= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
First Clay Millennium Prize goes to Grigoriy Perelman
In response to
Open Thread: March 2010, part 3
Is there a particular reason you linked to a blog instead of the actual story? How much money did you net from that decision?
Pi is well-defined, yes, and that's not going to change. But some notation is better than others. It would be better notation if we had a symbol that meant 2pi, and not necessarily any symbol that meant pi, because the number 2pi is just usually more relevant. There's all sorts of notation we have that is perfectly well-defined, purely mathematical, not dependent on any system of units, but is not optimal for making things intuitive and easy to read, write and generally process. The gamma function is another good example.
I really fail to see why metric vs. english units is much more serious; neither metric nor english units is particularly suggestive of anything these days. Neither is more natural. The quantities being measured with them aren't going to be nice clean numbers like pi/2, they're going to be messy no matter what system of units you measure them with.
What about the gamma function is bad? Is it the offset relation to the factorial?
e^(pi*i) = -1
Anything else: lame.
Uh, how is e^(pi*i) = 1 lame?
You may as well argue for base four arithmetic.
Huh. Would that actually be easier? I always figured ten fingers...
I don't see myself with ten fingers as a posthuman anyway.
In response to
Open Thread: March 2010, part 2
Has anybody else wished that the value of the symbol, pi, was doubled? It becomes far more intuitive this way--this may even affect uptake of trigonometry in school. This rates up with declaring the electron's charge as negative rather than positive.
Just in case you hadn't actually known this: "I like my women the way I like my coffee" is an archetypical joke beginning, like "Two men walked into a bar" or "How many [profession members] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?". I saw it as more a clever twist on the genre of the joke than as a statement of steven0461's philosophy.
Yes, I'm aware of that template of jokes. That doesn't take away the confusion with multiple women, or the connection to slavery. I don't think steven0461 meant it literally--I assume this person is likely the typical overweight nerd without much luck with woman. It was clever, though.
More to the point, 1337 is the popular convention. If the numbers were not meant as a reference to the convention then they would be more silly than they already are.
Well, yes, it is meant to mean "elite". There are several variations of it, though.
Humor will be more relevant post-singularity
That is a significant claim. Not least because it implies that given that a singularity occurs it will be a singularity that doesn't suck. (Better as a goal than it is as a prediction.)
Good point. I admit to being confused by the use of "suck" and singularity. But certainly--a dystopian singularity will leave perhaps nothing to laugh at.
Voted down for spelling 1337 wrong in your username.
Perhaps it is wrong to use the same digit to refer to separate letters. 133+ is OK, 1337 is OK, but 7337 seems to break that criteria. Point noted.
View more: Next
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Irrelevant for most people on lesswrong.com. You see, people here are male, heterosexual, fat, and autistic--unable to get into a romantic situation unless extremely rich.