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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
mircea_popescu: "i used to be an entrepreneur but then i took a fatter to the knee"
mircea_popescu: holy shit this fatass notion of equality for some things only.
mircea_popescu: it's that they do not show up for work, they get the same per hour pay (which on the strength of that alone they should not, for the record, as i'm not paying the same an hour the guy who works 16 hours and the gal that works 6.5) and so logically at the end of the year they get less.
mircea_popescu: it's not that they show up to work and still take home less money.
mircea_popescu: "4. You think it’s pretty unfair that women effectively work from 4 November until the end of the year for free because of the gender pay gap; and that female managers “work for free” for nearly two hours a day; and that the pay gap is even wider for women of colour and disabled women."
mircea_popescu: "It’s easier than you think to attract this offensive, sexist label – all you have to do is dare speak out against gender inequality"
mircea_popescu: not their fault you persist in living in a counbtry whichg has decided "coding will work like art works!!1"
mircea_popescu: i know bunches of late 20s earlky 30yos with insurance for the shiot they make
mircea_popescu: they won't do custom jobs for items worth less than maybe 100k or so, but then again fuck you, nobody is going to insure your chewwed gum
mircea_popescu: <ascii_field> phun phakt: most american 'home insurance' co. will specifically ~not~ insure any item you built yourself << of course they will.
mircea_popescu: how exactly did the russky govt manage to steal a .org ?
mircea_popescu: beat the shit of the romanians, who tried same but failed utterly.
mircea_popescu: they did a good job actually copying the principles not merelyt the objects, turn out perfectly passible items now.
mircea_popescu: ftr, the estonians got really great at "fake ancient furniture".
mircea_popescu: ascii_field wut ?! bathroom was the size of that room o.O
mircea_popescu: ascii_field the "apparently care" you propose has a name.
mircea_popescu: "someone pointed out to mp what that shit's been doing while nobody was looking"
mircea_popescu: derplet's got these feelings almost like he's a thing, "i am a tractor, it makes no sense i can't pull odwn this wall, please explain mechanics to it!"
mircea_popescu: it does "something" and for as long etc, i'll fail to understand why it remains a thing.
mircea_popescu: your argument strikes me of the same exceptionalism "medicine" of 1700 employed. or "religion" of 1800.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field i dunno, women i know hate the inept cocksure ones more than the neurotic pay-for-it ones
mircea_popescu: ascii_field it's more like ibm. "great american industree - does nothing really"
mircea_popescu: spiral of defeat. a) woman goes out, meets a buncha schmucks ; b) woman starts charging ~100 per dinner date, ensuring that... she will now ONLY meet the schmucks.
mircea_popescu: but whatever, not like anyone doubted cook was gonna sink apple.
mircea_popescu: "as long as the state agrees it's 700, doesn't jack shit matter what they do"