I just finished reading this:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mb566/papers/tacc-hs09.pdf

It's a very cool paper and everything. Some very interesting ideas in 
there. The only problem is... large chunks of it are utterly beyond my 
comprehension. For example, there are several figures which consist 
entirely of bizarre symbols, hitherto unknown. And the body text uses 
several words in a way that clearly indicates that they are technical 
terms rather than just plain English, but I have no idea what the 
meaning of these terms might be.

The fact that all this notation and jargon is casually banded about 
without the merest hint of an explanation suggests that it's the 
standard "well-known" language for some subject area or other (as 
opposed to something the authors came up with themselves). Does anybody 
have any clue what that subject area might be? (And where I can go read 
about it?)

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Invisible escreveu:
> I just finished reading this:
> 
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mb566/papers/tacc-hs09.pdf
> 
> It's a very cool paper and everything. Some very interesting ideas in 
> there. The only problem is... large chunks of it are utterly beyond my 
> comprehension. For example, there are several figures which consist 
> entirely of bizarre symbols, hitherto unknown. And the body text uses 
> several words in a way that clearly indicates that they are technical 
> terms rather than just plain English, but I have no idea what the 
> meaning of these terms might be.
> 
> The fact that all this notation and jargon is casually banded about 
> without the merest hint of an explanation suggests that it's the 
> standard "well-known" language for some subject area or other (as 
> opposed to something the authors came up with themselves). Does anybody 
> have any clue what that subject area might be? (And where I can go read 
> about it?)

you should be glad Simon is not talking about category theory. :P

The "weird" syntax seems to come from logic, propositional logic or 
logic of predicates, I don't remember.  Type theory is a branch of 
Logic, of course.

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On 14/10/2010 08:51 PM, nemesis wrote:

> The "weird" syntax seems to come from logic, propositional logic or
> logic of predicates, I don't remember.

Mmm, OK.

> Type theory is a branch of Logic, of course.

Really? That's weird...

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> The fact that all this notation and jargon is casually banded about
> without the merest hint of an explanation suggests that it's the
> standard "well-known" language for some subject area or other (as
> opposed to something the authors came up with themselves).


On math:

Junior-level college class on engineering physics.  The prof is talking about
radar guns. He puts a formula on the board that explains the phase shift as a
function of velocity.  I ask him three times why? What exactly is happening that
the things are changing in this way?  His answer each time, "This is the
formula."  The fact that he couldn't draw a cartoon of what was happening, IMO,
means he didn't really understand it, even though he was smart enough allegedly
to have had an elementary particle named after him.

At work 20 years ago, we were mixing tungsten and glass powder and sintering.
The resulting composite structure looks just like povray's noise function.  We
cross section and put a fine polish on these structures and take 30kV SEM images
of it.  The glass is gone! -- it's like the noise function with empty pores!
This confounded a roomful of PhD's in materials science until I figured out that
at such a high, acceleration potential, the much lower atomic number material
looks completely transparent/ invisible.  At lower kV's you can see the glass in
the composite.  Anyway, one of my more snottier mentors still didn't believe
that this could be the case: he said he would have liked to have a friend do
some Monte Carlo simulations (math!) of electron paths to see if that were
really possible.

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gregjohn escreveu:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> The fact that all this notation and jargon is casually banded about
>> without the merest hint of an explanation suggests that it's the
>> standard "well-known" language for some subject area or other (as
>> opposed to something the authors came up with themselves).
> 
> 
> On math:
> 
> Junior-level college class on engineering physics.  The prof is talking about
> radar guns. He puts a formula on the board that explains the phase shift as a
> function of velocity.  I ask him three times why? What exactly is happening that
> the things are changing in this way?  His answer each time, "This is the
> formula."  The fact that he couldn't draw a cartoon of what was happening, IMO,
> means he didn't really understand it, even though he was smart enough allegedly
> to have had an elementary particle named after him.
> 
> At work 20 years ago, we were mixing tungsten and glass powder and sintering.
> The resulting composite structure looks just like povray's noise function.  We
> cross section and put a fine polish on these structures and take 30kV SEM images
> of it.  The glass is gone! -- it's like the noise function with empty pores!
> This confounded a roomful of PhD's in materials science until I figured out that
> at such a high, acceleration potential, the much lower atomic number material
> looks completely transparent/ invisible.  At lower kV's you can see the glass in
> the composite.  Anyway, one of my more snottier mentors still didn't believe
> that this could be the case: he said he would have liked to have a friend do
> some Monte Carlo simulations (math!) of electron paths to see if that were
> really possible.

mathematicians and chemists don't really go well together... :)

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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