PZ, Bora, Orac, John, and others have all put up posts about a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years. As the reigning Geek-Lord of ScienceBlogs, I figured that I had to weigh in as well. Here’s the list: the one’s that I’ve read are bold-faced.
In math and computer science, we have a tendency to talk about “going meta”. It’s actually a
pretty simple idea, which tends to crop up in other places, as well. It’s also one of my favorite concepts – the idea of going meta is just plain cool. (Not to mention useful. There’s a running joke among computer scientists that the solution to any problem is to add a level of indirection – which is programmer-speak for going meta on constructs inside of a programming language. Object-orientation is, in some sense, just an example of how to go meta on procedures. Haskell type-classes are an example of going meta on types.)
Going meta basically means taking a step back, and instead of talking about some subject X, you talk about talking about X.
This isn’t really math, but I can’t resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another “news” site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny:
If You Have Laws, Don’t You Have to Have Punish Lawbreakers?
Robert CrowtherThe Advocate today gives a big hip-hip-hooray for Darwin’s “process.” They worry that the public doesn’t accept Darwinian evolutionary claims to explain the complex diversity of life and the universe. Must be that they just don’t understand. Their solution?
Perhaps the “law of evolution” would be more easily understood by the public than the “theory” of evolution.
It’s interesting that evolution is so solid, so proven, that it will only survive if it is declared a law. When evolution is the law of the land, what will happen then to those who dissent?
Yeah. The reason for talking about the law of evolution is so that we can throw anyone who disagrees with it in jail. Just like we do with the law of gravity, or the laws of thermodynamics.
I just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for a whole year! I managed to miss the actual
anniversary, which was on thursday. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing it for a full year.
When I started Good Math/Bad Math on Blogger, I honestly believed that I’d probably last a couple
of weeks; maybe a month at best. And I didn’t expect to find a lot of readers – my best guess was
that I’d be lucky if I got a couple of dozen readers a day. After all – what I write about is math – in particular, mostly extremely abstract math. Not exactly something that I expected a lot of people to be interested in.
And now, a year later, I’m part of the ScienceBlogs community. I’ve posted close to 500 articles since the blog started, and I’m averaging 3,000 pageviews per day. Absolutely unbelievable!
So I’d like to say thank you to all of you who’ve been reading and commenting. Writing GM/BM has been more fun and more rewarding than I could have imagined, and that’s mainly due to all of you who read, comment, and send links. Thanks for reading, and thanks for letting my share my love and enthusiasm for math with all of you.
I’d also like to say a particular thank you to my friend Orac. It was Respectful Insolence that inspired me to start my own blog, and Orac was the first blog to link to GM/BM, providing me with that first burst of readers that really got things rolling. So many, many thanks to you, Orac.
Here’s hoping that I can keep this going for many more years!
The third edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is out: this time around, it’s hosted at
Michi’s Place.
The next edition will be up in two weeks at my fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog.
For today’s installation of programming insanity, I decided to go with a relative of Thue, which is one of my favorite languages insane languages that I wrote about before. Thue is a language based on a rewriting system specified by a semi-Thue grammar. Todays language is called Thutu (pronounced tutu); it’s a string rewriting system like Thue, only it’s based on regular expressions instead of grammars, and it’s even got regular expression-based control flow mechanisms, making it a sort of hybrid language.
The scary thing about Thutu is that it’s not all that different from a language I’ve wanted to find some time to write myself – except that the one I want to write isn’t intended to be pathological. I’ve never stopped missing Teco for writing text processing programs; and since
my TECO programs tended to be roughly of the form: “Find something matching this pattern, and then take this action”, a regular-expression based language would make a lot of sense.
But anyway, today we’re looking at Thutu, which is a deliberately obscure version of this idea.
As promised, another review of a childrens math book. Tonight, my daughter and I read “Rabbits, Rabbits, Everywhere: a Fibonacci Tale” by Ann McCallum.
This time, I have absolutely no complaints. “Rabbits” is a beautifully told story, with delightful artwork, which makes the basic idea of the Fibonacci series understandable to a first grader. It’s a wonderful book, which I recommend absolutely without reservation. If you have a child around 1st grade age, buy this book.
Today’s basics topic was suggested to me by reading a crackpot rant sent to me by a reader. I’ll deal with said crackpot in a different post when I have time. But in the meantime, let’s take a look at axioms.
One thing that comes up a lot in homology is the idea of simplices and simplicial complexes. They’re interesting in their own right, and they’re one more thing that we can talk about
that will help make understanding the homology and the homological chain complexes easier when we get to them.
A simplex is a member of an interesting family of filled geometric figures. Basically, a simplex is an N-dimensional analogue of a triangle. So a 1-simplex is a line-segment; a 2-simplex is a triangle; a three simplex is a tetrahedron; a four-simplex is a pentachoron. (That cool image to the right is a projection of a rotating pentachoron from wikipedia.) If the lengths of the sides of the simplex are equal, it’s called a regular simplex.
So… Remember George Shollenberger? He’s the goofball who wrote a book allegedly containing the First Scientific Proof of God, which I dealt with here
and here.
Well, George has been continuing to babble away. He’s got his blog – and he continues to comment on a nearly daily basis on Amazon.com’s page for his book. In a particularly fascinating update, he speculates about why no one has posted any reviews of his book:
This book has now been on the market for six months. Its rank has oscillated monthly from a low rank to a popular rank. But, it has never been reviewed at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. Although I tried to simplify the contents, it seems apparent that the book’s unification of Science and Theology has made the book more difficult to understand. More recently, I have come to the conclusion that the absences of reviews are reflecting the awareness of the reader’s general acceptance of the book and their awareness of the potential major changes that could affect all humans, many business and industry, all governments, and the behavior of political and justice systems.
So, instead of sharing thoughts about the book through open reviews of the book on the Internet, I conclude that the thoughts of many readers about the book are being secured privately so that individuals and organizations can survive the potential changes. Clearly, the scientific proof of God will affect the whole world. This proof can expect to develop to a single worldwide religion, a virtual one-world government, and the worldwide sharing of natural resources. And, how will each individual handle the modern ideas of resurrection and reincarnation?
I also recognize that atheists are currently selling their best selling books For instance, the books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc. are currently bestsellers for the book market for people who do not believe in God. For this reason, the publishers of these books do not want to open up a debate on my book with the best selling atheistic books now. So, any debate between atheists and theists is being delayed until this atheistic market is served. But, as you see in my Amazon.com blog of my book, I am preparing for this debate. With this blogging effort, I expect to reduce the market of atheistic books drastically.
Since the way individuals and organizations might handle this book was not predictable by me, I believe that this book will be compared with science books and scriptures for years.
Via some Pandas Thumb folks, I just heard that there’s a free copy of his book available. It’s a discard from the library of congress. You see, the way that the LoC works is that they receive a huge number of books every year. Most publishers send the LoC a copy of any book they publish; and virtually all sleezy self-publishing agencies support their false claim to be legit publishers by talking about how their publications are included in the collection of the LoC. So the LoC gets millions of books every year, most of which are garbage. So they periodically go through the slag heap, junking some of the worthless crap to make room for more of the worthless crap that they’re receiving every day. Part of the way that they recognize the junk is: if the book is never removed from its shelf during the first year at the library, it goes in the trash.
George’s book – the book that that is, according to George, one of the most important things ever published – is being thrown in the trash by the LoC because since they received it, no one has removed it from the shelf. Not once.
The book that’s going to single-handedly diminish the market for “pro-atheist” books, that’s going to trigger the creation of a single world-wide universal religion, that’s going to reinvigorate every major field of study from mathematics to nutrition – has never been looked at since it was received by the Library of Congress, and so they’re throwing it into the trash.
I suppose that George can still hope for it to reinvigorate the science of waste disposal.