Programmer, math dabbler, he/him
Joined: 2022-11-19
Bluesky mirror of these posts:
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2024-11-26 mattmcirvin ┃ 1👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @AMS This was the big problem I had moderating sci.physics.research back in Usenet days. Our charter made it basically impossible to permaban somebody and I felt compelled to give […]
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2024-11-24 mattmcirvin ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird and when they start building civilizations, that's when you see faces. But they're always portraits of the big leaders and gods, at first. The face as a representation of power.
2024-11-24 mattmcirvin ┃ edited ┃ 1👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @neonsnake The Tower of London has been a tourist attraction for most of its history. For centuries one of its major functions was as a zoo-- the Royal Bestiary was kept there, and […]
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2024-11-23 mattmcirvin ┃ 1👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @FlockOfCats Exponential growth comes from geometric growth, that is, you add an increment that's proportional in size to the thing itself. Take the continuous limit, and you get […]
2024-11-23 mattmcirvin ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird I've just internalized that e^ix is a helix, sin and cos are its shadows on coordinate planes
2024-11-23 mattmcirvin ┃ 1👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @jturiano Capitalism seems to be good specifically at creating a wide variety of *consumer goods*.
There's a cost associated with that, of course--lots of waste, exploitation and […]
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2024-11-22 mattmcirvin ┃ 2👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @adriano @blbc Lewis Carroll's paradox seems to insist that even when there is a bottom, there is no bottom, and I've never been able to decide whether it is a legitimate problem or […]
2024-11-22 mattmcirvin ┃ 1👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @rysiek There are a bunch of "rhetorical fallacies" that are false when taken as statements about logical implication but that I've always thought appeal to us because they resemble […]
2024-11-22 mattmcirvin ┃ 1💬 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird Partial fraction expansions in calculus. I have to look up how to do them every time and my intuition for what was going on was never strong. These days it is easier to lean on a […]
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2024-11-19 mattmcirvin ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird The "Lebesgue integral" sounds like a high-end grill with special cookbooks that go with it and a strange cult following.
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2024-11-17 mattmcirvin ┃ 1💬 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird "no mods no masters" reminds me of 1990s Usenet, most of which prided itself on being this moderation-free Wild West where the playing field was level and any discussion was fair […]
2024-11-17 mattmcirvin ┃ 3👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @DaleHagglund @Jirikiha @whknott I think it's the orthogenetic focus of the US secondary mathematics curriculum in which classes are thought of as a road leading to calculus as the […]
2024-11-17 mattmcirvin ┃ 3👤 ┃ RE: futurebird
@futurebird @JorgeStolfi @dymaxion @whknott I think that all the way back to at least Leibniz there was this idea that you might be able to automate the general search for truth by reducing it […]
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