Read before you pontificate. Polya is about problem-solving in the general sense, yet you won't master any discipline simply by reading an effective approach to general problem-solving. You must practice your specific discipline, moving forward as you master each skill.
There is no mathematician in the history of the world who has solved every contemporary open soluble problem presented to him, so there is room for even the best mathematician to improve his skill. He just needs to identify at which level he needs to do this rather than being lazy and conceited (which is, frankly, just as bad as the guy who goofs off because he genuinely doesn't understand the material).
If you're still in high school and you find the mathematics homework easy, it means you can complete it in a few minutes and have the time to move on to more difficult challenges either set by yourself or with a helpful tutor. The whole "I was bored by easy work!" bullshit comes from dime-a-dozen kids who are slightly above average but lack the imagination and genuine interest to excel.
Nope, just checked my posts and never declared a right to armed violence. Uprising comes in many forms from mass civil disobedience to bloody revolution, but I'll forgive your Freudian slip.
Actually, didn't mention armed anything, though only the worst sort of jackbooted thug would argue that there's something immoral in fighting, say, a policeman kicking you out of a Whites Only bathroom in apartheid SA. Are you the sort of pusillanimous lickspittle to ascribe authority to divine right, or are you just sufficiently childishly naive to believe that no group of reasonable but powerful men ever turns evil?
First Amendment? Spare me your Yankee centric view of the life - I'm not even American.
You spoke of freedom of speech. Whether it's protected by the First Amendment or your local equivalent is immaterial, but thanks for demonstrating your inability to understand a point.
Well boo hoo for you. Must be tough living in the USA compared to living under Franco eh? Tell you what , quit your whining and move to somewhere more dictatorial then
The US, which I've spent long periods of time in but decided not to move to, is way more dictatorial than Franco was. Franco's regime was simple: while in Spain, don't speak out of line and pay a passing respect to Catholic values. As for the US, it's pretty much respect US trade policy (which includes bombardment with US culture) or leave the planet.
Well, I should be careful, because in earlier decades Spain was sponsored at arm's length for its passionate hatred of the USSR and in later decades propped up through heavy investment by US corporations (nothing like cheap labour!). But the Spanish had the buffer against US culture that was its own petty dictator.
If you think that having alloidal title, i.e. a piece of paper, is necessary to become an independent thinker then you're engaging in such arbitrary non sequitur that I'm not sure whether you're trolling.
But, FWIW, there are way fewer such titles today than there were two millennia ago, and the owners of such privilege work together more than ever. Fee simple is effectively rent from the government.
You remain dense. Pursuing technocracy is not the same as pursuing improved technology (while operating under one or more philosophies less stupid than technocracy).
Today's West suffers the same problem you do: believing technology<=>technocracy. Whence banking crisis (surely these clever bankers are doing what's right for us?), whence surveillance society (surely these clever politicians are protecting us?), etc. Technology is a tool. Technocracy is a proto-philosophy based on dominance by those with the power to harness technology.
You do realise that technocracy is essentially government by those who believe themselves to be intellectually strong, yes? Epitomised by Wernher von Braun, it's really just an application of "might makes right".
Since/. vaguely represents middle class America, I'm not surprised to see it enjoying so much support, but "ones that work" has a very specific definition of "work": working to ensure the domination of the intellectually strong and the continued willingness of those under them to serve. That's all technocracy is.
What do you think happens today to the average blue collar worker who suddenly decides he's not willing to play society's game? Which of today's government and the Lord of the Dark Ages you are so keen on generalising to everywhere-before-1900 has more resources to catch that man? If a man today, in the middle of the US, considers gathering a group of men to start an uprising to fix the ills of local, regional or national government, do you think he is more or less likely to succeed than a man five hundred years ago?
Put another way, as the world descends toward global surveillance and control, what is it about modern medicine (assuming you can afford it) that will make life worth living?
Well, reasoning is formalised by logic which is today usually regarded as a branch of mathematics. And reasoning is a requirement to practice philosophy. (N.B. even if you can somehow argue that you can come up with some philosophy without reasoning, you cannot practice philosophy in the general sense without reasoning.)
Moreover, mathematics in the most general sense is about formalising pattern-matching skills: recognising when and how to generalise. This crosses into philosphical (not mathematical) induction, well-understood as far back as Newton in justifying his theory of gravitation but little understood by dilettantes centuries later.
I maintain, then, that mathematics forms a basis for philosophy, regardless of those smartass xkcd comics. If you want you can turn it into a semantics game and argue that logic and philosophical induction are "not mathematics, but philosophy", and it is fruitful to argue whether either logic or philosophical induction can be justified without philosophy. But the same applies to anything, and the tools exist in their own right.
Oh, the "we're free because of the First Amendment" fallacy.
Here's an anecdote from my history book: half of my family comes from fascist Spain, my grandfather a bootmaker and my father asked to do the "backbreaking labo(u)r in the fields" as a boy that everyone likes soundbiting. It seems that lacking the right to whine and be ignored didn't affect either their boldness or sense of freedom nearly as much as today's centralised and surveilled management of corporation and culture.
Philosophy is the path by which every man continually asks questions of his condition and can thereby strive to improve it. It is something practiced while living, not instead of living (as "pursuit of happiness" is the ongoing enjoyment of happiness, not the singular and final goal of happiness). You may as well argue that man should not breathe because people who breathe are wasting their time only breathing when they should be doing other things.
Philosophy does not give a single solution to the world's ills and it does not force you to do anything or to make others subordinate to your will. I'm not sure what you're afraid of, but it's not philosophy.
So over the past two millennia we have cut the working day by 1/3rd and doubled the average lifespan at birth (if you ignore infant mortality, our lifespan hasn't increased that impressively).
Meanwhile we have turned the majority of Western humans from independent men into chair-warming consumers singing in lockstep for trinkets. We've made up for the opportunity to live a life of leisure surrounded by virtually infinite resources by blasting our population beyond 6 billion.
Technocracy is for the lazy man who wishes to be controlled and for the fascist who wishes to control others. The technocrat only has to think about one thing. But philosophy regards technology as one of many tools, not as a master. The philosopher-ruler (for philosophy is a basis for living, not an alternative) must not let prejudice cause him to dismiss the possibility that he can do better and for more.
The brain can be trained and the processes of problem-solving can be generalised - see Polya's How to Solve It. But it doesn't help much to just read the book: you've got to practice, and practice, and practice some more. You must make mistakes and learn from them. You must be prepared to accept multiple inputs rather than merely those which reinforce your strengths and/or prejudices. You must sometimes, as the old 9/11 troll used to say, get some perspective - don't count the angels on a pinhead while Rome burns, even while the most secure of academic positions involves the former and there's such an alluring spirit of mental masturbation in many disciplines and departments.
Meanwhile a good teacher has spent enough decades on some area that he knows both where to provide you hints on specific complex problems and which direction to guide you in when you're contemplating your whole professional life. But, again, don't just choose the teacher who happens to share your academic and ethical prejudices.
Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter.
Windows, Christianity and Britney Spears also succeeded on technical merit and social benefit.
It's funny to see geeks having been popularised so much over the last decade that the lowest common denominator gaggle together and mock others as they were once bullied by jocks in high school. Therapy, perhaps?
It must be because the entire software industry as it has existed since the 1970s is stupider than last year's crop of CS graduates, huh?
LISP is not suitable for building a traditional OS. (Its descendants may be suitable for a LISP Machine / emacs / other managed style OS, but we're not using them.)
LISP is not suitable for straight high performance numerical computation: FORTRAN and then C/C++ have done well there in the general case, but you might want specialised numerical packages.
LISP is not always the best choice for modelling: Mathematica is good for what I do, IME.
But, yes, much of the rest of the software industry of the last couple of decades is comprised of idiots producing bloated crap, not having got much further conceptually than "I NEED THE COMPUTER TO DO THIS TEN TIMES SO I WRITE A FOR I=1 TO 10 LOOP". Whence Java. Do you disagree?
assertion that newer (or, in his/her/its terms, 'more high level')
You are dense. LISP, Mathematica and Prolog are examples of "more high level" languages than Java. They all allow you to think about the problem rather than how the computer needs to process data because none of them are paradigmatically borne of Bjarne Stroustrup raping Alan Kay. They're all older than Java too.
We haven't seen a company more keen to take control away from you since IBM. If there's one thing Google will not do, it's create something for real people to solve real problems.
At best, they'll offer to solve sufficiently simple problems for you. Give a man a fish.
Java has always essentially been Visual BASIC with a less annoying syntax. It's usually been suitable where Visual BASIC is suitable. Windowbuilder is just a friendly reminder of this.
Meanwhile, people doing real low-level or time-critical work use assembler/C/C++, and people doing real high-level work don't go for a primitive imperative language which looks like C/C++ with training wheels.
So it's OK to call someone a money-grubbing Jew because Jews, not bound by Christian tradition, traditionally fronted for wealthy landowners? Never mind that usury / advanced fee fraud has occurred well before and more often outside Jewry / Nigeria than within, Jews popularised usury so we need to associate them with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Read before you pontificate. Polya is about problem-solving in the general sense, yet you won't master any discipline simply by reading an effective approach to general problem-solving. You must practice your specific discipline, moving forward as you master each skill.
There is no mathematician in the history of the world who has solved every contemporary open soluble problem presented to him, so there is room for even the best mathematician to improve his skill. He just needs to identify at which level he needs to do this rather than being lazy and conceited (which is, frankly, just as bad as the guy who goofs off because he genuinely doesn't understand the material).
If you're still in high school and you find the mathematics homework easy, it means you can complete it in a few minutes and have the time to move on to more difficult challenges either set by yourself or with a helpful tutor. The whole "I was bored by easy work!" bullshit comes from dime-a-dozen kids who are slightly above average but lack the imagination and genuine interest to excel.
Nope, just checked my posts and never declared a right to armed violence. Uprising comes in many forms from mass civil disobedience to bloody revolution, but I'll forgive your Freudian slip.
Actually, didn't mention armed anything, though only the worst sort of jackbooted thug would argue that there's something immoral in fighting, say, a policeman kicking you out of a Whites Only bathroom in apartheid SA. Are you the sort of pusillanimous lickspittle to ascribe authority to divine right, or are you just sufficiently childishly naive to believe that no group of reasonable but powerful men ever turns evil?
First Amendment? Spare me your Yankee centric view of the life - I'm not even American.
You spoke of freedom of speech. Whether it's protected by the First Amendment or your local equivalent is immaterial, but thanks for demonstrating your inability to understand a point.
Well boo hoo for you. Must be tough living in the USA compared to living under Franco eh? Tell you what , quit your whining and move to somewhere more dictatorial then
The US, which I've spent long periods of time in but decided not to move to, is way more dictatorial than Franco was. Franco's regime was simple: while in Spain, don't speak out of line and pay a passing respect to Catholic values. As for the US, it's pretty much respect US trade policy (which includes bombardment with US culture) or leave the planet.
Well, I should be careful, because in earlier decades Spain was sponsored at arm's length for its passionate hatred of the USSR and in later decades propped up through heavy investment by US corporations (nothing like cheap labour!). But the Spanish had the buffer against US culture that was its own petty dictator.
If you think that having alloidal title, i.e. a piece of paper, is necessary to become an independent thinker then you're engaging in such arbitrary non sequitur that I'm not sure whether you're trolling.
But, FWIW, there are way fewer such titles today than there were two millennia ago, and the owners of such privilege work together more than ever. Fee simple is effectively rent from the government.
One cannot simultaneously open his mind through philosophy and close his mind by relentlessly pursuing one outcome. There is no false dichotomy.
You remain dense. Pursuing technocracy is not the same as pursuing improved technology (while operating under one or more philosophies less stupid than technocracy).
Today's West suffers the same problem you do: believing technology<=>technocracy. Whence banking crisis (surely these clever bankers are doing what's right for us?), whence surveillance society (surely these clever politicians are protecting us?), etc. Technology is a tool. Technocracy is a proto-philosophy based on dominance by those with the power to harness technology.
You do realise that technocracy is essentially government by those who believe themselves to be intellectually strong, yes? Epitomised by Wernher von Braun, it's really just an application of "might makes right".
Since /. vaguely represents middle class America, I'm not surprised to see it enjoying so much support, but "ones that work" has a very specific definition of "work": working to ensure the domination of the intellectually strong and the continued willingness of those under them to serve. That's all technocracy is.
What do you think happens today to the average blue collar worker who suddenly decides he's not willing to play society's game? Which of today's government and the Lord of the Dark Ages you are so keen on generalising to everywhere-before-1900 has more resources to catch that man? If a man today, in the middle of the US, considers gathering a group of men to start an uprising to fix the ills of local, regional or national government, do you think he is more or less likely to succeed than a man five hundred years ago?
Put another way, as the world descends toward global surveillance and control, what is it about modern medicine (assuming you can afford it) that will make life worth living?
Well, reasoning is formalised by logic which is today usually regarded as a branch of mathematics. And reasoning is a requirement to practice philosophy. (N.B. even if you can somehow argue that you can come up with some philosophy without reasoning, you cannot practice philosophy in the general sense without reasoning.)
Moreover, mathematics in the most general sense is about formalising pattern-matching skills: recognising when and how to generalise. This crosses into philosphical (not mathematical) induction, well-understood as far back as Newton in justifying his theory of gravitation but little understood by dilettantes centuries later.
I maintain, then, that mathematics forms a basis for philosophy, regardless of those smartass xkcd comics. If you want you can turn it into a semantics game and argue that logic and philosophical induction are "not mathematics, but philosophy", and it is fruitful to argue whether either logic or philosophical induction can be justified without philosophy. But the same applies to anything, and the tools exist in their own right.
Oh, the "we're free because of the First Amendment" fallacy.
Here's an anecdote from my history book: half of my family comes from fascist Spain, my grandfather a bootmaker and my father asked to do the "backbreaking labo(u)r in the fields" as a boy that everyone likes soundbiting. It seems that lacking the right to whine and be ignored didn't affect either their boldness or sense of freedom nearly as much as today's centralised and surveilled management of corporation and culture.
Philosophy is the path by which every man continually asks questions of his condition and can thereby strive to improve it. It is something practiced while living, not instead of living (as "pursuit of happiness" is the ongoing enjoyment of happiness, not the singular and final goal of happiness). You may as well argue that man should not breathe because people who breathe are wasting their time only breathing when they should be doing other things.
Philosophy does not give a single solution to the world's ills and it does not force you to do anything or to make others subordinate to your will. I'm not sure what you're afraid of, but it's not philosophy.
You can't think really hard about anything without syllogism. Try it.
So over the past two millennia we have cut the working day by 1/3rd and doubled the average lifespan at birth (if you ignore infant mortality, our lifespan hasn't increased that impressively).
Meanwhile we have turned the majority of Western humans from independent men into chair-warming consumers singing in lockstep for trinkets. We've made up for the opportunity to live a life of leisure surrounded by virtually infinite resources by blasting our population beyond 6 billion.
Technocracy is for the lazy man who wishes to be controlled and for the fascist who wishes to control others. The technocrat only has to think about one thing. But philosophy regards technology as one of many tools, not as a master. The philosopher-ruler (for philosophy is a basis for living, not an alternative) must not let prejudice cause him to dismiss the possibility that he can do better and for more.
It's time to stop posting.
OK, define philosophy without logic.
The brain can be trained and the processes of problem-solving can be generalised - see Polya's How to Solve It. But it doesn't help much to just read the book: you've got to practice, and practice, and practice some more. You must make mistakes and learn from them. You must be prepared to accept multiple inputs rather than merely those which reinforce your strengths and/or prejudices. You must sometimes, as the old 9/11 troll used to say, get some perspective - don't count the angels on a pinhead while Rome burns, even while the most secure of academic positions involves the former and there's such an alluring spirit of mental masturbation in many disciplines and departments.
Meanwhile a good teacher has spent enough decades on some area that he knows both where to provide you hints on specific complex problems and which direction to guide you in when you're contemplating your whole professional life. But, again, don't just choose the teacher who happens to share your academic and ethical prejudices.
Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter.
Windows, Christianity and Britney Spears also succeeded on technical merit and social benefit.
It's funny to see geeks having been popularised so much over the last decade that the lowest common denominator gaggle together and mock others as they were once bullied by jocks in high school. Therapy, perhaps?
Yes, the lack of people willing (able?) to think is always a problem.
Right, two things:
(1) Embedded != low level, so your whole post is a straw man;
(2) Most embedded devices unnecessarily working on top of a bloated JVM are shit anyway (see AC's post for Android case).
Your sig is quite correct, though :-).
It must be because the entire software industry as it has existed since the 1970s is stupider than last year's crop of CS graduates, huh?
LISP is not suitable for building a traditional OS. (Its descendants may be suitable for a LISP Machine / emacs / other managed style OS, but we're not using them.)
LISP is not suitable for straight high performance numerical computation: FORTRAN and then C/C++ have done well there in the general case, but you might want specialised numerical packages.
LISP is not always the best choice for modelling: Mathematica is good for what I do, IME.
But, yes, much of the rest of the software industry of the last couple of decades is comprised of idiots producing bloated crap, not having got much further conceptually than "I NEED THE COMPUTER TO DO THIS TEN TIMES SO I WRITE A FOR I=1 TO 10 LOOP". Whence Java. Do you disagree?
assertion that newer (or, in his/her/its terms, 'more high level')
You are dense. LISP, Mathematica and Prolog are examples of "more high level" languages than Java. They all allow you to think about the problem rather than how the computer needs to process data because none of them are paradigmatically borne of Bjarne Stroustrup raping Alan Kay. They're all older than Java too.
We haven't seen a company more keen to take control away from you since IBM. If there's one thing Google will not do, it's create something for real people to solve real problems.
At best, they'll offer to solve sufficiently simple problems for you. Give a man a fish.
Java has always essentially been Visual BASIC with a less annoying syntax. It's usually been suitable where Visual BASIC is suitable. Windowbuilder is just a friendly reminder of this.
Meanwhile, people doing real low-level or time-critical work use assembler/C/C++, and people doing real high-level work don't go for a primitive imperative language which looks like C/C++ with training wheels.
So it's OK to call someone a money-grubbing Jew because Jews, not bound by Christian tradition, traditionally fronted for wealthy landowners? Never mind that usury / advanced fee fraud has occurred well before and more often outside Jewry / Nigeria than within, Jews popularised usury so we need to associate them with it.