mrwiseandshine

[mrwiseandshine]

my friends don't play monopoly with me anymore because i invented swaps and used them to technically keep people in the game as long as possible while i effectively owned all their properties

[mrwiseandshine]

251024. Amused to death.

[mrwiseandshine]

Surely the word "exists", when applied to abstract concepts, just means something slightly different than when applied to material objects? It wouldn't be weird to ask whether an even prime "exists", and there is a definite answer in a given context. If an even prime exists, and is two, then two exists. But what we mean by an even prime existing is that it's coherent, or valid, not that it's tangible. And I think that applies to two itself even outside of this particular question. Two is coherent, therefore it exists. Circles exist. A non-trivial even prime doesn't exist. Abstract concepts interact fine with the concept of existence, they can exist or not exist. But despite the word matching and still being useful, it applies differently to tangible objects and abstract concepts.

i think fundamentally the relationship between sign and signified is "not that deep" EXCEPT that we are humans, who only know how to talk and think in signs. so it's important to us. like how we care a lot about medicine but a lot of medical stuff would be super boring if it wasnt instrumentally useful for curing disease. god, if he was real, would not care about the relationship between sign and signified. except in the way that we care about things animals care about, because we care about the animals, i guess

[mrwiseandshine]

i’ve never actually talked to 95% of my mutuals but that doesn’t stop me from automatically thinking “friend!!” whenever their icons pop up in my feed

[mrwiseandshine]

i have to have sympathy for the degrowth people. id want the economy to grow until every forest is cut low and the world is smothered in steel and concrete on purely aesthetic grounds even if it wasn't also clearly morally necessary. so we're kind of two sides of the same coin

[mrwiseandshine]

guy who’s running for office as a washington insider. enough with this folksy shit. he’s here to bring some much needed big-city transactionalism and insincere flattery to the house of representatives

[mrwiseandshine]

By reverse visuals

[mrwiseandshine]

[mrwiseandshine]

So there’s something called a ‘geodetic control point.’ These are used by surveyors to create accurate map measurements. There’s over a million in the United States, which the National Geodetic Survey uses to ensure the government’s maps are all accurate. It’s extremely important that these things are more accurate than any measurement you do on top of it, so they’re usually extremely stable markers. Most of the time it’s metal caps or rods buried in the ground

Washington D.C. has a couple of them, of course.

Next to the Washington Monument is a manhole cover in the grass.

That manhole does not lead to a sewer - it’s the top of a control point. But unlike most control points that are simple rods, this one is unique…

… for this control point is a mini replica of the Washington monument buried right next to the full size one.

[mrwiseandshine]

any serious thought reveals that music is the least art

[mrwiseandshine]

I've been doing some reading about flying aces, partly because of Dick Bong (who I already knew a fair amount about), and the Red Baron just reads like an anime villain:

Richthofen scored his first confirmed victory when he engaged Second Lieutenant Lionel Morris and his observer Tom Rees in the skies over Cambrai, France, on 17 September 1916. His autobiography states, "I honoured the fallen enemy by placing a stone on his beautiful grave." He contacted a jeweller in Berlin and ordered a silver cup engraved with the date and the type of enemy aircraft. He continued to celebrate each of his victories in the same manner until he had 60 cups, by which time the dwindling supply of silver in blockaded Germany meant that silver cups could no longer be supplied. Richthofen discontinued his orders at this stage, rather than accept cups made from base metal.

This is such rich characterization, a collection of silver cups, disgust at the idea that he can't have more cups because of a little thing like the war he's fighting in? It's so great.

He's got an autobiography, which was written shortly before his death at the end of World War I. That's actually really considerate of him, because it means that there's not a whole lot more to catch up on after finishing it. Of course, it was also written with the encouragement and censorship of a national propaganda department, so I'm not so sure it'll actually be illuminating, but it's free online, so I'm going to give it a shot. Can't be worse than Aldo Nadi's biography.

[mrwiseandshine]

turning of the leaves

[mrwiseandshine]

if the usa used a national civil service exam to staff the government, the problem would be the entire government would be chinese. this wasn’t a problem in china bc they were already chinese

[mrwiseandshine]

[mrwiseandshine]

I think it's pretty much just accurate to say that math as descended from Euclid and Ptolemy is part of the western philosophical tradition. There are just fewer forms of non-Euclidian geometry than forms of non-Aristotelian ethics, and it's much easier to select the right geometry for a given problem space. Logical validity has of course been invented multiple times and is often invoked outside of a philosophical framework, but it has a distinct position within that specific philosophical lineage, and clearly shows up alongside these other ideas because it was taught as part of the canon to all scholars in a broad region for many centuries.

Maybe this shouldn't surprise me, but it seems weird how.... continuous western mathematics is? Like, okay, we've got Galileo quoting specific theorems of Appolonius, whatever, it's the rennaissance, but, like... go back a few hundred years and you have islamic astronomy, and they're working from ptolemy right? Woah what, we have a copy of Appolonius in Alhazen's handwriting? Like there's this two thousand year period where people are referring to specific theorems from the same books. I guess that's no different than them referencing the same poems and stuff.

I guess what's also weird is that it seems like other civilizations got on fine without like... theorems and proofs? I guess this is a shallow impression, but what I've seen of traditional chinese mathematics looks sort of like the older western stuff like the rhind papyrus, like recipe books teaching by example. Like people talk about a "chinese remainder theorem" but what I've seen of the original text look like problem sets, rather than a proof that such problems always have a solution.

Western math in the sense of like theorems and proofs is weird because it resembles philosophy, but it's not really the same, but it also gets used by more "practical" people. And I guess we still have that today, where math and the quantitative sciences have this odd relationship to each other, where you have people that care primarily about proofs of generalities and other people that care primarily about getting the right answer in particular instances of problems, but they have a shared language and knowledge base

[mrwiseandshine]

If you scrape the data instead of just using Tumblr's notes count, you could calculate notes only from people who already follow you, and limit to one note per account per day or something. It would be lower totals, but it would also provide for more interesting game theory if "externally viral" posts aren't counted.

Your mobile blog should have minigames so I don't get bored and go look at something else

let's turn this blog into a casino

[mrwiseandshine]

☁ a fluffy pixel art sky ☁

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