(Part 3) Top products from r/iamverysmart

>"The sum of two positive numbers is always greater than either number"

This "axiom" is a bit silly since you'd expect to be able to deduce what is essentially the triangle inequality from a more fundamental set of axioms. But hey listen, if you want to hold that as one of your own personal axioms and deduce some logical truths from that then more power to you. You can do math however the hell you want to do it.

(Quick side-note: I'd be careful in how you extend some of the "rules" for summation from finite to infinite sums because it doesn't always work! For example, while commutativity is a trivial property of finite sums, it turns out that commutativity does not hold (in general) when you consider infinite sums!)

>Fair enough. Which definition of limit would you like to use to justify the -1/12 limit?

The sum of the naturals does not approach -1/12 in any limit. Again, if you want to define "sum" to be the limit of the sequence of partial sums then thats totally fine. My point is that you can produce useful and powerful results by considering other more general meanings to the word "sum".

>That statement in quotation marks doesn't give you a basis to justify saying "sum of naturals is equal to -1/12". Of course, as humans and mathematicians we can attribute meaning wherever we find necessary.

Honestly I don't really understand what you mean here.

>Along the standard definitions of sums and convergence, yes people did.

You've heard people say that the sum of the naturals converges to -1/12? That's silly. You can prove that the sum of the natural is a divergent series very easily!

>As of right now, the whole idea of sum and equal to are undefined by you.

I gave you a whole list of "sums" to choose from! If you want me to pick just one then I'd perhaps pick the Zeta function regularization?

>And it's you whose trying to say that "nature thinks -1/12 is the sum of naturals". That's quite a bold statement.

I know, right! But at the end of the day its an experimentally validated statement. EDIT: I don't like how I worded this. Nature doesn't "think" anything, I think. It'd be more justified to say that QED analytically continues divergent sums to finite answers.

>I'm going to assume the scientists were using the standard definitions and that their theoretical value (sum of naturals) is infinity.

This just isn't true. Instead throwing up our hands and saying "oh, nature has given us a divergent series, time to look for a new theory" we figured out a way to make sense of this divergent answer. Whether you like it or not analytically continuing the zeta function and substituting in -1/12 for the sum of the naturals gave the right answer. Does that mean that the sum of the naturals converges to -1/12? No. Does that mean that the sum of the naturals approaches -1/12 in some limit? Of course not. Does it mean that the sum of the naturals equals -1/12? Reasonable people could say 'of course not, that goes against the entire field of mathematics!' OR 'well.. I just substituted in -1/12 for the sum of the naturals and I got the right answer. Perhaps there is some sense deep connection between these two quantities! Could a new definition of 'equality' yield more insight to this relationship?' Both are reasonable statements – I'm just saying that the latter is a more productive way of looking at things.

>Well I was under the impression that limits were calculus. Okay, what other meaningful areas of mathematics should we bring in here?

Mathematical physics. Wikipedia claims that renormalization is used in self-similar (fractal) geometry but I am not familiar with that field to know any examples.

>Keep in mind what you've been doing here. You've been saying there are other areas of mathematics and other definitions but not saying what specifically they are. I'd like you to start doing that please.

Hopefully I've 'name dropped' a sufficient amount of fields for you. If not then I would check out this book on a bit more information on the topic. Alternatively, if you're a fan of free youtube lectures, Carl Bender has an amazing lecture series on mathematical physics that sheds some light on the topic of assigning meaningful values to divergent series.

At the end of the day I'd like to reiterate my initial point: reasonable people can disagree about these topics and thats ok. My entire point here is that one should never be to extreme with their views on math (or really anything). If we applied your exact outlook on the sum of divergent series on the introduction to complex variables then we'd be doomed to have fields such as complex analysis or quantum mechanics forever out of reach. Being accepting of new outlandish ideas could lead to profound results!

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS OP?

Hi everyone. I'm the red person in this post. I absolutely love how the OP here decided to include this one comment out of context and failed to include the fact that I'm a motherfucking linguist.

The book I'm using to learn grammar is called Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar by Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington. This book is what's called a "reference grammar." It is not, in fact, a textbook, it is a book aimed at linguists to be able to understand grammatical concepts of other languages in extreme detail.

How extreme, you may ask? There's an entire chapter dedicated to a single verb. It's not really intended to be used as a textbook at all. Every chapter consists one to two paragraph descriptions of an aspect of the language, followed by a handful of examples.

This type of book isn't particularly accessible to the average person because it's very dense with technical terminology, and it goes into way more detail than a beginner needs. As I go through it, I'm skipping massive chunks because I know how to identify what's not important to learn right now and can skip it. There's probably a decent chunk of the population that can't remember what an adverb is from when they learned it in high school, so I don't think a chapter section entitled "Initiator-Oriented or Action-Oriented Descriptive Adverbials" will be of much use to them.

The book I'm using for pronunciation is called The Phonology of Standard Chinese by San Duanmu. Do you know how detailed this book is? They don't even start talking about tone until page 255! Tone is a pretty important beginner concept in Chinese, though, don't ya think? But my specialization in linguistics is phonetics/phonology, so I love reading about the detailed little aspects of how the sound system works.

Hey OP, this sub is for posting high schoolers who took a basic physics course and post statuses about how they've been thinking about quantum mechanics and coming up with great ideas. Not about people who were trained in a field using the technical knowledge they learned in that field to learn something related to that field. Seriously, fuck you.

This one out of context comment might sound very condescending, but black is actually a very close friend of mine. He knows I'm a linguistics graduate student, and he knows I study cross-linguistic differences in speech acquisition, most notably between English speakers and Mandarin speakers. That's why he didn't say "Any specific textbook recommendations for Mandarin," he said "Any specific recommendations about learning Mandarin?"

Here's the full conversation for anyone interested.

I post statuses about languages and language learning all the time, as well as articles about it. I'm insanely passionate about linguistics and language learning, and I've decided to dedicate my life to it by going to grad school and hopefully becoming a professor one day. Anyone who knows me knows this. Fuck you OP, if I ever find out who you are, we are never fucking speaking again.

Also, for anyone interested in why all of the dates in my image say "recently," check out the awesome "Demetricator" browser extension. It removes all the numbers from Facebook!

>It's a problem because it's not backed by any real research

It doesn't need to be backed by research. It's a bunch of people reporting their own behaviors. If you don't need to file for a scientific study when you tell someone your favorite color, or that you like steak with potatoes. People don't need 3rd parties researching them to know their own sexualities.

>People on blogs and internet forums made all of this up.

This isn't a problem.

>It's completely an issue that the language is not as reputable as the language used by scientists, because people treat it as such.

Again, I haven't seen this.

> Language used in science refers to specific things, used to clear up ambiguity. Language in the internet queer community creates more ambiguity every time it defines something new.

This is subjective.

>It's a continuum and trying to define everyone individually by it not only oversimplifies each individual's sexuality, but overcomplicates the terminology used, and overcomplicating language greatly reduces understanding.

As long as you can communicate effectively to the person you wish to convey a message to, there's no problem with using complicated language. All of the definitions that I've seen so far-- demisexual, homoromantic, etc. are extremely easy for me to wrap my head around.

I can understand someone not getting it, but that doesn't mean that a system that makes sense to so many people and gives comfort to so many people and is helpful to so many people should be tossed out because some people don't understand it.

I don't think the words are trying to describe everyone on the spectrum, because the definitions are so general. It's implied that there are going to be individual differences between people.

>By the current terminology used by this community, I would identify as a cisgendered bisexual heteroromantic gray-a queer. But my sexuality is much more multidimensional than that, so this oversimplifies it. Yet it puts me into a bunch of categories when I could just say "my sexuality is something like 60% traditional and 40% out of the norm", so it overcomplicates it at the same time.

No one can force you to use these terms to describe yourself. If you don't like it, don't do it. 9/10 the people talking about this stuff are strangers on the internet so it's not like they can force you to do what they do and it's probably not productive to look down on them for doing their own thing either.

>And if you could link me to some scholarly articles which actually acknowledge things like demisexuality, I would actually be interested in seeing them, because I can find nothing but blog posts.

Like people say, it's a new concept so you're going to be hard pressed to find academic research about it. 1. It's a new concept that only became popular in the past 5 years or so. 2. There's no money in researching it. It's esoteric. I had a history class where I had to do research on a bunch of different artists. Their works were hanging in museums, but there was nothing online about them. Doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means they aren't popular.

Nevertheless, I was still able to find some textbooks that go over this stuff. Part of me is glad to go and bring this stuff to you, but another part of me is kind of annoyed because whether or not it appears in a text-book, especially in light of what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, has no bearing on whether it is a real thing. The requirement for it to be mentioned in studies is even more confusing considering that so much sociological research on sexual-orientation is based on self-reporting. There are no academic reports about /u/MissInkFTW. Should I assume you don't exist? Another part of me is annoyed because it's pretty easy for me to find these papers. It's unfair to be dismissive when it appears that you're not doing any serious work to find research that supports or dismisses your opinion. :/

In paging through these, I've found that most academic books actually go a lot further than common internet activist lingo does, ie. not only homoromantic, but homoemotional, homoaffectional, etc. These aren't all used to describe sexual orientation though.

There's a limit to what I can personally find and share since I don't have a subscription to any academic journals/sites. :/



Asexuality as a Spectrum

• thesis: http://qmss.columbia.edu/storage/McClave%20Caroline.pdf (Mentions National Surveys of Sexual Attitude and Lifestyles in 1990 and 2000 (NATSAL I and II) from the UK, and Towards Better Sexual Health (TBSH) in 2000)
  
  
• paper: Compulsory Sexuality by Elizabeth F. Emens (focuses on asexuality but goes over gray-asexuality and demi-sexuality)
  
  
  For Homoromanticism
  
  
• book: Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example
  
  
• dissertation/pdf: Shelley's closet: Sexuality, history, Romanticism
  
  
  other
  
  
• book: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, and Sexuality through History [6 volumes] (v. 1-6) (I can't find a look-inside of this one. Listed for asexuality references.)
  
  Maybe this list will be longer one day. These articles are interesting but there's too much stuff that's just behind paywalls and I'm bored and I'm done.

It's a common occurrence in mathematics to come across some Greek you don't know, which then means that you'll have to do "the usual yoga" -- make up exercises and examples until you've worked yourself into whatever you're looking at, as opposed to expecting to understand everything by reading about it.

From what you say I infer that you can do and have done that, as such I doubt you can really put yourself into the mother's shoes -- because this fundamental stumbling block of not learning a thing because you believe you can't ever learn it vanishes once you've had the experience that with some yoga, everything can suddenly very well work out.

How can you invest time and effort into understanding something if you haven't learned that you can understand things that way?

That's btw also why not few people who aced maths in school drop out of maths at university: The smarter you are and the easier and "obvious" things for you are in school, the less likely are you to actually develop that skill. If then on top of that you're arrogant enough to miss the pointers your professors throw at you, you've set yourself up for failure.

Raw intelligence without grit and the wisdom of how to apply it to things amounts to little. And makes you quite likely to end up linked on this sub. Have grit and sufficient wisdom, however, and it doesn't matter much how much raw intelligence backs it up, you'll excel in one way or the other.

---

Thinking about it, I guess /s would've been a better choice than :) in my previous post. I do get it, I just have enough practice to usually overlook that path.

It already exists: The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words.

There was a thread about it on here not too long ago. Can't find it now. Anyway the book takes your normal intelligible English and shits out incomprehensible grandiloquent sesquipedaloquiaciousness. It's glorious.

As it should be. Actors of violence shouldn't be given popularity, as it only succeeds in encouraging more like them (One thing I learned from The Gift of Fear)

I can't find the book where it's mentioned on my shelf but I'm almost positive it's this one. And now I wish that I could find it, as I read it like 10 years ago and can't remember any citations dude made about it.

So, in short, you have no reason to believe me and I don't know if I believe myself anymore :(

I'm currently reading Why does E=mc^2 by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw and, whilst my brain is melting into a small puddle, it clearly does...

I won't pretend I understand most of the maths (even when they try to explain it in simple terms) but experimentation clearly shows the theory to be correct.

It always seems to me that these loons don't understand how scientists think at all. Scientists love being wrong! Every time they're wrong, it opens up a new thing for them to explore.

? Am i smart already?

lol I literally use the term "quantum physics" right here, in one of my most upvoted posts from 2 years ago. And I'm not alone, here's a textbook titled "Quantum Physics" written by a physicist with tenure at Harvard. And here's Ed Witten quoted using the term at a conference.

What kind of physics did you study for your PHD? I'm guessing it wasn't anything quantum.

here

These types of books aren't entirely uncommon, unfortunately

> "Leviathon Series"

acktchually

Can confirm, had to buy the illustrated edition just to understand.

Actually, his point about Asian men isn't completely wrong.

http://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-When-Think-Ones-Looking/dp/0385347375

Asian mean are ranked as the least attractive, at least through the data accumulated through OKCupid.

What the hell is up with the insults? I understand what they're saying, I just have a problem with the way they say it. I doubt that anyone outside of Harvard or Yale has thoughts in wordy language, and I highly doubt that people who spend hours on reddit (like you and me) talk like that. Why should we pretty up our language, when we can easily say what we mean? I recommend this book if you want to hear how good a genius sounds without fluffy words. This debate is very subjective, so let's keep it light, and not come to conclusions about each other.

>Evolution is inherent in unparalleled chao

Okay, this person (or bot?) is obviously churning out fake-deep bullshit, but...Stuart Kauffman? Is that you?

But you said yourself that the author rejects the term. The point about prose novels starting out serial is valid and totally solid though.

I think you might be surprised by the quality of some graphic novels though. Habibi, Tardi's 'It Was the War of the Trenches' & 'Goddamn This War!' , Fun Home, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, This One Summer

> Israel has already given Egypt a significant amount of territory (c.f. The Sinai peninsula, despite its Jewish holy cite and natural ressources) - that worked wonders.

They're generous because they gave the Egyptians their own land back?

Its signifiance to Jews means nothing; Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims too.

> There are more Arab nations than there are Jewish nations - a vote from the international community will not be impartial.

Zionist influence in the US is beyond anything the entire Arab population can muster, and this US power (which protects Israel and its war crimes) is where Israel gets its power. In fact, Israel is in violation of so many UN resolutions (including the current mass murder and indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilians) without a care in the world. Even Jews (Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, etc.) are speaking out against Israeli terrorism.

> the Jordan valley would soon become a tunnel for terrorists affiliated with Hamas/Hezbollah/etc to raise all hell

No hell they've raised or will raise can compare to the current devastation Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian civilians. In fact, the reason Palestinians are picking up arms is because of Israeli war crimes and massacres, which have never stopped since Israel was created. You would be making an achievement if you could name a decade that Israel did not commit a massacre -- all in the name of "self-defense", of course.