(no subject)

[theweaselking]

I love the internet.

We have been given absurd rules to apply to this weird concept, such as: a negative number multiplied by a negative number equals a positive number. How can it be that a negative number, which by the definition mathematicians have given us, is less than zero, when multiplied by another number that is less than zero, become a positive number? It has to be pure, unadulterated nonsense.

Comments

[flemco.livejournal.com]

HOLY SHIT YOU FOUND RON PAUL'S PERSONAL BLOG

[jdarkwulf.livejournal.com]

Wow. It started off as what seemed like a genuine (if misguided) commentary on their inability to wrap their head around the concepts, and then degenerated into conspiracy theory.

[prince-eric.livejournal.com]

Big Deal. Someone who has problems with basic math? A rank amateur.

I give you Gene Ray and TimeCube.

Accept no substitutes.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Wait, are you saying that the Wisest Human is a nutter?

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Ah, Timecube. The classics are always the best.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. Managed to be the first and so far only person to get a perl module dropped from CPAN. He submitted it, a member pointed it out to the rest of us, and there was a great sound of WTF? across the globe.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ooooh.

What did it do?

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

As you might expect, not much.

I did download it before it got deleted (as you already suspected. I was singing the base line in the WTF chorus).

Let's start with the README, which has a very short summary:

He has demonstrated absolute unrefutable
proof of 4 simultaneous 24 hour days with
in a single rotation of Earth. No other man
or god can claim such Truth manifestation.
The academic brainwashed mind is corrupt
and can't comprehend Cubic magnificence.

Uh-huh. Hmm, "Copyright (C) 2007 Joseph Evers" I may get hit with some lawsuit.

Anyways, there are a lot of comment blocks like that in the module itself, including a tasteful ascii-art drawing of a plane crashing into a building with ascii-art figures holding up an ascii-art banner blaming jews. The ascii-art is used as strings for creating simple constants, and there's a pointless calculation involving the ord() function and your uid, which is of course terribly useful if you're on Windows. Not that it'd be useful on Unix either.

Oh, did I mention the ascii-art swastika which is also ord()-ed into the calculation? Or the variables and functions that have names like "jews" and "humanBrain" and "dongers"?

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

I'd be careful about leaving the copyright notice in more because I'd be afraid I'd be credited with the rank nonsense.

[heraldofchaos.livejournal.com]

"Santa & God debase women
as if non-existing opposites.
How evil unto their mothers. "

o

m

g

cant stop laughing.

[heraldofchaos.livejournal.com]

for those of you that dont want to read thru the painful rants and stuff, here he is in the the famous interview on tech tv....

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1811406843328925198&q=Time+Cube+on+TechTV&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Isn't that a GREAT feeling?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Well, kind of. When you're just talking numbers, sure.

But when you're talking *phases*, not only do you not care if it cancels, but it's often more useful if it doesn't cancel. It's some REALLY neat stuff, being able to treat signals as vectors rotating on a complex plane.

[fearmeforiampink]

My favourite quote is: ""Pure" in this sense does begin to approach Purity from a Pure dimension"

Reminds me of something I read long long ago, that started off as something about how the Nephillim might be memories of the Neanderthals, but then suddenly at the end goes off on one as it declares that aliens came down, the Neanderthals were their halfbreed children with earth women, and they were all killed off by what is remembered in the bible as the flood.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

The idea of questioning basic principles is a good one. The problem is that in the case of mathematics those basic principles are so tightly ingrained that most of us never even think to question them.

The poster is quite correct regarding negative numbers and the number zero. They don't exist in any real capacity, and there are thus rules regulating their use which are there to limit their ability to mess everything up. A division by zero is the basis for a very simple proof that 1 = 2, though it obvuscates the division via algebra.

That's the only reason those rules exist, because they mess things up. Until we find those flaws through demonstrating clearly that they contradict more basic principles, we don't know there's a problem.

When dealing with zero and basic addition, that's easy to see. However, note the difference in complexity between the basic concepts (addition and zero) and compare them to the proof which is at least several orders of magnitude more complex than the basic concepts themselves. Now advance mathematical theory to it's current state. That same number of orders of magnitude of complexity difference to create the proof will be required to demonstrate problems with more advanced theories. Because of the striking complexity involved in those theories themselves, it's not only possible but quite likely that we no longer have the ability to do them. Thus our ability to find the errors in more modern mathematical theory is becoming increasingly limited as time passes.

Which isn't to say that we shouldn't use such things, but that we need to always remember that mathematics carries the same assumptions as every other science, and that they need to be questioned in exactly the same manner, even if you learned them in the first grade.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The poster is quite correct regarding negative numbers and the number zero. They don't exist in any real capacity, and there are thus rules regulating their use which are there to limit their ability to mess everything up.

Uh, no. Zero is very much a real number and a real concept, as are negative numbers.

Take, for example, the number of muffins in my hands right now. There is a real number, zero, to express the real concept of "no muffins".

If I dig three holes in my lawn, I could say I have three holes, or I could say I have -3 holes worth of dirt. Both of those are perfectly valid ways of looking at things, expressing perfectly real concepts.

As for rules regarding their use... there is ONE special case rule, and that is that division by zero gives a meaningless result. Not "infinity", not "an infinitely large number", a meaningless result. The question you've just asked, after all, is how many pieces of size *zero* can you divide a finite quantity into?

Everything else is not a "special rule" for negative numbers or zero. It's simply a logical extension of the existing rules for positive numbers, applied identically.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I inherently disagree. The absence of an object cannot be expressed in the quantity of that object, because that object doesn't apply in the first place. But that's such a low level discussion that we can't even really discuss it; it's so simple as to be more a belief than a cognitive process.

The rule for zero is simple, because zero is a simple concept. Compound several thousand years of mathematical advancement with an increasing trend of complexity, and the rules we now need to recognize the existence of are ridiculously more complex than the divide by zero rule. Add in the multiple layers of theories and practices atop one another, and it becomes increasingly difficult to see how the divide by zero rule applies to a more advanced theory.

As far as negative numbers being positive numbers treated identically, that is incorrect as directly proven by the existence of imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers have spawned an entire school of mathematics and has carried over into both other sciences and more practical applications like engineering.

Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be using these concepts, but that in doing so we need to recognize they are not set in stone as many of us seem to believe. We have made assumptions, and those assumptions come with limitations that become harder and harder to see the more layers there are abstracting us from them.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

holy god your username is so descriptive

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting comment. Would you care to elaborate on it?

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Because the comment I was responding to was Gene Ray-esque.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

In what capacity? I've stated that mathematics uses basic principles that must be questioned like those of every other science, and I've given examples to reinforce that statement.

[heraldofchaos.livejournal.com]

actually, i understand his issue.

his basic formation of math in his understanding is based in a 4 dimensional "reality" his apples are apples.

he states himself that the "metaphysics" of even the concept of "infinite nothing" makes his stomic turn. which is understandable as its a pretty heavy concept.

while basic principles of math are easily usable in "reality" those are only the foundations of the science/art/philosophy of math as a whole.

his poor little brain, cant deal with the bigger picture, its too locked in a view of real. so inapropreatly applying ocams razor to the issue, he decided that the only answer is a conspiracy.

theres a reason why alot of the early mathmations were also philosiphers, they were the only ones with the mental flexability to deal with the concepts.

[thette.livejournal.com]

Yes, I kept thinking when I read that about the various stages of mathematics I read about in Irving Adler's The Giant Book of Mathematics when I was a kid. I don't remember them exactly, but I think they were:
*The shepherder's math, which has only positive integrers. (You can't, after all, have less than zero sheep or half a sheep.)
*The builder's math, which has positive real numbers.
*The bookkeeper's math, which has positive and negative real numbers.
*The engineer's math, which has complex numbers.

I think I missed one kind of math with positive rational numbers, but I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, the guy seems to be stuck on shepherder level.

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

The note of "A" vibrates at 440 Hz. Following the theory of negative numbers, if you were to play an A and a negative A (-440 Hz) simultaneously, they should cancel one another and you would hear nothing. You might think this is true if you have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the rules about negative numbers. However, the two will not cancel each other because there is no way of reproducing a negative Hz.

If you were to hit an A note at 440 Hz, and then hit another A note at 440 Hz that had its polarity shifted... Let me take a step back.

If you were to look at the picture of a sound... well, if you were to look at a picture of silence, it would be a flat line, at zero, no movement. Sound is vibration, movement back and forth. If you were to look at a graph charting the movement of a 440 Hz pure tone, you would see a sine wave going up and down over the "zero" line over time, going into the positive and negative.

First of all, this is a place where positive numbers would definitely exist. Now, if I had a 440 Hz wave that started at the origin, at zero, and then went positive (then negative, then positive, etc.), and then I played a second 440 Hz wave at exactly the same amplitude that also started at the origin but first went negative, acting as a mirror image of the first wave with the origin as the line of symmetry, and then I played these two 440 Hz wave together, they would indeed cancel each other out and make zero.

So yes, the negative 440 Hz wave does exist. Not that anyone who graduated high school actually needed that explained, but being a music grad, that one paragraph just made me particularly chuckle.