Slashdot Mirror
Fields Medal Winner Manjul Bhargava On the Pythagorean Theorem Controversy
prajendran writes There were a lot of controversies generated at the Indian Science Congress earlier this month, including claims of ancient aircraft in India, the use of plastic surgery there, and ways to divine underground water sources using herbal paste on the feet. One argument that could be tested using some form of evidence was the assertion by Science Minister Harsh Vardhan that the Pythagorean theorem was discovered in India. Manjul Bhargava, a Princeton University professor of mathematics and a Fields Medal winner describes why the question is not defined well.
It could have been created in both places, it being a relatively simple law of mathematics that anyone pondering triangles is bound to discover soon enough.
There are other examples of things being invented in two separate places at roughly the same time. Why the need for bragging rights? Let the evidence do that.
I almost modded this funny, thinking it was a parody. Is the spam becoming aware of it's surroundings?
Pythagorean theorem was discovered in India
Nobody's going to change the name of it now, and there's no copyright royalties to be had on it.
He made a very good point, it's all about perspective.
With that said, does it not sound like India reading a page from the book "stranger in a strange land"
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Or you could just RTFA and discover that the nice Indian mathematician had some cogent and logical things to say.
TL;DR - it's complicated.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Pythagoras hacked Sony to suppress the truth
Pythagoras imposed his quasi-religious philosophies... about never urinating towards the sun...
when Pythagoras’s student Hippasus tried to calculate the value of [square root of] 2, he found that it was not possible to express it as a fraction, thereby indicating the potential existence of a whole new world of numbers, the irrational numbers (numbers that can not be expressed as simple fractions of integers). This discovery rather shattered the elegant mathematical world built up by Pythagoras and his followers, and the existence of a number that could not be expressed as the ratio of two of God's creations (which is how they thought of the integers) jeopardized the cult's entire belief system.
Poor Hippasus was apparently drowned by the secretive Pythagoreans for broadcasting this important discovery to the outside world.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I like how your suspicion of brown people is so strong that you somehow bring anti-American sentiment into a debate of an event that happened between 2032 to 4276 years before the existence of the US.
Obviously, those Indians are just driving home the point that events cannot possibly be attributed to a country that didn't exist at the time, thereby proving something about time and continuity, right?
The nice Indian mathematician does bring up some nice cogent and logical things.
But he also leaves out some points which are fairly damning to the argument that the Indians had much to do with this. Many/most non-Indian historians of mathematics seem to believe that the key Indian document here was very likely based on earlier (non-Indian) traditions. In other words, it was just a copy of stuff from Mesopotamia.
I'll quote the wikipedia article on the Theorem (which in turn supplies full quotes from the scholarly document if you hate wikipedia):
"Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Boyer (1991) thinks the elements found in the ulba-stram may be of Mesopotamian derivation."
That makes any claims that India "discovered" the theorem really really weak by any definition I would think.
Damn! The link between Pythagoras and Kim isn't so weak! Whoa! Reincarnation?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you are going to nominate for lifetime achievement in pedantry I would go Slashdot.org instead if just one article.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Pythagoras imposed his quasi-religious philosophies... about never urinating towards the sun...
That was a translation error. What he actually said is you don't piss against the wind.
If you knew anything about building construction, you would know that the first humans that built an accurately square large structure must have known Pythagorean Theorem as it is the simplest and only way to set out the structure. Although they might not have expressed the theory directly, they certainly expressed it in the shape of the structure. It is starting to look like there was in fact ice age civilisations that collapsed as a result of the deluge resulting from the end of the last ice age and likely it is with them that you would have to look for the originators of many human theories.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Chekov will probably be from India.
Chekov: "Ah, yes - Quatro-triticale!"
Kirk: "Does everyone know about this wheat but me?"
Chekov: "Not everyone, Captain - it was an Indian inwention!"
#DeleteChrome
The nice Indian mathematician does bring up some nice cogent and logical things.
But he also leaves out some points which are fairly damning to the argument that the Indians had much to do with this. Many/most non-Indian historians of mathematics seem to believe that the key Indian document here was very likely based on earlier (non-Indian) traditions. In other words, it was just a copy of stuff from Mesopotamia.
I'll quote the wikipedia article on the Theorem (which in turn supplies full quotes from the scholarly document if you hate wikipedia):
"Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Boyer (1991) thinks the elements found in the ulba-stram may be of Mesopotamian derivation."
That makes any claims that India "discovered" the theorem really really weak by any definition I would think.
I have actually read Van der Waerden's books on Mespotamian mathematics and astronomy (I have copies of them at hand). His "belief" is not evidence of any kind. He is simply supposing, without any supporting evidence.
And Boyer, who wrote his history of mathematics 50 years ago (1991 is a reprint, he died in 1976), was no expert in ancient mathematics. He has been called the "Gibbon of Mathematics" which is a very good analogy, since Gibbon's work represents a compilation of everything known and believed about the Romans, written from the perspective of an 18th century European, complete with moral interpretations drawn from contemporary cultural viewpoints. It was a work that says at least as much about Gibbon and Europe of the time, as it does about the Romans. Similarly Boyer's beliefs represent the assumptions of a western scholar trained in the 1930s.
No one has yet shown any evidence at all that the suryas actually draw from Mesopotamian sources. Saying it doesn't make it true.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
It's complicated, but the arguments for each can be summarized:
First known indication of knowledge of the relation for integer-sided triangles (Pythagorean triples) - 2,500 BC in Egypt
First known general statement of relation - ca. 1,800 BC in Mesopotamia
First known general statement of relation with respect to right triangles - ca. 800 BC in India
First known rigourous proof of the relation - ca. 1046 to 256 BC in China
(Pythagoras, who may or may not have had a proof - ca. 570 to 495 BC in Greece)
Welcome to Indian/Hindu nationalism...government ministers often make outlandish claims about something having being invented in India.
It was created by God and brought to Earth by his son Jesus and he's British!
You heathen bastards!
The key to understanding why the whole debate is doubtable and nationalistic from the beginning, is to understand that general mathematics is a universal science.
You cannot invent mathematics.
(Remark: This should also be true with physics, these physics inventors haven't even their free energy device running so well it could power their cell phone.)
Basic mathematics like pythagorean theorem is discovered,
and Pythagoras didn't invent it, he discovered that just some basic relationships but he wrote down a universal formula..
(And I think he also managed to geometrically proof the theorem. I'm not sure)
So even if you find some of these so called pythagorean relationships and use the numbers in your construction - then if you don't write down a formula you have no theorem at all. And however sometimes a library burnes down and papyrus with the theorem is lost.
But again mathematics is universial, so if a theorem is truely universal it can be rediscovered. And this is what's happening, some pupils and students have the capability to rediscover mathematical principles using just their education they received to a certain point, with having never heard about before. Brilliant!
The real genius idea is after discovering a numerical relationship to write down a "general" formula, this is what he did.
Discoveries are made sometime, and sometime they are forgotten. It is possible that Pythagoras is just a "late" inventor, but understand the indian minister you need to understand that he is a hindu nationalist, and as any nationalist, he believes in the superiority of his "peer group".
This reveals an inferiority complex nationalistic indians are worried that their country was and is a develloping country - aside from their huge steps in science and engineering.
They just have too put their name on everything and claim everything, it's just sad, because these people will not stop there, where science and philosophy would return to a more rational debate.
According to The Fine Article, Indians have documentary evidence of knowledge of a few right triangles.
The Pythagorean theorem states a universal truth about all right triangles.
The difference is quite significant.
And of course, the theorem predates Pythagoras - the Pythagoreans just projected a whole lot of mysticism onto the result.
Indeed.
I may testify that it is called Pythagorean merely because of the path via which the theory's proof got popularised in the western world. No more no less.
This does not make any other discovery paths any less or more important, just parallel efforts (and Chinese are certain to have had many parallel discoveries).
However, when somebody comes to contest the ordering and aetiology of events he better comes with proof about it; that kind of proof is yet lacking or weak at best.
The ancient greek world tends to get much of the credit, merely because the birth and death dates (years) of any people involved, innovators and story-tellers alike, tend to be well-defined or well-bound and as such allow for refutable statements, which is good ground for efforts to reconstruct scientific history. This certainly does not cancel the importance of any discoveries happening in co-developing cultures, yet let's remind that it took centuries back then for ideas to propagate around.
Spend less time on something that happens a long time ago and worry more about things like those call centers and your nifty new space program.
Which is all the more impressive considering that it was the current dear leader that invented mathematics, theorems, and the abstract concepts of proof and discovery.
I was in Mumbai just over a year ago and went to the Nehru planetarium. They had a diorama there of the first moon landing. Everything looked perfect, from the Apollo spacecraft to the little astronaut in a space suit standing on the Lunar surface. There was one blatant problem though... they replaced the American flag with the Indian flag! My boss (also American) and I had a good time laughing about that.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
US betrayed India to the Chinese. The CIA was sending terrorists into tibet from Indian soil and when China invaded India in retaliation US abandoned India and said you are on your own. Indians don't forget that the US is not a friend in need.
You don't need the Pythagorean Theorem to construct a right angle. You don't even need the theorem to know that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle. It's a nice explanation of why those proportions get you a right angle, but that's a different issue; once you know you want a right angle, and a triangle with integer-proportion sides so you can easily reproduce it, trial and error will get you there. Furthermore, the classical geometric proof doesn't automatically give you integer solutions; Diophantine equations were Diophantus's trick, not Pythagoras's.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'll give the Indian politician the amount of credit it was due, along with mystical spacecraft flying to other planets and such. But this article by a guy who won the bloody Fields Medal not only deserves a lot more credibility before reading it, but also after - he talks about the discoveries of various parts of the idea in different parts of the world. And Indian and Arab mathematicians did contribute a huge amount to culture and civilization; you can't even claim they made zero contributions without using the zero they contributed,
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If someone else had discovered this theorem, it would have a different name -- unless there's an Indian named "Pythagoras" -- so checkmate Science Minister Harsh Vardhan.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
> Indians think of Judaism as that new fangled sect
> Hinduism is contemporary with the ancient Greek and Iranian religions.
Whenever you see a menorah. That's a remembrance of when that "new fangled sect" collided head on with that ancient Greek religion.
You seem to be a great confirmation that this is an Indian flavor of "Chekov-ism" we are seeing here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Aren't you guys allies with Pakistan, the enemy of India?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You call it pedantry, but I'm proud as fuck about things that my ancestors did without any input whatsoever from me personally. You go, ancient awesome guys!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
-- In India there is an undeniable and strong tendency to construct narratives of how everything good in the world was discovered in India. All Indians don't share this perspective, in fact it is shared by a minority, but er, that amounts to 150 million people or something.
-- This tendency is inward, not outward looking. This politician Harsh Vardhan is a fuck up, like a lot of Indian politicians. But generally this thinking is not directed at bragging to the rest of the world about how great India is, rather it is to nurse, heal, revive people's connections with their own trampled culture and history -- one that in recent times is increasingly being supplanted by a pseudo-western culture and western lifestyle. It's a way of telling people in India to give their intellectual heritage another chance.
-- Honestly, most rational people don't give a damn about where the Pythagorus theorem was invented. I mean if it were an easily provable fact, then it might be an interesting piece of historical information, but given that it's ambiguous who cares, unless to stoke one's nationalist ego.
-- The Princeton mathematician who won the Fields Medal... which is like a Nobel prize except that it's given once every 4 years... is a reference because of his grasp of mathematics, not because he's Indian. If you think of him as "some Indian guy trying to pocket a laurel for his fatherland" then that's a strong statement about you, not about him.
Sure, the Hindu nationalist politician the other day who brought up the issue deserves your criticism, claiming that Indian mystics were flying to other planets centuries before the West was.
But the Indian mathematician who won the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize is the person were talking about today, and he gave a good discussion about what different aspects of the theorem were invented where and when. It was relatively short and sound-bitey, and there's a lot of history we really don't know about how much communication there was between different regions (so for instance, did Pythagoras and Euclid learn about it from people who'd traveled to India, such as Alexander the Great's armies or random merchants or traveling scholars? Or did they base their work on what the Egyptians had done?) There's also a lot we don't know about what was developed in each region, because only bits of it survived into the historical record. It's not like Pythagoras was the first person in the West to see a triangle; his original work was a follow-on to already known things that he'd learned.
Science does work that way, after all - we need to keep communication as open as possible so people can benefit from it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe you should try discovering something new (mathematical or scientific) that will be useful for thousands of years, then come back and tell us it was so easy that you don't deserve any credit.
The reality is, for instance, that Algebra is derived from Arabic, that Algebra as we know it today was refined in the middle east, and is of particular Arabic origin. Much of the origin myths of the west have been written to exclude non-western contributions. This can be as simple as US children not being taught that the Russians were instrumental in defeating Hitler, to including stirrups on horses in B.C.E Europe even though such technology only existed in China until the 5th or 6th century C.E.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Aesop's fables, Damascus steel - two things that firmly point to cultural exchange between India and Mediterranean & Mesopotamian lands. Saying the Suryas draw from Mesopotamian sources in light of other historical evidence lends credibility to that assertion.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Good, let's reason instead of rhetoric. What specifically do you object to in the linked article? Because unless you point out verifiable issues, I'm using it next time I explain how stupid people can't stand information that contradicts their understanding.
Including your knee jerk response here as an exhibit, of course.
Ground rule, please keep to the specifics in the article, and not some straw man.
And please, don't start sentences with filler words. This may sound impossible, but it makes you sound less intelligent.
Nations are never great. Societies and cultures that choose to be free - free to think, free to choose, free to express, free to travel and study anything - are what history has shown to be great.
Any country that allows it's people to be truly free will eventually be great, and will be remembered as great. Sometimes people forget who and why a group of people came to be known as great, but as we forget and repeat history, we will re-learn.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
There's a saying that the credit for a discovery goes to the last person who finds it. This is a variation of Stigler's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
TIL Pythagoras was American.
"The USA was a major force in dismantling colonialization. The exceptions to this seem to have been through the involvement of Wall Street anglophiles (or just plain agents of the British) "
Hmm. James Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Randolph Hearst, General Pershing and Commodore Perry, all Anglophiles...
Ask the Spanish-speakers of the Western Hemisphere about the US commitment to anti-colonialism.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
There was really only one Jewish Zombie, and he's really just an excuse to have a protracted discourse on Neo-Platonism.
Hinduism is a beautiful system of beliefs but strains of it can be REALLY overloaded with a lot of superstition and naturalistic garbage... Christianity has different problems- its idealism and anti-humanism for a start- but it's attachment to weird pseudoscience isn't generally one of them.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
That's the problem I've seen with Indian workers as well, and several people I've worked with have seen it too. It seems to be a real problem, because they will not say no to their bosses - about anything. If they're given a task beyond their skillset, they say yes anyway because saying no would be disrespectful (or so I understand).
On one occasion, I was hired to spend a day working with the IT manager of a company in Dallas - to find what was happening with their network performance. I found (poorly configured) routers everywhere. Triple, quadruple, quintuple NAT, cross linked networks - dueling DHCP servers. It was a mess. It turned out that their IT manager managed to graduate his Indian university with a computer science degree and yet knew virtually nothing about anything. When his boss said add another router - he said yes.
I left after turning those routers into switches and restoring the performance they were missing, but not the performance they could have had if they'd put it together with the right parts to begin with.
I was paid in cash, by the IT manager - so I suspect that I was paid out of his pocket to save his job.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Integers using what units? The prof never says. He just says the lengths. He might as well say "Today I walked a nice even 6."
As an Angelino, I can assure you that many, many people still speak Spanish.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Sounds kind of strange - America is not the only country in the west and as a brit I learned that the basic concepts of algorithms and algebra were invented in the arab world, although the actual forms that we use today were developed in the 19th century. The eastern front was where nazis were sent to die (from the historical documentry Allo Allo probably), and stirrups came west with the Mongols who used them as a decisive military advantage.
So you could equally conclude that American education is uniquely crap in the western world.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
There are a couple of reasons.
1. The USA provided significant material support to Pakistan prior to and during the Indo-Pakistani wars which were to some extent seen as a cold war proxy conflict between the USA and USSR; this support and military cooperation continues in various forms, so India is naturally wary of American actions in the region. Although the cold war is for the most part over and the relationship between Russia and the USA has warmed substantially, India and Pakistan are still constantly at each other's throats; fatal border clashes are quite common.
2. India is a democracy but it is a country that is still plagued by a socially ingrained class system that just won't die. Corruption, strife, and malnutrition are rampant; while literacy is not. Deflecting blame onto distant, untouchable, and largely uncaring foreign entities is a tried and true method of bolstering domestic support.
3. India is poised to be a potential superpower in the near future, so they're naturally trying to shore up nationalism and a we-can-do-it-ourselves attitude. Conveniently rewriting history, or omitting important contextual information is in no way an Indian invention.
Isn't it very likely that something very basic like the pythagorean theorem was discovered more then once? Probably several times in the region we now call India.
We know of the greeks because we got to copy their stuff before it was burned, but we burned thousands of equal amount of historical accounts, philosophy and science from other sources. We've had long-lasting cultures who mainly destroyed other cultures and all their records.
We were just lucky the romans thought that the greeks were cool. If that hadn't been the case, all that would have been destroyed as well.
I am an Indian and I don't give a fuck about whether it was an Indian that wrote down the first comprehensive statement of the Pythagorean theorem. The theorem would be as profound irrespective of where it originated. I am sick of my country's politicians gloating over an imaginary past full of glory to make up for the utter shambles that Indian science has been in over the past 50 years. I wonder if any these morons can even complete a Pythagorean triplet given the two of the numbers in one. Indian politicians boasting about imaginary science of the past is our version of buying a slick sports car to compensate for some of our insecurities.
So proof that something is possible is proof that something *is*? Okay...
Are you high? Must be good shit. The units make no difference.
Dude. Spanish has the second highest number of speakers of any language, behind Mandarin and ahead of English.
We were recently looking for a new developer and thus put out the feelers - the number of Indian applications we got via agencies was high, but what was more surprising was the number of those applicants who were able to get multiple degrees in the subject from Indian universities in less time than it would take to achieve one degree in a western university (we are talking 2 degrees in a 2 year timespan, when one degree in the UK typically takes 3 years). Now why would that ring warning bells?
Oh, and the number of applicants rejected out of hand because they had "qualifications" from a London based college which is trivial to link to massive visa fraud through quick Googling...
I will probably come across as massively racist, but it would take some convincing in order for me to hire an Indian immigrant into an IT position.
While that's an admirable thought, the reality is that modern mathematics owes very little to the prehistoric findings pre ca 1500. The breakthroughs that transformed mathematics into the tool we use today occurred mostly in Europe during the Renaissance period and later. Perhaps the only significant (*) contribution before then is Euclid's tour de force (**), technically also in Europe.
(*) to modern mathematics
(**) I'm talking of course of the logical structure, not the actual geometrical results.
Modern mathematics only became possible by inventing a language in which abstractions can be precisely and economically stated. Before this happened, mathematical ideas could only be expressed in analogies, with very lenghty, hard to interpret, paragraphs. It took until the Renaissance for mathematicians to understand that.
Think about legalese. That's exactly what old mathematical documents are like. Over time, symbols with precise meanings were invented. This is how future generations of mathematicians are able to completely assimilate, and then surpass, in a very short time, the discoveries of their teachers.
Incidentally, the lack of such a development in the legal world is one reason why there is so much confusion and irrationality in that world. It's literally at the same primitive stage that pre-Renaissance mathematics used to be, but without so much even as Euclid's Elements for a guide.
Before the modern European era, mathematical ideas were sporadic, and highly subject to interpretation. Where one scholar sees a universal theorem, another only sees a single numerical example, clumsily expressed. More often than not, generalizations were just wishful thinking. Once the modern era began around the time of Descartes, these old results could be rediscovered easily enough by anyone using the modern mathematics.
That's the power of the new mathematical language, and that's also the reason that the old results, while mildly amusing to read about, are not important milestones for modern mathematics.
You're either a troll or a moron, pardon my French. The simplest way to construct a square is to take a piece of string, fold it into four identical lengths, and tie it into a ring. Now take four people and pull at the corners until the four sides are taut.
Actually Disney would never argue for that, because they would be on the hook for billions of dollars in back copyright payments for all the works that they have "used" out of copyright.
Personally I feel that if a firm or body wants to make use of a copyright extension, then back payments would be applicable to people who's copyright would not have expired had that extension been in place when they made use of the work. So Disney for example would need to payout on Pinocchio as Carlo Collodi only died in 1890, so in 1940 it would still have been under copyright by modern standards.
That's the power of the new mathematical language, and that's also the reason that the old results, while mildly amusing to read about, are not important milestones for modern mathematics.
You need to be careful to distinguish between "inventing" and "popularizing." Developments in the renaissance, and particularly the printing press, made it much easier to communicate ideas of all sorts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to credit Gutenberg as the father of mathematics. Your "New" mathematical language is an extension of all the old mathematical languages, invented by people who had learned the mathematics of the day. If it really is easy to discover the old, solved problems in that "new" language, it is because those solutions were embodied in the creation of that language. If you think notions like the existence of Zero are not important to math, then you have a naive understanding.
If you want to talk about the clear expression of specific ideas, I will refer you to Hooke's Law of elasticity, as he expressed it, ca. 1650: ceiiinosssttuv.
I have hired some top people from India. I have also worked with some developers out of India that were extremely... not top people. So, your mileage may vary, I guess.
There do seem to be lots of Indian development groups that will pound out the fastest, sloppiest mess possible to meet a deadline. But I wouldn't put that down to being Indian, I'd say it is more a function of attempting to be an ultra-low-cost vendor. What is it they say about fast, good and cheap?
I'm a moron too. I can't see how your string method assures right angles? Please enlighten me.
-- Make America hate again!
But would they still be easily accessible? What if the people who knew them died and the artifacts, such as paper and hard disks, that had a recording of these truths were destroyed. Then these small group of people would have to spend hundreds/thousands of years to rediscover these truths again.
we pay pakistan not to go full-blown batshit insane.
I discovered a prize in a box of cracker jacks, therefore I must have invented it.
Panama, Puerto Rico followed pretty much the same path as the Phillipines. It was a post Spanish-American war thing.
Every June my neighborhood is host to a huge Puerto Rican Independence festival, where all the descendants of Puerto Ricans come back to the old neighborhood and celebrate the end of their dependence from Spain.
I can't wait to see the party they'll throw when they are finally truly independent.
The dude who wrote "Was God a Skywalker"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The GGP was just beating on a strawman. He should have been ignored.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm a racist (as usual) says the anonymous coward (Marc, is that you?) who can't accept that I'm not the only one to experience this phenomenon. I've worked with a few very intelligent Indian IT workers, and I love Indian culture (especially the food, mmm-mmm - makhani chicken). I think it's sad that some institutions pushing students out the door without the skills they need are giving a bad reputation to an entire race of people.
"Lame" - Galaxar
You can't appreciate the beauty of it until you read it in the original Klingon.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are plenty of top-notch people working American IT companies from India and similar non-Western places, because I work with a bunch of them (in the U.S.). Hiring anyone is simply a matter of figuring out how to filter out the posers, the Dunning-Kruger experts and the BS artists, and there are plenty of those to go around.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Pythagoras imposed his quasi-religious philosophies... about never urinating towards the sun...
That was a translation error. What he actually said is you don't piss against the wind.
Where are my mod points when I need them!
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
I, too, am very proud of how the first single cell organisms survived to become multicellular. You go, Eoarchean awesome cells! At some point, don't we just have to call history the past and move on to create our own future??? If we humans want to continue to survive, we are going to have to start thinking much more about the future, and dwelling less on attributions of the past. Don't get me wrong, it is good to know what happened and learn from it. But, once you find your historical sources have run out and you are basing your conclusions on millionth hand anecdotal evidence, it is time to let the past be the past.
I'm very sorry for the down-mod. I really thought my reply would have gotten you off the hook. I even *showed my work*.
C'mon people. Work with me here
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The US doesn't operate colonies like 19th century Britain (although it does have some outright colonial possessions like Puerto Rico and the Marshalls). The US operates an empire much more like 16th century Britain, where local control is maintained by friendly satraps who are nominally independent but do not exercise true sovereignty, and resources (mostly oil, but also cheap labor) are expropriated by factorist enterprises, nowadays called "corporations."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The US started to get a distaste for classic colonialism early in the 20th Century, although it largely disregarded US messing in Latin America.
Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which formed the basis for the treaties ending WWI, were largely anti-colonialist, and many colonies were put on a somewhat different legal system, which implied that the colonial rule would be temporary.
Before WWII, the only colony in Asia that had a firm independence date was the Philippines. This is thought to have had a lot to do with Filipino attitudes towards the US and Japanese during the war. Most colonies occupied by the Japanese were not all that seriously anti-Japanese, with what is now Indonesia getting arms from both sides and stockpiling them for a postwar revolt against their colonial masters (the Dutch).
The US, much to Churchill's disappointment, was not interested in making the world safe for classic colonialism, and a very large number of independent countries appeared.
You'll notice I've been talking about classic colonialism. The US was a leader in the sort of colonialism that involves economic but not political control of nominally independent countries. So, as usual, the answer is considerably more complicated than the question.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm a moron too. I can't see how your string method assures right angles? Please enlighten me.
Yeah, me too. I keep getting a rhombus.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
You have to invent mathematics. It isn't a feature of the real world.
Consider Euclid, for example. He has postulates, axioms, and definitions, and proceeds to deduce interesting things from these. He made things up: he knew of no physical examples of points or lines or circles, just approximations. He looked at real-life dots and almost-straight lines and almost-perfect circles, abstracted them, and ran with it.
At that time, it was thought that geometry (earth-measure) was a description of reality, just like arithmetic. Many philosophers set themselves a goal of proving things about the world in a similar manner. Eventually, we figured out that we could invent other geometries, and much later that pretty much everything interesting has non-Euclidean geometries.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Indoor plumbing, on the other hand...
Actually, the Indus Valley civilization seems to have had the first proper sewage systems, so ...
I set out industrial buildings fuckwit and yeah 3,4,5 is exactly how you do it with string or actually braided wire because string stretches to much and that stretch makes a huge difference between varying lengths of string and even wind plays a role in that and after that you check the diagonals and then you go away and before you do anything you check it all again. Tape measure are also a pain because of course sun light will vary the length of your tape, requiring repeated short measures rather than long ones.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So how is extending the copyright on already existing works not an ex post facto law? Changing the terms for new copyrighted works would not be an ex post facto law, But a retroactive blanket change of the terms on already copyrighted works, many of which are decades old?
The formula is fact, it's part to math/reality not the ancient who's best remembered for it.
Read my idea again, it is very specifically not ex post facto. Copyright extension is fine, but if you wish to make use of it then you have to consider your past actions. If you don't make use of it then you don't have to consider your past actions. As such it is not ex post facto as it does not change any pre-existing legal relationships.
I would note by your definition of ex post facto then any copyright extension as currently enacted is illegal in the U.S.A. because it changes the legal status of relationships that existed before the law was enacted.
For example I might have a copy of a piece of work that I had paid for on the understanding that by now it would be out of copyright, but the extension has changed that legal relationship. Copyright extension can by your definition only be ex post facto for works created *AFTER* the copyright extension is enacted.
Oh and finally not every legal jurisdiction on this planet bans ex post facto laws. So while it might be forbidden by the United States constitution (which I would note could always be amended), those laws don't extend to the entire planet.
Dam I meant to point out that if you had bothered to read your wikipedia link you would note that the U.S. Supreme court has repeatedly ruled that ex post facto law is only prohibited for criminal law and not civil law. As copyright is civil law ex post facto effects of legislation is permitted.
The British-Indian comedians of Goodness Gracious Me had a recurring sketch about "Mr. Everything comes from India", who would argue (mostly with his son that) everything came from India. Not only the things that actually are from India, like shampoo and verandas, but Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa ("Son, this is Mina Losa, a Gujarati washerwoman from Bhavnagar!"), John Travolta, Superman and the British royal family.
I think all nationalisms have some people like that.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Please re-read the comment. I was not referring to any photo. I was referring to a diorama. As in, a 3D replica of the moon landing. It is definitely there. Go in the front door of the Nehru planetarium into that main room where they have multiple exhibits, and the loudspeakers call everyone to go from place to place. In the back right of that room there is a diorama of the moon landing, and they stuck one of those toothpick flags in there next to the astronaut. And it's an Indian flag, not an American flag. Obviously you didn't look close enough.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.