Isaiah 58:6 describes Linux well: “… to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke…”
C4C Linux is not the first ‘Christian’ distro… I don’t know if it is still around or not, but I remember the release of “Jesux”, I think some time in the 90’s… Among other things it replaced (renamed) “demon processes” with “angels” and went through the kernel source comments and cleaned up the kernel dev’'s use of obscenity to describe various bits of code…
I do give the Aussies credit for some good ideas though, I remember a film from a while back about “The Man Who Sued God” - wonderful legal theory, I’d love to see someone put it to the test in a real court…
ex-Gooserider
Well, whether he is or not – I just realise, that some people have communication issues, which vary. Often, communication issues result in unpleasent behaviour, which is unintentional. The biggest problem is not that, but that normal people do not understand that. They simply do not understand, that having communication issues can result in your behaviour seeming mean/evil/intolerant/whatever…
That said, not only the classical autism explanations would be necessary to explain communication issues like these. For example, only few people know, that a symptom of depression or anxiety (especially when both are combined) can lead to frequent outbursts of anger, intolerance and all the meanie meanie meanness, which normal people hate so much, leading to them calling such people “bad” or “mean” or “jerk” or whatever.
I personally know people with depression and anxiety. Some of them were my partners in my life.
The one with the heaviest depression was the one with the most “intolerant” and “mean” attitude of all. It didn’t bother me too much, because I knew the reasons, but every time someone normal spoke to that person, they felt uncomfortable, whenever an emotional red point was hit, unintentionally.
So, all in all, I wish for normal people to be a bit more chill about “mean” behaviour and think twice before calling mean people “jerks” or whatever. I’ve talked about Xah Lee a couple of times on this forum.
He’s a genius in his own right. He has vast amounts of knowledge and is certainly not “normal”. Which is great.
However, I deplore how people reacted to him over the years and decades. He has been called a “troll”, “jerk”, “idiot”, “moron”, etc. countless times in his life. Why? Because people don’t get, that his way of conversation is different and that you have to understand, that you cannot compare his way of communication to the most generic every-day-man’s way.
Just because he sometimes sounds mean or aggressive, that does not mean it’s meant literally like that. Sure, he is angry about stuff, but he doesn’t want to harm people in any way. He is not “evil”.
He just wants to make things better, in all honesty.
I wish, normal people would get that and try to get along with abnormal people, like Xah Lee, Linus (I don’t know him, but I assume he is OK), us. We are definitely neither the most nicest people and most social people on earth. I think that’s fine.
(To be honest, I hate people being too nice… 
It’s really annoying and reeks of ass kissing. Hate that.)
My message to everyone:
Do not assume the worst of people. Do assume the best, if you don’t know better!
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Thank you for giving me the opportunity to finally rant about what has sitting in the back of my head a long time…
First of all, I hate that most people think that daemon and demon is the same thing. It’s not!
Demon is what people think it is. An evil creature, originally sent by the devil. Okay, fine.
But
DAEMON
is different. Don’t swallow the A. A daemon is originally the voice, the inner self, the conscious in the back of your head. It’s the voice, that tells you what you should not do, if you are about to do something evil, for example.
There are many interpretations of that, but all interpretations share the idea, that it is not related to evil creatures originally sent by the devil.
So, a daemon process is something running in the background, not obvious to the eye, except you explicitly look at the process table, checking out the background (daemon) processes.
Conclusively, if those Jesux morons really renamed anything from daemon to angel, then they were dumb as fuck.
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Not sure what that has to do with Australia, I have a vague recollection of a movie with Billy Connolly, who’s only Autralian by way of marriage to Pamela Stephenson, who’s not really even Australia, she’s a Kiwi, like Russell Crowe, and Sam Neill…
Well at least some of the characters in the movie had what sounded to me like Australian accents, and I think the courtroom scenes were in an Australian style court - at least it was definitely not a US court… I definitely got the impression that it was Australian…
At any rate it was a fun concept - If bad stuff happens, and the insurance companies won’t pay because they say it was ‘An act of God’ then God must be liable for the damage he caused… It is longstanding legal principle that if you can’t serve papers on a person, you can serve them on his appointed representative… Arguably the one thing organized religions all have in common is that they declare themselves to be the representatives of God…
Will leave it at that to avoid spoilers, but it’s a neat movie.
ex-Gooserider
Damn - it was an Australian movie! I stand corrected! Billy Connolly sure, but the rest is Aussie… Will have to check it out… Love some Aussie movies like :
The Castle
The Dish
Chopper
Two Hands
Judy and Punch
Goldstone
nearly ALL of the Mad Max movies except that atrocious pile of crap Thunderdome
The Proposition
Idiot Box
The Big Steal
Breaker Morant
Walkabout
Stone
@Mina
This business of sequences in pi seems to ignore the point that each digit is a successive approximation so that
3 + .1 + .04 + .001 …
approaches pi asymptotically.
It is just a property of the way we choose to write decimal numbers.
To me it is not surprising that there is no meaning in the succesive digits, and that if you follow the series long enough you can find any combination, even exceedingly long combinations like the human genome.
Maths can sometimes hover over some exceedingly obscure concepts, while giving no indication of what they are used for.
Regards
Neville
Actually, in Math we don’t care too much about what things can be used for.
yes and no
It might well be that some finite subsequences don’t appear in a certain irrational number. Consider e.g. the number: 1.01100111000111100001… This is an irrational number, and yet it exhibits observable patterns.
Other representations of irrational numbers which are independent of the chosen number system are continued fractions.
An example is e.g. the representation of Euler’s number e:
Another the golden ratio Φ:
In this representation, both numbers exhibit very regular patterns.
Now, check out π:
Seems to be a different story, right?
However, there are infinitely many representations of irrational numbers as infinite fractions.
The search for patterns is one of the areas where Maths and Computer Science touch.
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There is such a thing as Applied Math.
I am struggling at the moment learning to use Julia language. Lots of practice works. Reading the Julia manual brings back memories of first year Abstract Algebra at Uni. … seemingly endless lists of definitions of entities with no indication of what they were for.
It is just bad presentation. Julia needs some creative writers. There is no book like Kernigan and Ritchie for Julia…
I love your reply, and I respect your Pure Math. Just never made it there myself.
Regards
Neville
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Perhaps @Akito can recommend a good book for Julia. As far as I know, he’s pretty good at it.
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Do you know if repeating patterns of digits are related to the chaos phenomenon of attractors?
A very interesting thread, remarkable for the range, breadth, and depth of the thoughts percolating in the brains of some of our most helpful and thoughtful contributors.
As a mere Linux user, I read and marvel but can’t contribute anything more but my admiration.
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This here, was my biggest problem, and frustration, with mathematics when I was in school, especially high school and all that tangents and cosines stuff, hypotenuses - and logarithms, blah blah blah… and whole bits and pieces that seemed exceedingly abstract and removed from the day to day… I was actually quite good at basic maths like integer and decimal basics, but all the rest? I never covered “calculus” in school, thank goodness, I’m sure it would have driven me batty!*
It wasn’t till I got OUT OF the HELL of high school, I learned some fascinating stuff, like the Fibonacci sequence and logarithms in nature, like spirals, and fractals and stuff… WHY DIDN’T THEY TEACH LIKE THAT? Show me what the FUCK a FUCKING logarithm can do, and I might learn… I NEVER EVER EVER got the point of being given a set of numbers, then looking that up in the table of logarithms… WHY not SHOW an example FFS? No! No we can’t do that, because then you might get interested - you MUST BE BORED BY THIS POINTLESS ABSTRACT BULLSHIT!
Show me a PRACTICAL use, or somehow, somewhere it’s used, an example in nature, and I will be interested…
It seemed to me, the who point of teaching of mathematics was TO BORE and DETER students… We don’t want you to understand, we just want you to be a DUMB PROCESSING COMPUTATION DEVICE that KNOWS the FUCKING ALGORITHMS 
* I still to this day, have NO IDEA what calculus even is… I guess that’s a shame, as Newton’s and Liebnitz (simultaneous) development of calculus, is a major theme in the Baroque trilogy of Neal Stephenson’s - one of my all time favourite works of literature… All those equations with greek symbols look like gobbledy gook to me…
** I did have a fairly disruptive schooling, and missed two years of primary / grade school, 5 different primary schools across three states, 4 different high schools across 2 states (two times - i.e. West Australia, then Victoria, then back to West Australia).
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Exactly. I did lots of maths at school,and Uni, but never got enthused until I needed it - to work out how to analyse some data in my postgrad work. Then it clicked and I went back and restudied stuff with a new attitude. Today I actually enjoy a bit of maths
Music used to be considered part of maths. You like music. Read about fractals in relation to music. The sequences of notes in music are neither completeltely random, nor highly correlated, they are in between, ie fractal
It would seem our education system has it upside down. Tbe motivation to learn comes long after the opportunity to learn at school.
Chesterton had it right
“They cant tell us what good is, but they want to teach it to our children”
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Literally describes my teenagehood. I cannot relate enough. This is a 100% description of the time I had with mathematics in any school below university, etc.
I remember even going to my teacher and asking whether we would learn something interesting, like for example, the Fibonacci sequence. It seemed just as useful as any other thing taught in maths, but at least it was interesting and pupils would’ve listened.
After receiving a big fat “no” on that one, I had lost hope altogether. (To be honest, I had no hope related to maths to begin with.)
Now, that I look back I can smile about that time, but back then it felt like literal hell on earth.
I can smile, when I remember EVERY SINGLE TIME a pupil asked for reasons of using something mathematical or how something mathematical would be used in actual real life, there was NO sufficient answer, at all! Sometimes, even the teachers themselves admitted that some things literally had no real life purpose beyond using it in a closed room for research or doing advanced math stuff. So, basically doing math, for the sake of math.
Then, when the average scoring among all pupils was really low, sometimes so low the teacher could get in trouble for being incompetent (teachers need to hit certain average grades, or they are doing something wrong), the same teachers waving off every purpose and reason to learn any math were raging about the test results and wondering how on earth those humans who see no purpose in educating themselves regarding the topic of math are not interested at all in the topic and therefore have bad grades in it. Well, what a surprise!
I can also smile, when I remember that one lesson, when the teacher explained something about zero not always being zero (don’t remember the exact topic). This was the one time I actually was interested and showed interest (for once). Once that was made clear, the teacher interrupted the explanation with something like “…well, but this is getting philosophical and we are here to do maths…”.
Now, when I look back, I realise that a lot of problems were arising from the fact that lots of math teachers are unpopular due to their behaviour. For example, in the school these examples were taken from, all the teachers being remotely related to math, were extremely unpopular and “bad teachers” in a way. Just “bad” like, they were so unlikable, they weren’t able to charismatically make people listen out of interest, at all.
Still, it was hell on earth. I believed that, if a devil really existed, he created mathematics to torture children and teenagers.
I think, the biggest problem with mathematics is, that it is purely part of liberal arts and yet it meddles with basically every real world actually useful natural and applied science. It’s like – what do you want? Be theoretical or do you want to help build real life? If you want to build real life, then start behaving like you are helpful to that!
Of course, if more mathematics teachers would actually know how to teach and give examples where math is useful, then pupils would actually start to listen. But if every teacher honk head is just going like “nope, just learn this; you have to, because you have to and the reason is, I say so, so deal with it”, then of course pupils won’t ever listen or remotely enjoy the topic, except those ultimate freaks who actually enjoy mathematics in high school. How…
P.S.:
A study showed that young pupils anticipating mathematical exercises were able to feel actual pain. So, just thinking about mathematics may cause bodily pain.
Pretty much how it went for me. Once you understand the purpose, it’s much easier to get into it.
In my case, the real clicking went off when I saw actual real life hard facts that showed how proper mathematical algorithms can improve the performance and efficiency of software. This was enlightening. Finally, I had found an actual use!
However, just learning it for the sake of nothing is mind numbing and feels like literal torture.
Perhaps, Albert Camus would be a fan of this, but I’m no Albert Camus.
I’ll use two examples that happened to me at the same school in the same year…
Start the school year at a new school in a new state… I was always wary of maths, so opted for the BOTTOM skill level class…
The teacher was a really nice bloke, a Seppo (rhyming slang, Seppo = Septic, “septic tank” rhymes with Yank) - no idea if he was from the actual USA, or Canada…
Anyway - he was shocked to learn that maybe 3/4 of the kids in this class did not know their timestables - myself included. I had a somewhat interrupted, and disruptive schooling. My first two years of school, was by nuns and they were UTTERLY USELESS! I never even learned the alphabet until watching Sesame St as a 10 year old… And I missed two years of grade school too (never did Grade 4 or 5).
Anyway - the Seppo teacher came up with some kinda “cue card” system that all of us had to undergo to learn our timestables, and this to me seemed a good, practical thing, it was handy to just KNOW that 7x7=49 - don’t even have to calculate it: like a math copressor for small integer multiplication and division… Great… I actually learned my timestables at the age of 14! Bonus!
Second semester that year - I turn up and that BRILLIANT and charismatic and encouraging and motivational Seppo teacher had been replaced with a dry deadpan deadshit pommie (Aussie term for The English) bastard… Guess what he plonked us into, after 3/4 of us had only just learned our timestables in Semester 1? Exponential notation! He also expected EVERY kid in that class to be able, mentally, multiply or divide any two numbers that ended in “25”, e.g. 300345435325 x 948343425… I really fuckin’ hated that teacher… he used to drive an old London Taxi (in Melbourne) and I hated him so much, I used to let his tyres down… Not only that - I actually ended up wagging (wagging is another Aussie term for playing hooky or going “truant”) that class and others, but mostly just that class…
I still don’t understand, or I’m unable to read, exponential notation, e.g. when a spreadsheet app does it - I end up dragging the column width “wider” so I can see the number WITHOUT the fucking exponential notation! And sometimes I go into formatting and set it to display commas too, if it’s a really big number…
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That reminds me of how sometimes the teachers thought that someone is just “too lazy” or “not focused” enough or something. When in fact it was a mix of lack of interest and bad teaching. The lack of interest mostly caused by the bad teaching practices to begin with…
“It’s so easy!”. Yeah, I wish I would go back to the same teachers and give them some programming exercise with a non-functional language and then say “it’s so easy!!!”. That would feel so right.
Yes, it does not make much sense. Things like incomplete mathematic exercises are fine for when that piece of math is given as input to any type of computer. However, I do not see much purpose in showing this to a user in a UI. It’s already hard enough for humans to imagine a number like 234098342908 – do not make it even harder by compressing the view of that number…