of writing to MPs is that, since word processors came into common use forty-odd years ago, one usually receives in reply a letter relevant to the general subject but not actually addressing one's points. Schumer's reply seems to be of that kind.
How much diversity are you, personally, willing to tolerate?
Anyone who's willing to engage in reasoned, fact-based, and tolerably polite discussion.
I see no problem with discussing religious perspectives, so long as we're not expected to follow arguments from scriptural authority. And I'm quite willing to read rational arguments for Trumpism, if any exist.
I understand the ban on McKT under whatever name, but I'd like to see him back. I urge him to apologise to the powers-that-be for having accused them of holding malevolent beliefs which they do not, and I urge those powers then to rescind the ban.
...economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth.
Economists are not necessarily stupid. They use a "utility curve" to describe how much an individual values increasing wealth. The standard assumption is that utility curves are increasing, i.e. people prefer more wealth to less, and concave, i.e. the curve gets flatter as wealth increases.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs. NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready. I am learning to hate AI
It seems to me that AI, at least as quoted on this site, could readily replace the MBAs and other B-Arkers, but not the people who actually know and understand stuff.
The China Debt talk compares US to China 10-year government debt yields, without saying that the yield should be the inflation rate plus the credit spread plus something for time value. In fact, the different yields are almost entirely explained by the different inflation rates.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The law of the letter”
Perhaps the greatest calculator, unmentioned in Devlin's article, was Kepler, who worked out his laws of planetary motion from Brahe's observations.
"
I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
"
...the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty...
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
(I struggle with Hebrew, where some of the letters are just too alike.)
"
India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages
Off the top of my head, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. There are many others.
On “Your Schadenfreude monitoring open thread”
At a guess, there are a fair few powerful men who enjoyed what Epstein had to offer, from both parties. Trump is one of them.
It didn't occur to him before that a real investigation would be bad for him, because he's stupid and entitled.
He's now saying that any "credible" information should be released. "Credible" here means "not implicating Trump".
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
I'm confident that 2 is, in fact, prime.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
"Welch" in sundry comments should be "Welsh", right? As in this blog.
"
I think we could debate the merits of a policy in a civilised way, even if Trump favours it.
What, in my recollection, Marty found no sympathy for was the notion that voting for Trump might be a defensible action. Since Marty now hopes for, rather than expects, democratic elections, it seems that the rest of us were right in saying that it was not.
"
I had a lot to say about the transgender issue and found myself very aligned with GftNC's point of view...
I mostly agree with GftNC's viewpoint, but didn't find time to write a carefully phrased comment when the question was live.
"
Everyone's wrong about something, possibly including me. The question is whether they'll listen to reason.
"
If this is a suggestion that we should have political shibboleths for commentators, I'm against it.
I don't mind discussing whether Trump lost the 2020 election - he plainly did, but I see no harm in demonstrating the fact in response to an honest enquiry.
"
My long experience of writing to MPs is that, since word processors came into common use forty-odd years ago, one usually receives in reply a letter relevant to the general subject but not actually addressing one's points. Schumer's reply seems to be of that kind.
"
"Expected" by who?
I might have expressed myself more precisely. I was merely discussing what I'm interested in reading.
"
How much diversity are you, personally, willing to tolerate?
Anyone who's willing to engage in reasoned, fact-based, and tolerably polite discussion.
I see no problem with discussing religious perspectives, so long as we're not expected to follow arguments from scriptural authority. And I'm quite willing to read rational arguments for Trumpism, if any exist.
"
I understand the ban on McKT under whatever name, but I'd like to see him back. I urge him to apologise to the powers-that-be for having accused them of holding malevolent beliefs which they do not, and I urge those powers then to rescind the ban.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
...economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth.
Economists are not necessarily stupid. They use a "utility curve" to describe how much an individual values increasing wealth. The standard assumption is that utility curves are increasing, i.e. people prefer more wealth to less, and concave, i.e. the curve gets flatter as wealth increases.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
"
American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs.
NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready.
I am learning to hate AI
It seems to me that AI, at least as quoted on this site, could readily replace the MBAs and other B-Arkers, but not the people who actually know and understand stuff.
"
The China Debt talk compares US to China 10-year government debt yields, without saying that the yield should be the inflation rate plus the credit spread plus something for time value. In fact, the different yields are almost entirely explained by the different inflation rates.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.