oqmemphis

[oqmemphis]

im a bit of a pointless hater about certain usages of the term “monsterfucker” bc i think it’s often one of those things people say but don’t believe with their whole chest. like if all the “monsters” you like are vampires and similar mopey human-looking folks it’s possible you are actually just into goths. Let’s not dilute the beautiful world of teratophilia for our bloodborne sex soldiers out there fucking and sucking in yharnam or whatever. Anyone on earth would fuck a vampire. that’s vanilla

[oqmemphis]

#“hey check out these sketches”#*black linework on a charcoal-grey background*

...i mean.

Sometimes you can really tell that a digital artist is working on a monitor or tablet with very non-standard brightness and contrast settings.

[oqmemphis]

i love making spreadsheets. the only problem with making spreadsheets is that i don't have enough things to turn into spreadsheets. the spreadsheet market is in shambles. but i can't just ask people if i'm allowed to make them spreadsheets, because if you go up to someone and go can i make you a spreadsheet they go literally why would you do that. but Sometimes you can social engineer your way into making a spreadsheet for someone and that's the most beautiful feeling in the world.

[oqmemphis]

For the UK peeps!!

[oqmemphis]

John Gabriel and Mathematical Ignorance

Have you ever watched a flat earth conspiracy video? If not, the usual format is pretty straightforward: the presenter rambles, unscripted and unedited, into a cheap microphone while using some shitty screen recording software to film themselves drawing lines on top of random jpegs in paint.net for five to ten minutes, before sitting back and proudly claiming that their unmatched genius has proven all human knowledge from the last several millennia to be hopelessly fraudulent.

John Gabriel is a flat earther for mathematics.

Mr. Gabriel writes and speaks at great length about an invention which he calls "the New Calculus", a theory most briefly described as an attempt to reformulate all of mathematics starting from (what he perceives to be) the base principles used by the Ancient Greeks. He believes that mathematics as a field of study has been practiced almost exclusively by idiots for approximately the last two thousand years, or nine hundred, or a hundred and fifty (the exact time at which things went to shit seems to vary a lot; he rejects much of Euler and Fermat, but also calls Cantor "the father of all cranks") and claims that only he can understand numbers "properly".

Whenever a popular maths YouTube channel makes a video about infinity (see Numberphile on -1/12 or Vsauce on transfinite ordinals), there are inevitably people in the comments arguing that the video's premise is misleading, wrong, unnecessary or incoherent, or that the concept of doing mathematics with infinite sets is fundamentally invalid. Mr. Gabriel takes this finitist view to its logical extreme.

In his 152-page tirade against modern academia, he argues that any "infinite process" is outright unmathematical and should not be allowed; his definition of "infinite process" includes convergent limits, such as the unending decimal expansion required to express irrational numbers. A significant basis of his work is that irrationals like π and √2 are not numbers, but rather "constants" or "incommensurable magnitudes". Why this is a useful distinction, given that these "constants" behave like numbers in nearly every regard, is never explained. He additionally claims that 0 is not only not a number, but is "not even required at all in mathematics". He spends the entire first half of the book re-deriving all of arithmetic and algebra based entirely on principles of Euclidean geometry, while repeating, mantra-like, that only integer ratios are numbers and that anyone who claims otherwise is an ignorant buffoon. I wonder if he writes RPF of himself throwing Hippasus into the sea.

He has then taken this idiosyncratic worldview as a starting point from which to reinvent calculus.

He is straightforwardly wrong.

Mr. Gabriel frequently complains that his critics mindlessly hurl insults at him without seriously engaging with his work, so as a show of absurdly generous good faith I will engage with it now. Any fellow masochists reading this are invited to take a look at Mr. Gabriel's manuscript - specifically his demonstration of how to take a derivative without the use of limits - and try and figure out where the problem is.

Ignoring Mr. Gabriel's apparent inability to find the subscript button in Microsoft Word, he has taken an nth-degree polynomial (which could contain many terms), and transformed it into a single term of degree n-1. This, you will be astounded to learn, is not the correct result when taking the derivative of anything more complicated than f(x) = x^p. Notably, he never attempts to do this.

In fairness, the above demonstration is not actually the New Calculus. Mr. Gabriel explains that he has helpfully preceded his earth-shattering revelations with a less rigorous, more geometrically-derived formulation. I'm sure we'll get some real mathematics in a minute.

What we get is him complaining that the Encyclopaedia Britannica does not provide sufficient intuition for the work of Newton and Leibniz, before claiming that his New Calculus is "the first and only rigorous formulation of calculus in human history". He uses this exact phrasing (or nearly) at least four other times in his PDF; if he is unhappy with the Britannica, I might politely advise him to try reading Roget's Thesaurus instead.

Finally, on page 120 of 152, we are given an explanation of the epiphany to which the entire monograph has been building.

"Left as an exercise for the reader" is a phrase used by cowards (and to his credit, John Gabriel is not a coward), so I will point out the slight issue here: it is not possible to calculate values for m and n unless you already know the tangent slope. In his example of how to compute the derivative of sin(x), he expresses the function in its Taylor series form (so much for shunning infinite summations), and then simply replaces said series with the one for cos(x) without comment; he then manages to successfully determine his secant intersection values, and then calculates the value of the derivative function he just shoved into his pile of equations a few lines further up. Thus, his bafflingly circular logic is enabled almost invisibly.

This is it. This is all that this book is. John Gabriel's magnum opus, the thing he has been building up to for 119 pages amid paragraphs of bluster about the idiocy of irrationals and his own vaunted genius, is the ability to compute the derivative of a function as long as you know the derivative of the function. And as long as that derivative is not a zero found at one of the function's inflection points, because apparently that doesn't count as drawing a tangent line (for reasons that I'm sure are unrelated to the fact that Mr. Gabriel's secant method fails for such points).

I don't want to go deep into personal insults here - that's John Gabriel's job - but this is not useful mathematics. The logic is circular, the motivation is worthless, and it enables no new insights not already achievable with the current mainstream understanding of calculus. No statement is proven that has not already been shown to be true within the framework of Newton and Leibniz; there are only restatements of existing theorems based on the shaky-at-best logic of these new principles. So what is it for?

This is a question I kept coming back to while reading Mr. Gabriel's PDF. What is this for? What is gained by stubbornly insisting that π and e are not numbers, but rather "constants of incommensurate magnitude"? How does rejecting the usual definition of division as a multiplicative inverse in favour of some guff about "measuring in equal parts of an abstract unit" expand the horizons of mathematical knowledge? Of course, it doesn't.

John Gabriel, ultimately, is not important. There are thousands of other flat-earthers and similar grifters just as laughable as him, and to my knowledge there is roughly nobody who takes him seriously. (And if anyone does, the chance of some random guy on Tumblr convincing them otherwise is vanishingly small.) But I find his writing fascinating precisely because of the way in which he is wrong. He seems firmly rooted in the idea that mathematics is all discovery and no invention; that we can derive mathematical truths out of absolutely nothing. He rejects the notion of logical axioms as a starting point for derivation, instead seeking answers grounded in reality (by proxy, via "pure geometry"), and he is incensed when people ignore his demands.

But mathematics is not physics. Mathematical objects don't exist independent of their definitions, but they do exist independent of the real world. The rules of mathematics are defined by mathematicians only; if we want π to be a number, all we have to do is say "let π qualify as a number"; if we want to define an infinite sum as being equal to its limit, we can. If the rules disallow something, nobody can stop us picking different rules, reality be damned. John Gabriel has in fact done this too, even if he doesn't realise it - it's just that his starting axiom around which the rest of his theory is based is "I am the greatest mathematician in the world, and everyone who has come before me is a moron". I do not exaggerate when I say this; a pinned comment under one of his recent videos reads:

I, the GREAT JOHN GABRIEL explained why calculus works and I defined NUMBER correctly for the FIRST TIME in human history. For this, I am called a crank by your ignorant, incompetent and incorrigibly stupid mainstream math professors and teachers. I shall keep reminding students of your venom and your hatefulness towards me. You are vile, disgusting excuses for human beings. The longer you deny me as the greatest mathematician, the more shit will accumulate in your diapers.

If Mr. Gabriel objects to logical premises that are rooted in fiction, I have some suggestions for ideas he might want to discard.

[oqmemphis]

I love going insane shoutout to late night puzzle solving in the canonexus server to decode something @oqmemphis hid in their big ol’ timeline chart

Deciphering the poem’s meaning is a work in progress but what we HAVE figured out is. Ohoghogohhh

[oqmemphis]

does this complexity extend infinitely in both directions, or is there a meaningful definition of a lowest-order angel? and if so what is that

what about the angels in enochian magic? are they sentient?

Enochian angels have a sort of nested fractal intelligence. Like, a second-order angel is made of the seven angels below it, a third-order angel is made of seven second-order angels and so on.

They're also mutually transcendent and ineffable, but only in one direction. Angel'2 knows what it's like to be an Angel'1, and experiences everything it's lower order angels feel.

Additionally, an angel'2 knows that it is a part of an angel'3, but it cannot concieve of what being an angel'3 feels like.

[oqmemphis]

Not even remotely what I'm looking for but thanks anyway Google.

[oqmemphis]

dr who’s on first, doctor strange is on second and doctor house is on third. theres no way theyre getting through a single inning

[oqmemphis]

this is easier than you think: the 'Til Death Do Us Blart podcast features the McElroys and Taskmaster NZ contestant Guy Montgomery

there is an overlap between taskmaster, game changer, and jet lag the game that i cannot articulate but they exist like a venn diagram in a corset that turns itself into a circle to me

[oqmemphis]

[oqmemphis]

New dino article hath dropped! Its space time fuckery, geology, a sprinkle of lesbians, and was made as a gift in the 2024 Art Exchange! Enjoy :}

[oqmemphis]

his name is Yusuke Iseya, licenseboxes are your friend folks

who tf is the faceclaim for ryoto hishakaku i know someone said it but who the fuck IS HE

.

[oqmemphis]

rb to have a super gay 2023

[oqmemphis]

the thing i love about tumblr is that it's completely impossible to tell whether this is comedic microfiction parodying the general concept of hellsite discourse, or a colourful retelling of an actual news story that's just far removed enough from reality to be unrecognisable as such

the potion seller discourse is insane. cop walks into a chemist's lab and demands pure undiluted morphine. chemist says hey i don't make this for human consumption. cop insists repeatedly, crying, shitting himself. in no way is the potion seller in the wrong here.

[oqmemphis]

plot devices