I'm deep in understanding Cohen Forcing at the moment. Those who know what that is will understand, and if you don't, just imagine the thing you understood least about maths at school, and multiply it by a thousand.
So here's a gorgeous album by Paul Desmond
that turned a recent Sunday morning into something light and easy. Paul Desmond is the guy who played sax on Take Five. That West Coast Cool Jazz thing, when it was done well, produced some wonderful music.
And then for something completely different, here's a KM Channel video. If you don't know them, watch one.
Monday, 30 April 2018
Thursday, 26 April 2018
The Pseudo-Paradox of Toleration
I was goaded into writing this by a discussion of pluralism in mathematics by a philosopher I will not name because it would make you think ill of them.
The so-called `paradox of toleration’ is that the tolerant must tolerate the intolerant, who will therefore take over and install Sharia Law, burkas, compulsory short beards, take away votes for women and leave the sewers to fall apart in a decade...
Nobody could take this paradox seriously, yet some people do. It relies accepting the claim that to be tolerant means you have to tolerate anything and everything.
That’s not what tolerance means. ‘Religious tolerance’ means that the State does not actively stop people worshiping the God of their understanding in the manner their sect prescribes - within the limits of civil and criminal law (so no live sacrifices).
We don’t have laws on what cuisines can and can’t be served in this country, except for dog, cat and a few other Chinese delicacies, and that’s `culinary tolerance’ or something similar.
We do have laws against killing people, swindling them, assaulting or harming them, and various other things. We don’t tolerate that. If you think you can kill your daughter for making eyes at the wrong man, do it outside our borders or we will lock you up. Usually, even the grossly intolerant want laws about those things, involving steeper punishments, so there’s no clash.
And liberals, of course, don’t tolerate all sorts of things, but mostly a) anyone who disagrees with them, b) right-wing ideas and movements, c) nationalism and strict immigration controls. Except that doesn’t count as `intolerance’ because those are bad ideas and bad people and so outside the scope of tolerance. Tolerance is only for the good, if you’re a liberal.
Here’s a quote from a site about Islam, which to judge from what it says, is pro-Islamic.
Tolerance means that some things do not matter. What you wear on casual occasions, what you eat, what car you drive or even if you drive, how you style your hair, what church you go to, if your marriage partner is the same sex as you or different… these are things about which we have decided to be tolerant, in this country, and therefore do not matter to us, or at least, to the State.
What happens if the Sharia Law party gets started? The media choose the most rabid, least balanced spokesman and feed him questions intended to make it clear that women are going to have a hard time under SP rule, and it won’t be obvious how we will have a replacement generation of engineers when only rote-learned Koran is taught in schools. Nobody argues, nobody discusses, they just let him rant on. What nobody does is engage or argue, because that would suggest these might after all be reasonable people. Since they are their own worst enemy, and most extremists are, they can be relied on to do sabotage themselves.
Tolerance does not mean we have to make the intolerant look good or give way to their ideas and policies: it means we don’t lock them up for speaking. As long as we don’t do that, we can tell them to go hike on all the other stuff.
The so-called `paradox of toleration’ is that the tolerant must tolerate the intolerant, who will therefore take over and install Sharia Law, burkas, compulsory short beards, take away votes for women and leave the sewers to fall apart in a decade...
Nobody could take this paradox seriously, yet some people do. It relies accepting the claim that to be tolerant means you have to tolerate anything and everything.
That’s not what tolerance means. ‘Religious tolerance’ means that the State does not actively stop people worshiping the God of their understanding in the manner their sect prescribes - within the limits of civil and criminal law (so no live sacrifices).
We don’t have laws on what cuisines can and can’t be served in this country, except for dog, cat and a few other Chinese delicacies, and that’s `culinary tolerance’ or something similar.
We do have laws against killing people, swindling them, assaulting or harming them, and various other things. We don’t tolerate that. If you think you can kill your daughter for making eyes at the wrong man, do it outside our borders or we will lock you up. Usually, even the grossly intolerant want laws about those things, involving steeper punishments, so there’s no clash.
And liberals, of course, don’t tolerate all sorts of things, but mostly a) anyone who disagrees with them, b) right-wing ideas and movements, c) nationalism and strict immigration controls. Except that doesn’t count as `intolerance’ because those are bad ideas and bad people and so outside the scope of tolerance. Tolerance is only for the good, if you’re a liberal.
Here’s a quote from a site about Islam, which to judge from what it says, is pro-Islamic.
...the reality is that Islam is meant to be a complete way of life for its followers. It includes a complete and logical set of beliefs, rituals, and a moral code that covers every action that a Muslim takes in their life.Every action. Everything matters. Whether you swallow what you pick from between your teeth, or spit it out: that matters. When everything matters, there can be no tolerance.
Tolerance means that some things do not matter. What you wear on casual occasions, what you eat, what car you drive or even if you drive, how you style your hair, what church you go to, if your marriage partner is the same sex as you or different… these are things about which we have decided to be tolerant, in this country, and therefore do not matter to us, or at least, to the State.
What happens if the Sharia Law party gets started? The media choose the most rabid, least balanced spokesman and feed him questions intended to make it clear that women are going to have a hard time under SP rule, and it won’t be obvious how we will have a replacement generation of engineers when only rote-learned Koran is taught in schools. Nobody argues, nobody discusses, they just let him rant on. What nobody does is engage or argue, because that would suggest these might after all be reasonable people. Since they are their own worst enemy, and most extremists are, they can be relied on to do sabotage themselves.
Tolerance does not mean we have to make the intolerant look good or give way to their ideas and policies: it means we don’t lock them up for speaking. As long as we don’t do that, we can tell them to go hike on all the other stuff.
Monday, 23 April 2018
From Self-Improvement to Optimisation
Dom Mazetti has a good line about “The day you want to get big is the day you will be forever small”. Because no matter how big you get, something will always need working on, some bro will always have a bigger set of that muscle than you do.
I wonder. Is the day we go into self-improvement the day we will be forever unworthy? That we will have the nagging sense that we need to improve something else about us that is simply not good enough. Since we cannot be perfect, we can always improve. So how much improvement is enough?
Self-improvement has two purposes: first, to get rid of damaging or grossly sub-optimal habits and replace them with good habits; second, to take on new habits that will make us more informed, interesting, resilient, employable, healthier, better company and so on and on.
‘Lift weights’ contains within in the injunction ‘stop being a lazy slouch’. ‘Quit eating junk’ forces us to look for better food to eat. ‘Read books’ tears us away from the TV and the Internet. And so on.
Self-improvement stops when we’ve dumped the bad habits and replaced them with better, though possibly not optimal, ones.
Keep that up, and it’s maintenance mode. After that, it’s about optimising.
Getting your body fat down from 30%+ to around 20% is self-improvement. Getting down to 15% is optimising, and for looks at that. (Google it: Special ops have around 18% because any lower and you don’t have the reserves to wait for the submarine to come back the next night after the first pick-up has to be abandoned.)
Trying out for the local soccer or basketball team is more than exercising, it’s an interest. The work you will have to do to be good enough for a reasonable team will require some performance improvements and specific skills: this sounds like optimisation.
Reading some books on the history of food is maintenance. Reading a book on knife skills and using them is optimisation.
Throwing out garish branded clothes and getting some low-key trousers and shirts where the brand is tucked away inside, this is self-improvement. Custom suits are optimisation. https://twitter.com/michaelporfirio
I suspect I’ve been in maintenance mode for a while now, and need to get a little optimisation going on somewhere. I’ll tell you this: it’s not going to involve the gym. As I’ve said before and will say again, call my nephew when you’re doing what I’m doing at my age. I feel the need for some optimisation in some new direction and that may feel gratuitous.
I wonder. Is the day we go into self-improvement the day we will be forever unworthy? That we will have the nagging sense that we need to improve something else about us that is simply not good enough. Since we cannot be perfect, we can always improve. So how much improvement is enough?
Self-improvement has two purposes: first, to get rid of damaging or grossly sub-optimal habits and replace them with good habits; second, to take on new habits that will make us more informed, interesting, resilient, employable, healthier, better company and so on and on.
‘Lift weights’ contains within in the injunction ‘stop being a lazy slouch’. ‘Quit eating junk’ forces us to look for better food to eat. ‘Read books’ tears us away from the TV and the Internet. And so on.
Self-improvement stops when we’ve dumped the bad habits and replaced them with better, though possibly not optimal, ones.
Keep that up, and it’s maintenance mode. After that, it’s about optimising.
Getting your body fat down from 30%+ to around 20% is self-improvement. Getting down to 15% is optimising, and for looks at that. (Google it: Special ops have around 18% because any lower and you don’t have the reserves to wait for the submarine to come back the next night after the first pick-up has to be abandoned.)
Trying out for the local soccer or basketball team is more than exercising, it’s an interest. The work you will have to do to be good enough for a reasonable team will require some performance improvements and specific skills: this sounds like optimisation.
Reading some books on the history of food is maintenance. Reading a book on knife skills and using them is optimisation.
Throwing out garish branded clothes and getting some low-key trousers and shirts where the brand is tucked away inside, this is self-improvement. Custom suits are optimisation. https://twitter.com/michaelporfirio
I suspect I’ve been in maintenance mode for a while now, and need to get a little optimisation going on somewhere. I’ll tell you this: it’s not going to involve the gym. As I’ve said before and will say again, call my nephew when you’re doing what I’m doing at my age. I feel the need for some optimisation in some new direction and that may feel gratuitous.
Thursday, 12 April 2018
I Have A Cold...
... but not one that involves runny noses. I can get up and go to work, but by the time I get home, I'm just waiting for sunset so I can go to bed. Plus it's messing up my tummy so if I do too much diary I get reflux. Also I over-did my hamstrings and had that lower back stiffness which turns me into an old man who can't get up once he's sat down. I went to my sports masseuse for that today. I just want to sleep. Or rather, not to be terribly active.
Pathetic excuses, but what can I tell you?
Pathetic excuses, but what can I tell you?
Thursday, 5 April 2018
March 2018 Review
God that was a long month. On the first Thursday I must have absorbed something alcoholic around lunchtime, because I went slightly wobbly for twenty-four hours. I didn’t do anything stupid and even made it to the gym, but accidental alcohol makes me feel shaken. At the end of the month I took the four days before Easter off, and naturally, the weather was cold, wet and not worth getting out of bed for. Equally naturally, I slept badly and kept waking up early. That may have had something to do with the clocks going forward and me only finding out when I looked at my watch on leaving the house Sunday morning - Wait 06:25? What? My phone said it was 06:25 an hour ago, oh, that must have happened.
I continued the Food Experiment. One week I tried salads and other potato-based lunches from Masters on Throgmorton Street: result were satiety, no sharp appetite in the evening, and an extra pound of weight that fell off by Saturday morning because I work from home then. The next week I tried bagels from Bagel Mania on London Wall: results, less dozy in the afternoon, no extra weight, but a tendency to light-headedness by the end of the afternoon. I lost three kilos but no more. This will continue for a while.
I re-gained some of my Python chops, using PyCharm, writing a file-copying utility with a simple UI. Hence the post about the rotten documentation of os.walk(). Python is a nice language to use, but I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write documentation and help posts actually follow their own advice. I may write a post on how to write instructions as well. It’s nowhere near as easy as you think.
I read Ben Yandell’s Honors Class, a series of biographies of the mathematicians who solved Hilbert’s Problems; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the British Isles, which got me interested in Anglo-Saxon England, about which I now have a book to read; Nicolas Naseem Taleb’s Skin In The Game, which makes a lot of good points and is prime NNT; and started on Per Olov Enquist’s The Wandering Pine.
I succumbed to Calibre. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, this is to e-books what the iTunes is to music. It’s a terrific program and I had my small e-book collection consolidated, organised and with updated metadata after a couple of hours. I will probably write a post about using it in the future.
I finished S3 of House. Five more to go. I had a break and started watching S2 of Follow The Money. I saw some movies in my holiday week: You Were Never Really Here and Isle of Dogs at the Curzon Bloomsbury; Red Sparrow and Unsane at the Cineworld Leicester Square; and The Square at the Curzon Soho.
I had supper with Sis for her birthday at Picture on Great Portland St, and with my mate at the Argentine Steak House in Richmond.
I had a lot of early nights. If I’m tired, I’m in bed at 20:30 and if I’m not, at 21:15 at the latest.
I continued the Food Experiment. One week I tried salads and other potato-based lunches from Masters on Throgmorton Street: result were satiety, no sharp appetite in the evening, and an extra pound of weight that fell off by Saturday morning because I work from home then. The next week I tried bagels from Bagel Mania on London Wall: results, less dozy in the afternoon, no extra weight, but a tendency to light-headedness by the end of the afternoon. I lost three kilos but no more. This will continue for a while.
I re-gained some of my Python chops, using PyCharm, writing a file-copying utility with a simple UI. Hence the post about the rotten documentation of os.walk(). Python is a nice language to use, but I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write documentation and help posts actually follow their own advice. I may write a post on how to write instructions as well. It’s nowhere near as easy as you think.
I read Ben Yandell’s Honors Class, a series of biographies of the mathematicians who solved Hilbert’s Problems; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the British Isles, which got me interested in Anglo-Saxon England, about which I now have a book to read; Nicolas Naseem Taleb’s Skin In The Game, which makes a lot of good points and is prime NNT; and started on Per Olov Enquist’s The Wandering Pine.
I succumbed to Calibre. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, this is to e-books what the iTunes is to music. It’s a terrific program and I had my small e-book collection consolidated, organised and with updated metadata after a couple of hours. I will probably write a post about using it in the future.
I finished S3 of House. Five more to go. I had a break and started watching S2 of Follow The Money. I saw some movies in my holiday week: You Were Never Really Here and Isle of Dogs at the Curzon Bloomsbury; Red Sparrow and Unsane at the Cineworld Leicester Square; and The Square at the Curzon Soho.
I had supper with Sis for her birthday at Picture on Great Portland St, and with my mate at the Argentine Steak House in Richmond.
I had a lot of early nights. If I’m tired, I’m in bed at 20:30 and if I’m not, at 21:15 at the latest.
Monday, 2 April 2018
Upgrading the Windows Computer
Every now and then I think about upgrading my Windows laptop. At the moment I have a Samsung that may be seven or eight years old. It has a 17.5 inch screen, a 2GHz Pentium, a 500GB HDD, 4GB of RAM and a basic video card. The body is plastic and the keyboard is only for light use, and I mean maybe ten minutes at a time. It does the job I want it to do, and I suspect the video card is a part of that.
So I’ve been looking at laptops and mini-PC’s.
At the bottom end of the price range, say about £300 or so, are Celerons and Pentium with 2GB of RAM. At the other end are 4k video editing machines for photographers. These have GeForce 1040 or above video cards, 8GB+ of RAM, an i7 HQ, some SSD and a 1TB drive or a lot more SSD, and USB 3. / 3.1 to connect external HDD’s with decent transfer rates. MacBook Pros and Dell XPS 15’s are get a lot of mentions. (High-end gaming laptops are way over what I need.) These machines have good keyboards and aluminium unibodies (the Dell is almost an aluminium unibody).
In between is a mass of i5 / i7 U-series machines, with or without graphics cards, random amounts of SSD, rarely an HDD, random combinations of USB / HDMI / VGA ports and build quality that ranges from awful to okay-I-guess. These can vary in price between about £600 - £1,000. The only way to make sense of these component salads is to assume that Wintel manufacturers design a high-end model, a low-end model and a mid-range model, and all the others are put together from excess parts and left-overs.
The decisions are much simpler than all those fancy specs and combinations make it look.
Want to browse the net, do text-based work, basic photographic editing and adjustment, and send e-mails? But don’t do 1080p and upwards video-editing or scientific computing? Take a serious look at an iPad and an external keyboard.
Get a Macbook Pro if you want to do iOS, Mac or UNIX / Linux development.
Get the high-end £1,100+ video-editing capable machines if you want: the aluminium body, high-quality keyboard and sharp screen; a large HDD; to use Adobe Creative Cloud or the equivalents on 1080p and 4k movies.
Want to do lots of calculations but not much graphics? (Very rare). Then you can get one of the component-salads with an i7-HQ, 256GB of SSD and integrated graphics.
Sustained daily typing and use - because you’re an author, or journalist or other content-producer? Consider a Mac Air or one of the top-end machines. (The price difference is not that large, especially if it’s how you make your money.)
Anything else? Get the mid-range Wintel.
It’s the build quality. Once you’ve had Mac, you can’t go back. At work, they hand out POS HP’s with Win 7, VGA adapters, and a keyboard with the Page Up / Down / End / Home keys in the wrong place. But that’s institutional companies for you. Cheap. The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite user in the family does so on an MSI gaming machine with an i7 HQ and 16GB of RAM with a 17-inch screen. It’s wicked fast but it’s got that corporate cheap build feel. And he doesn’t work for a big company.
I don’t want to come home and use something similar to the junk they give us at work. It’s my home, not an office. Computers are one of the things I’m willing to Pay Good Money for. (Not Silly Money, but Good Money.) As a tool to do a job. And the video-editing performance laptop is a tool for a job I’m not going to do.
The outsider for my needs is an Asus mini-PC, which has the 1TB drive, an i5-7U series, a mid-range graphics card, some SSD, Wireless-AC, and ports out the wazoo. It can drive two external screens, which is a nice-to-have I’ve wanted for a while. It will be an ace media centre, but would need hi-fi to make nice sound, but then, so does a laptop. It costs £650 and already I have an external screen (the TV), a mouse and keyboard. At a pinch I could get a 21-inch monitor for about £150 and work on a table if I wanted to use it as a computer. Back to the future.
PS: I didn’t do any of this. I did something else instead that didn’t involve spending money. I’ll talk about that later.
So I’ve been looking at laptops and mini-PC’s.
At the bottom end of the price range, say about £300 or so, are Celerons and Pentium with 2GB of RAM. At the other end are 4k video editing machines for photographers. These have GeForce 1040 or above video cards, 8GB+ of RAM, an i7 HQ, some SSD and a 1TB drive or a lot more SSD, and USB 3. / 3.1 to connect external HDD’s with decent transfer rates. MacBook Pros and Dell XPS 15’s are get a lot of mentions. (High-end gaming laptops are way over what I need.) These machines have good keyboards and aluminium unibodies (the Dell is almost an aluminium unibody).
In between is a mass of i5 / i7 U-series machines, with or without graphics cards, random amounts of SSD, rarely an HDD, random combinations of USB / HDMI / VGA ports and build quality that ranges from awful to okay-I-guess. These can vary in price between about £600 - £1,000. The only way to make sense of these component salads is to assume that Wintel manufacturers design a high-end model, a low-end model and a mid-range model, and all the others are put together from excess parts and left-overs.
The decisions are much simpler than all those fancy specs and combinations make it look.
Want to browse the net, do text-based work, basic photographic editing and adjustment, and send e-mails? But don’t do 1080p and upwards video-editing or scientific computing? Take a serious look at an iPad and an external keyboard.
Get a Macbook Pro if you want to do iOS, Mac or UNIX / Linux development.
Get the high-end £1,100+ video-editing capable machines if you want: the aluminium body, high-quality keyboard and sharp screen; a large HDD; to use Adobe Creative Cloud or the equivalents on 1080p and 4k movies.
Want to do lots of calculations but not much graphics? (Very rare). Then you can get one of the component-salads with an i7-HQ, 256GB of SSD and integrated graphics.
Sustained daily typing and use - because you’re an author, or journalist or other content-producer? Consider a Mac Air or one of the top-end machines. (The price difference is not that large, especially if it’s how you make your money.)
Anything else? Get the mid-range Wintel.
It’s the build quality. Once you’ve had Mac, you can’t go back. At work, they hand out POS HP’s with Win 7, VGA adapters, and a keyboard with the Page Up / Down / End / Home keys in the wrong place. But that’s institutional companies for you. Cheap. The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite user in the family does so on an MSI gaming machine with an i7 HQ and 16GB of RAM with a 17-inch screen. It’s wicked fast but it’s got that corporate cheap build feel. And he doesn’t work for a big company.
I don’t want to come home and use something similar to the junk they give us at work. It’s my home, not an office. Computers are one of the things I’m willing to Pay Good Money for. (Not Silly Money, but Good Money.) As a tool to do a job. And the video-editing performance laptop is a tool for a job I’m not going to do.
The outsider for my needs is an Asus mini-PC, which has the 1TB drive, an i5-7U series, a mid-range graphics card, some SSD, Wireless-AC, and ports out the wazoo. It can drive two external screens, which is a nice-to-have I’ve wanted for a while. It will be an ace media centre, but would need hi-fi to make nice sound, but then, so does a laptop. It costs £650 and already I have an external screen (the TV), a mouse and keyboard. At a pinch I could get a 21-inch monitor for about £150 and work on a table if I wanted to use it as a computer. Back to the future.
PS: I didn’t do any of this. I did something else instead that didn’t involve spending money. I’ll talk about that later.
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