[HN Gopher] The Making of a Prophet
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The Making of a Prophet
Author : Caiero
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-08-27 05:12 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| hamiltonians wrote:
| trim tab, more like flim flam
|
| Coming from a rich family helps, but today in tech and finance we
| see tons of successfull people from more modest means. i think
| times have changed and family wealth not as important.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| > i think times have changed and family wealth not as
| important.
|
| Tell that hundreds of millions of dalits in india (coupled with
| hundreds of millions of other lower castes) who never get a
| chance to have a proper education because of caste they were
| born in, and utter disregard for them by indian state.
|
| If you ever have/had colleagues from India, trust me they are
| not coming from some lower middle class or below. No chance in
| hell, maybe in 22nd century.
|
| And that's 1, albeit huge country.
|
| But sure if you limit it to cca 5% of the global population
| that represents US then its closer to true. In Europe, at least
| after WWII, we solved this for good (apart form pesky east
| during cold war where regime allegiance could make or break any
| talent or hard work, further east its unfortunately still
| valid)
| civilized wrote:
| The author obviously _really_ dislikes his subject, Buckminster
| Fuller, but even accounting for some personal bias, the guy does
| sound like a bit of an idiot:
|
| > he found the number pi distasteful. "I'd learned at school that
| in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ
| pi, and I'd also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how
| many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I
| reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn't use
| pi," reads his objection in a New Yorker profile.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| A bubble factors pi as it moves and deforms and reforms. Not in
| _decimal_ , not in a numerical base...in unary.
| nsajko wrote:
| What does "factor" even mean here?
|
| The unary base is only good for natural numbers (and
| isomorphic sets), right?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| It's an analog approximation of a sphere against the error
| induced by air motion, and gravity.
| dlivingston wrote:
| I'm not sure I totally get what you're saying - can you
| explain more?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| So a bubble is unary in that it represents pi with single
| molecules in a circle. Then, forces tug at it--like gravity
| a tiny bit, but moreso wind and especially the hyperlocal
| flow of air driven by eg temperature (and particle
| concentration) that want it to not be spherical. But the
| bubble membrane wants to be spherical because that's its
| most stable shape. Here we're thinking of big huge bubbles,
| those exemplify this more, bubbles like 20 cm in diameter.
| So it's a tug of war between the air and the bubble, with
| the air tending to infinitely deformed and therefore
| inescapably burst bubble and the bubble tending to pi.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think this is roughly equivalent to their point: Pi is a
| rational number, as long as you're in base-pi
| L_226 wrote:
| Pi is only irrational in base-10 (edit: yes and the rest of
| them, I know), if you use base-pi it's just "10". BAM!
| irrationality gone :)
|
| /s
| xcambar wrote:
| have there been been studies about non-integer bases? I guess
| so, but I'd be curious what kind of properties they have...
| especially with irrationals...
| ithkuil wrote:
| Well, we don't really know if nature/reality has an infinite
| precision. Perhaps you don't need an irrational Pi to compute
| everything up to maximum accuracy. That said, the irrational
| number Pi in its mathematical abstraction is extremely useful
| and just as "real" in its abstract mathematical domain.
|
| Not every step of math has to be mapped to something physically
| real in order to math to be useful to describe the real world.
|
| Imaginary numbers per se may not have a direct mapping to any
| physical magnitude, but complex numbers nevertheless are very
| useful to accurately describe real world phenomena. You just
| don't need to focus in the wrong detail and lose the bigger
| picture off sight.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Perhaps you don't need an irrational Pi to compute
| everything up to maximum accuracy
|
| "For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for
| interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's
| look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't
| use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there
| are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever
| perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many
| decimal points as you present."
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-
| decimal...
| civilized wrote:
| What's baffling to me is the idea that nature manipulates
| numbers but not irrational ones.
|
| This only makes sense if you assume nature must be a digital
| computer.
| Isamu wrote:
| There's a great book on Mathematical Cranks where one of the
| recurring themes is that the intuition must always be correct,
| and anything that seems counterintuitive is abhorrent and must
| be wrong.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| They must *hate* the Monty Hall Problem.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| I think this is an okay belief to have if you approach it
| from the bottom up instead of the top down. If something is
| counterintuitive, then you shouldn't write it off as a hacky
| asterisk in your head, you should improve your understanding
| of the domain in question so that it becomes intuitive.
| Isamu wrote:
| Agreed that intuition can be useful, same as making a guess
| or going with your "gut feeling".
|
| A crank turns that useful but possibly misleading thing
| into a crusade where truth is being suppressed by the
| establishment.
| sdwr wrote:
| Makes sense that he's best known for constructing spheres out
| of straight lines then.
| classified wrote:
| Not about the Prophet synthesizer. I am disappointed.
| rrr999 wrote:
| Reminds me of a lot of "prophets" today.
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