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Post by kungfuzu on Dec 27, 2019 9:10:31 GMT -8
I like Adam's quote. It sounds like a formula for raising good citizens and maybe even a future George Washington.
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Post by timothylane on Dec 27, 2019 10:02:24 GMT -8
Adams had his personality flaws, but he was a sensible man. Jefferson was a brilliant man, but not as sensible as Adams. Despite having much better financial prospects than Adams, and probably as good as Washington's, he was always desperate for more money. (Part of this was his bibliomania, which I find it hard to criticize someone for.) His idealism regarding slavery fell afoul of his need for money.
Adams also made a comment (unfortunately, I don't recall it precisely and wikiquotes doesn't have a selection of Adams quotes) to the effect that his generation studied war so that the next could study politics and the next generation could study the arts and sciences. It worked out, too, which is why so much science and especially so many inventions have come from America. It helps that our Constitution provides for patents and copyrights precisely to encourage them.
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Post by kungfuzu on Dec 27, 2019 15:43:42 GMT -8
Brad got me looking at quotes and I liked this one from George Washington, which describes the result of leftism and, its actual if often unacknowledged relative, libertarianism.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Dec 27, 2019 21:47:14 GMT -8
Yes, that's a good quote.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Dec 29, 2019 11:01:10 GMT -8
I’ve decided to try at least on month of The Great Courses channel. I found another series of lectures by the personable Professor Tanton called ThePower of Mathematical Visualization. Although sometimes he goes a little fast (or simply skips steps) and loses me, I’m more or less able to stay with him. The last episode involved doing story problems in a visual form. It was rather good exercise for the brain. He has another series of lectures on geometry that I already mentioned. This has much more math in it and thus is a little harder follow in places — and is far less interesting (in places) because I have no use for actually learning the math. But the appeal, especially in this other series, is getting behind the scenes and seeing what the numbers mean and not just learning rote formulas. And in this endeavor, in particular (the other series is full of this stuff too), he is quite successful so far. But these lecture series tend to all have 24 or more episodes or so. They can be a marathon. I ran into one such visualization exercise regarding the geometry of circles. The thought experiment goes like this: If you took a rope and strung it so that it was snug around the equator of the earth, how much would this slacken the rope if you added ten feet to it? The circumference of the earth at the equator is about 24,901 miles. Adding ten feet to the rope isn’t much. So the math question (using π r2, etc.) is how much would that ten feet of slack raise the rope above the surface of the earth if you evened out all that slack? Take a guess before peeking at the answer: about 19” I figured about 1/10,000th of an inch or something along that scale. I was a bit off.
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Post by timothylane on Dec 29, 2019 11:39:32 GMT -8
That's an interesting computation. Circumference is pi times diameter, so adding 10 feet to the circumference would add just over 3 feet to the diameter. I assume the height above the Earth would be half of that, since it would be raised equally on both sides of any diameter. That would be just under 1.6 feet.
Looking at the answer after that, I see it's 19 inches, which is just under 1.6 feet, so I did compute it right. I think you went wrong (I started to do the same thing) by thinking of the percentage of change.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Dec 29, 2019 14:31:50 GMT -8
Wonderful. You’ve visualized it via a less circuitous route. Circumference divided by the diameter equals pi (3.141592…) — the basic fact of a circle. From that, the other formulas derive.
Professor Tanton presented the question from another angle and sets you down the road to thinking this gap will be minuscule, which is indeed what seems intuitive.
But your method gets you there without the distraction of expectations. Diameter = Circumference/π (π= 3.14159…)
Therefore, if you make the circumference of any circle ten feet larger (as Tanton notes, this is as true of the planet Jupiter or the orbits of an electron around a nucleus), that diameter will increase by 10 ft./π which is an extra 3.18 ft. in diameter or (for our purposes here) and extra. 3.18/2 ft. of “slack” in the rope (the extra radius of the circle). The equates to about 1.59 feet or 19.9 inches. As Tanton notes, this is enough extra room to crawl easily under that extended rope.
But approached from the other side, about how much “slack” that 10 feet of extra rope would add to a rope that is already 24,901 miles long is at least intuitively unexpected.
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Post by timothylane on Dec 29, 2019 14:53:36 GMT -8
I know what you mean about unexpected. I was originally thinking in terms of 10 feet as a proportion of the total circumference (just under 135 million feet). But as I tried figuring out how to apply that percentage to the total diameter, it hit me that the distributive property was the answer: a (b+c) = ab + ac. I think I first learned that in 8th grade math, certainly a year later in Algebra I. In this case, a would be 1/pi and b and c would be the original circumference and 10 feet.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Dec 30, 2019 9:43:46 GMT -8
I watched a little more of the Gnosticism lecture series. My summary is based on what this (presumably) leftwing (but otherwise congenial) professor’s views are. I know little about Gnosticism. And it’s fair to assume that any lecture regarding Judaism or Christianity will be underpinned with a hidden glee at showing that it’s all a bunch of bunk. But basing things on what this lecturer has presented, I can understand the appeal of Gnosticism. In short, they apparently believe(d?) that the God of the bible is not the real god but a lesser god, and a malicious one at that. The “gnosis” part of it I don’t find all that different from any other brand of Christianity. There is a sense that God is ineffable and yet knowable on some level. But Gnosticism reinterprets (or one could say “interprets correctly”) the Bible in terms of a lesser God having botched things up. And this lesser God has been actively working ever since Genesis to keep mankind from realizing that the God of the Bible is not the real god.
For instance, it was thought that it was a sneaked-in emissary of the Real Highest God (in the form of an eagle, not a snake) who tried to get Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree in order that they may come to understand the deception of the false god. The Flood happened not because mankind had become corrupt but because too many of them were catching on to the nature of this false god and had to be eliminated. The Real God intervened and saved Noah and a select few others. The Left wins in any discussion such as this because it shows (or reveals) religion to be just a bunch of interpretive stories that you can mix and match in any old way, therefore they are just stories told to placate the sensibilities of various groups of people. And I don’t have a bone to pick with that, per se. But what you’ll never see from academia is someone critiquing their own myths as just a bunch of stories that, for whatever reason, are pleasing for a bunch of people to believe. In the case of the Gnostics, their intuition that the God of the bible is a lesser one is not without reason. In orthodox Christianity, the fault of this world is taken upon ourselves as “Original Sin.” I’ve never bought that notion. It makes much more sense to me to say that the parameters of this world lead inevitably to the dog-eat-dog world that we live in. A lesser god? I can believe that. How did a lesser god come to create the world? Well, you have to delved into a bunch of odd theology that might make the Scientologist creed sound reasonable by comparison. But basically they believed that some of the basic products of God’s mind came in male/female pairs. In this case, the female paired with Wisdom decided to go of on her own and create the universe. It was a botched job from the get-go because this lesser god wasn’t fully in sync with The Greatest God. But this Greatest and Real God, after the fact, did try to set things straight, infusing the world, here and there, with Himself so that, with help (primarily the Gnostic teachings) one could find one’s way back to the Real God. Jesus, of course, was one of The Real God’s methods for doing so. Strange? Yes. But any more strange than a good god killing all the people on the earth but Noah? Not really. To me, the basic overall of the Gnostic view makes more sense even if the details are a little wacky.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jan 8, 2020 8:25:18 GMT -8
I finally watched all of the lectures by mathematicians James Tanton that I cared to. He has some interesting stuff. He’s one of the few who does on The Great Courses channel.
I tried watching a lecture series on archeology. The problem with nearly all of these lecturers is that they won’t get to the point. I canceled the service. There just is very little worth watching. But, hey, I tried. And we (royal we) are here to serve you. Even if you are the geekiest enthusiast for knowledge, I can’t recommend this channel.
And it’s not because of some of the liberal content. It’s because of no-content. These lecturers just can’t make things interesting. They can’t get to a point. If I’m doing a lecture on archeology, I’d skip the preliminaries and get right to a site and maybe explain some of the basics. But this one guy just drones on and on. I can see that these “lectures” are actually little more than vanity projects for the lecturers.
With the exception of Dr. James Tanton (the Aussie mathematician) and the chick who does the series on The Black Death (which is still way too spread out but at least she does move the series along much better than most), I haven't seen anything else worth viewing.
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