193100+ entries in 0.067s
mircea_popescu: (also, the proposed device does not actually work. the female ass is exactly antithetical to the steel ball. negative ricochet factor. fortunately.)
mircea_popescu: in spite of pretense to the contrary, nobody can tell teh difference.
mircea_popescu: (if you sautee the eggplant first, then you use the butter to sauce...)
mircea_popescu: cut the chicken in very long thin strips and butter fry them lightly, can also add sautee'd eggplant
mircea_popescu: the former home made because srsly i have never seen a restaurant that made edible white pizza
mircea_popescu: most recently i've had white pizza with fried chicken and artichoke and margherita with extra anchovies
mircea_popescu: <phf> you mean like a bell pepper pizza? << absurdly the us figure spicy salami can be propperly called "pepperoni", which is normally a veggie.
mircea_popescu: phf they can go discover the moscow school of psychology for all i fucking care. idiots.
mircea_popescu: but no, you're not supposed to eat american processed meats, if that's actually what you had in mind. if what you had in mind was actual salami, say with peppercorns or something... sure.
mircea_popescu: i somehow doubt people who call salami "pepperoni" ever had proper salami anyway.
mircea_popescu: there's >10k dubious establishments that pretend all sorts of things, up to and including HAVING INVENTED THE DAMNED THING, but otherwise never saw one.
mircea_popescu: well on the other front, i just got taken to the only actual pizzeria in buenos aires
mircea_popescu: ty internets. you might not know wtf fractals are, but you certainly spring the goods when it comes to naming strippers.
mircea_popescu: i also have cherysse which apparently is my own invention
mircea_popescu discovered he had got candi and candice on his very own!
mircea_popescu is naming his heroes in this game, and he decided all the thieves get stripper names (for obvious reasons) that start with the letter c.
mircea_popescu: byzantium when it fell to the turks was 4-5 villages lost among pastures surrounded by ancient walls, and american english is similarly a huge complex architecture maitnained by the remnants of a leper colony
mircea_popescu: im not even sure it's any sort of alteration above and beyond simple decay through disuse.
mircea_popescu: as the headcount of romanian kids toiling with gheba during five decades.
mircea_popescu: i don't think as many people lived the bible as a whetstone in their life during the whole history of christianity
mircea_popescu: and so all the books were called "exercitii si probleme" or "probleme si exercitii"
mircea_popescu: In fact, even the term “word problem” is not used in Russia, because the word “problem” usually means a word problem, while non-word problems are called “exercises”. << exactly correct ftr. the difference was even enshrined as such, in the ro equiv of "standards" cca 60s.
mircea_popescu: (and once you've done that you're right over on cantor's doorstep and so forth. this might even be the best way to even introduce numbers altogether.)
mircea_popescu: (and if you're doing that, pretty much every bright 12 yo kid has been playing mentally with the peano curve while taking a shit and following the tiling, but didn't know it's called that. so you could of course tell him.)
mircea_popescu: (ironically, the concept can be correctly introduced - if one's willing to take the geometric route, and in so doing miss out on most understanding available in the topic - by first explaining what a tangent is and then demaning a closed continuous curve be drawn that allows no tangents. good enough for a bright 12yo, plus minus. but otherwise, fractals are of analytical rather than geometrical interest.)
mircea_popescu: and with this observation, the world as observed suddenly makes significantly more sense.
mircea_popescu: see, this is the problem. we go around like we're all people and shit. but then some of us go home to where we know what fractals are, and some of us go to whatever that is, where they don't.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: jesus fucking christ no english speaker can produce a definition of this concept.
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a never-ending pattern" quoth "fractalfoundation.org".
mircea_popescu: From: Doctor Douglas Subject: Re: Fractals Hi Boris. The key idea in the definition of fractal is "self-similarity". What this means is that the object looks the same no matter what power magnifying glass you use to view it.
mircea_popescu: From: Boris Subject: Fractals What is the definition of a fractal?
mircea_popescu: "An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole. Fractals are used in the design of compact antennas and for computer modeling of natural-looking structures like clouds and trees."
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a figure with repeating patterns containing shapes that are like the whole but of different sizes throughout."
mircea_popescu: in what fucking alternate universe may a definition include the word "or"
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale." via en.wikipedia. or in fucking definitions, THIS IS ALLOWED NOW!
mircea_popescu: and so is f(x) = x/this guy's IQ. for crying out loud.
mircea_popescu: not to mention that the number 1, as well as the number 0 and the number 78 are "self-similar" on all scales, in a technical sense or not.
mircea_popescu: the geometric notion of the point, and the geometric notion of a line, and the geometric notion of a plane, and the geometric notion of wolfram's mother impaled on a triple cheeseburger ALL SATISFY THIS DEFINITION
☟︎ mircea_popescu: "Fractal -- from Wolfram MathWorld mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales. The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure ..."
☟︎ mircea_popescu: but perhaps the spanish speakers are retarded, right ?
mircea_popescu: "fractal Definiciones web Un fractal es un objeto geométrico cuya estructura básica, fragmentada o irregular, se repite a diferentes escalas. El término fue propuesto por el matemático Benoît Mandelbrot en 1975 y deriva del Latín fractus," blablabla.
mircea_popescu: but since toom mentioned the fractal problem, let us consult the web. because the web knows shit, right ? all human knowledge, accessible to everyone etc, right ?
mircea_popescu: "The authors of “standards” want to reform American mathematical education, but actually only aggravate its main shortcoming: vain ambitions and contempt for consistent, systematic and thorough study." << this is a societal problem. Obama is not an accident, but an archetype.
mircea_popescu: (i am not even all that keen on toom's obviously very geometric take on fractals. they're an analytic construct, which yes can be graphed, like any other function. you don't need "dimensions", you need numeric theory.)
mircea_popescu: if you want fractals, first go away and get rich i mean, figure out what a number is, then come back
mircea_popescu: but yes, the man has a point. fractals aren't for everyone. just like bitcoin isn't for everyone.
mircea_popescu: "I asked several school teachers who were enthusiastic about teaching fractals to define a fractal and none of them mentioned the idea of dimension, least defined it. Usually they emphasized “repeating patterns”. When I asked why they were not satisfied with wall-paper, they took offence." << yes, because who needs to take a breather and think when they could take offence instead and flail!
mircea_popescu: "The idea to teach fractals in school has already found many supporters. (Everything is possible for those who are not competent enough to understand how difficult it is.)" << heh. "But fractals are cool man, like the universe's all connected and everything"
mircea_popescu: it is, however, very inefficient (ie, costs a lot more per joule than pretty much any alternative)
mircea_popescu: the utility of the process in various industrial lines is due to the relative high heat, readily controllable total energy and relatively low latency.
mircea_popescu: the idea to use this as a heat source is older than the aeroplane. i had perfectly functional schematics in books published in the fucking 60s.
mircea_popescu: so : some chemical reactions are strongly exothermic (they give out heat). aluminum salts chief among them.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: under the guard of some old prune too dessicated to fuck them in the first place. Not waste MY fucking time with it.
mircea_popescu: Oh, god. Such pain and suffering. When I took usian slavegirls, attempts to discuss art and philosophy and so forth quickly floundered over a basic inability to remember sentences and build logic trees, which resulted in beatings and many tearful hours spent over grammatical analysis of sentences. Something they should have spend their 12th and 13th year of life on, back before anyone could possibly want to fuck them,
mircea_popescu: "When I came to America, I taught several classes of problem solving and started to appreciate much more the basic education, because my new students dramatically lacked it. They understood advanced ideas but floundered in algebraic transformations, which turned solution of interesting problems into painful struggle with basics."
mircea_popescu: more million man marches plox, clearly they fix problems.
mircea_popescu: thank you mustachjioed nigger what's his name, you totally helped those people
mircea_popescu: i mean for fucks sake, what's even the point of knowing math like that
mircea_popescu: " E.g., my graduate students in differential geometry could calculate quite hard integrals to know the area or the length of a curve but were not able to answer the question what the geometric sense of the roots of the quadratic equation x^2 − 2Hx + K = 0 is, where H and K are the average and the Gaussian curvature of a surface."
mircea_popescu: trinomial. Most American students whom I ever met were not even aware of most of these facts.
mircea_popescu: sum of roots equals −b/a and that their product equals c/a and to use these facts to factorize the
mircea_popescu: children to derive the formula for roots of a quadratic equation ax2 + bx + c = 0 , to prove that the
mircea_popescu: function in a rather complete manner. In particular it was obligatory for all Russian schools to teach
mircea_popescu: anything too advanced. Let me give an example. When I was in high school, we studied the quadratic
mircea_popescu: because TIMSS followed the anti-theoretical bias of American educators. By “theory” I don’t mean
mircea_popescu: I think that the real situation in American mathematical education is even worse than TIMSS shows