On 8/21/2011 3:19 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> I seems only fitting that by 2036 the US might be so fucking stupid that
>> they couldn't build a log cabin from his time, let alone work out why
>> living in one would be preferable to huddling under a tree, or wearing
>> animal skins in a cave... Or, so it sometimes seems the trajectory of
>> some of this stupid shit is headed.
>
> I think sometimes it's hard to tell whether the entire world is stupid,
> or just a vocal minority.
>
Vocal minority, plus a big non-vocal minority, who just want shit to 
work, but not why or how. Just had one bozo on MSNBC last night all but 
*admit* that Rick Perry, the Texas governor, who has driving his state 
into a worse condition than the rest of the country, but now wants to 
run to be president, is selling his constituents his own ideas, based on 
fear, deception, and misinformation, because, "people are reacting to 
what they feel is wrong, not the facts. The facts, such as Bush's last 
days being a hemorrhaging of jobs, while Obama managed to at least 
stabilize things, are basically irrelevant to the process of deciding 
who the next Republican candidate is, or whether he will be elected."

The mans entire argument seemed to hinge in this being perfectly OK, 
nothing wrong with it, for the most part, and entirely irrelevant to the 
well being of the country. It was just how the right wing had to "sell" 
the problem to their ignorant, stupid, angry, and wanting things to get 
better, constituents. The fact that none of what was being sold to them 
can or will solve the problems, most of it is stuff that caused them in 
the first place, and that actually basing your policies of reality is 
*necessary* to fix things, where all meaningless. My jaw would have 
dropped, but it still hadn't receded from the floor from earlier, when 
Bachman claimed that people where still afraid of the rising power of 
the USSR (yeah, Soviet Russia), which she apparently failed to not the 
fall of, while working cleverly inside the IRS to undermine the federal 
tax system, before she decided to run for office some place else.

Fact is, most people don't want to know anything. Its inconvenient to do 
so. So, the end game of that is that what sells, i.e., what speaks to 
the gut at the time, matters, and silly things like facts, statistics, 
truth.. well, those just don't sell as well, so fewer people will listen 
to them. As long as people, "trust their gut", which has the brains of 
Homer Simpson...

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On 8/21/2011 3:16 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> What part of
>>>
>>> | U x V | = |U| * |V| * cos a
>>>
>>> do you *not* understand? :-P
>
>> Would be a lot simpler if the damn stuff you have to use it in
>> "understood" all that shit, natively. The problem I always run into is
>> that you can find a perfectly comprehensible form of something some
>> place, but it is only applicable is you a) do it by hand, or b) know how
>> to derive some completely bloody different set of equations, that the
>> damn computer will understand. Its like knowing, sort of, how to speak
>> some obscure Chinese dialect, but then finding out that you need to
>> *write* the information down in German, which for which the only work
>> you know is the one applying to yourself, Dummkopf.
>>
>> Well, not exactly the same case, but if you don't have all the other
>> stuff in between the two concepts, understanding what the math is doing
>> in the "human" version won't get you any closer to understanding how the
>> hell the computer needs to deal with it.
>
> I'm having difficulty following what you're trying to say here.
>
Just that, in such a case, the problem isn't just translating between 
languages, its knowing "which" of perhaps dozens of words might 
correctly convey the original details. You could, without a lot of 
problems, pick German words that muddle the meaning so badly its hard to 
work out what the original even meant. This is actually even more the 
case if you went from German to Chinese, since there is like a small 
handful, and one major, written form of it, but like I don't know how 
many dialects. Its the only language in the world where you write dog 
nearly the same way in every single case, but there are 20 ways to "say" 
it, some of them nothing at all alike.

If you don't know what the "intended" meaning is, i.e., the stuff in 
between, the result is going to end up being complete nonsense.

>> The original post in this, describing deriving the two equations needed
>> for Mandelbrot, from the original non-computer usable one, is a perfect
>> example. My reaction is, "Show the math, step by step, because WTF?" lol
>
> Yeah. All the textbooks advanced enough to talk about complex dynamical
> systems assume that you *already* know everything there is to know about
> complex numbers (a much less advanced topic, comparatively speaking).
>
> The first equation *is* useable in some software packages. But usually
> you need to expand out the real and imaginary parts seperately - a step
> which isn't mentioned anywhere and isn't described in any detail because
> it's presumed to be "obvious".
>
>
>
> I assume that was a rhetorical question, but I'll answer anyway...
>...

Uh.. Will go over that some time and try to work out what you did. lol 
Though, I could probably, based on the stuff he already gave, at least 
make an attempt at it without you having helped. I did get far enough in 
math to do some of that. I just am not sure I remember all the factoring 
and other stuff clearly enough to get it right.

But, yeah, exactly. If you don't know all the stuff "between", you won't 
get any place, other than confused.

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On 8/21/2011 3:58 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Vocal minority, plus a big non-vocal minority
That should have been "plus a big non-vocal majority".

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On 20/08/2011 03:43 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/20/2011 4:11, Warp wrote:
>> Drawing an accurate antialiased line (of certain width) is not a trivial
>> problem. Basically for each pixel you need to calculate how much of it is
>> covered by the line. Doing this accurately with integer math only can be
>> complicated.
>
> I am not sure you can do it accurately with integer math at all, given
> that there's a "portion of a pixel" involved in there somewhere. At best
> you'd be working in scaled fixed-point.

You realise that all of the quantities involved are rational, right? And 
that a rational number is just two integers?

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>> Nobody ever needs to compute the exact quotient of two 4-figure numbers
>> mentally. It's not necessary. You just need to be able to estimate the
>> answer with sufficient accuracy.
>
> True.
>
>> (Something which apparently a great
>> many people can't do for some reason...)
>
> Again true.

I hypothesize that this is due to their being far too much emphasis on 
memorising the algorithms for (say) computing a quotient, and far too 
little emphasis on getting a feel for what all the symbols *mean*, and 
*why* you manipulate them in this way.

>> Practising something you're going to need to do every single day of your
>> life is worth while. Practising something which you will never, ever
>> need to actually do is pointless.
>
> Well it surprises me that you never need to calculate something when you
> are away from some form of calculator.

It's not that I never need to calculate something. It's that I never 
need to calculate something to 6 figures. Usually I just need to 
estimate the answer. If I really do need an *exact* answer, I can use a 
calculator (given that there is *always* one in my pocket), or use 
pencil and paper if it matters that much.

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>> You just need to have a firm grasp of /how/ it works and /why/ it works.
>> Once you've got that, practising it on endless question sheets is just
>> an utter waste of time.
>
> Yes, but instead of a firm grasp of /how/ and /why/ it works, some
> people (and I guess they're the majority) need training to get a firm
> grasp of /how to/ actually do it - either because they never will get a
> firm enough grasp of the /how/ and /why/, or because they just don't
> give a shit.

It's a well-established fact that meaningful things are far easier to 
remember than meaningless things. Hence, if you understand why a 
procedure works, it's much easier to recall it.

This doesn't change the fact that some people don't give a damn about 
maths. Then again, when "maths" just means memorising a bunch of stuff 
for no other reason than "it's in the test", who can blame them?

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Am 22.08.2011 10:14, schrieb Invisible:
> On 20/08/2011 03:43 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> On 8/20/2011 4:11, Warp wrote:
>>> Drawing an accurate antialiased line (of certain width) is not a trivial
>>> problem. Basically for each pixel you need to calculate how much of
>>> it is
>>> covered by the line. Doing this accurately with integer math only can be
>>> complicated.
>>
>> I am not sure you can do it accurately with integer math at all, given
>> that there's a "portion of a pixel" involved in there somewhere. At best
>> you'd be working in scaled fixed-point.
>
> You realise that all of the quantities involved are rational, right? And
> that a rational number is just two integers?

But in the end you want to paint a pixel a particular color, which is a 
/single/ integer. That's where the precision you might be able to keep 
with rational representation ultimately breaks down.

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>>> I am not sure you can do it accurately with integer math at all, given
>>> that there's a "portion of a pixel" involved in there somewhere. At best
>>> you'd be working in scaled fixed-point.
>>
>> You realise that all of the quantities involved are rational, right? And
>> that a rational number is just two integers?
>
> But in the end you want to paint a pixel a particular color, which is a
> /single/ integer. That's where the precision you might be able to keep
> with rational representation ultimately breaks down.

That's where the precision with ANY POSSIBLE REPRESENTATION will break 
down. :-P

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>>> (Come to think of it, *all* of the networking stuff at college was done
>>> by Novel Netware. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...)
>>
>> They're still around.
>
> Novel is clearly still around. I meant Netware.

Netware, the OS, is pretty much gone.  Novell still sells its NDS 
(Novell Directory Services) and file servers, but they're now using 
Linux for the OS (SuSE, if I recall)


-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On 22/08/2011 01:35 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>>> (Come to think of it, *all* of the networking stuff at college was done
>>>> by Novel Netware. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...)
>>>
>>> They're still around.
>>
>> Novel is clearly still around. I meant Netware.
>
> Netware, the OS, is pretty much gone.

That's what I suspected.

> Novell still sells its NDS (Novell Directory Services) and file servers

Interesting...

> but they're now using Linux for the OS (SuSE, if I recall)

Yeah, that's the one.

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