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QED
3:00 PM
In philosophy and logic, the liar paradox or liar's paradox (pseudomenon in Ancient Greek), is the statement "this sentence is false". Trying to assign to this statement a classical binary truth value leads to a contradiction (see paradox). If "this sentence is false" is true, then the sentence is false, which would in turn mean that it is actually true, but this would mean that it is false, and so on ad infinitum. Similarly, if "this sentence is false" is false, then the sentence is true, which would in turn mean that it is actually false, but this would mean that it is true, and so on ...
"Gödel used [...] the liar paradox"
 
"Gödel [...] is [...] a [...] liar"
3
 
Let A and B are two known vectors in R^5. Find vectors C,D satisfying the following three conditions
1.C is parallel to D
2.D is orthogonal to A
3. B = C+D
I find that there ten unknown variables we have to find but there are 11 eleven equation and they are consistent. how is it possible??
 
@RamanaVenkata hi Ramana ) cannot believe that you asked only 8 questions at MSE
 
@RamanaVenkata Please ask it on the main site. It's not the intention of this chat to obtain faster answers to your questions...
2
 
@ZhenLin I love out-of-context omissions... :D
 
3:06 PM
@JonasTeuwen where are you? cannot see you - too foggy ))
 
@Gortaur :D. At EWI.
 
@Gortaur Hi I was away for nearly 3 weeks or so
 
@RamanaVenkata I was pointing out the same as Jonas: that you asked more questions here
 
@JonasTeuwen Okay
 
@JonasTeuwen I'm not sure that EWI exists in the current moment: cannot see the tower from 3mE
 
QED
3:09 PM
@HenningMakholm also keep in mind that your aggressive impatient attitude makes is both hard for people to admit mistakes as well as not enjoy or want to talk with you
 
Funny, we're (sort of) speaking about Gödel, then there's a user called Gardel whose gravatar is a famous picture of Fibonacci.
 
@RamanaVenkata It's possible to have any number of equations all of them consistent. E.g., write down a single equation (in say, 2 variables) and just repeat that equation desired number of times.
 
Or make a "new" one, where both the left and right hand sides have a common factor
 
@Gortaur Yes, it is quite foggy indeed...
 
3:14 PM
@JonasTeuwen: By coincidence I stumbled upon an excerpt of "Functional Analysis" by Bachman and Narici. Judging from what little I read I feel that this book is according to my liking and that it's less "basic" than Kreyszig. Do you have an opinion about that book? What about @tb?
 
@Matt I have no opinion about that book. Can you read German?
 
@JonasTeuwen: Yes.
 
Great.
 
QED
@HenningMakholm anyway I think I'm going to turn you off now because I don't see this improving
 
Then I recommend this book.
(Werner)
 
3:15 PM
@QED: Cool, how do you turn someone off?
 
Sounds threatening.
 
@Srivatsan Yeah I agree with you what you say In the question I was given A=(1,2,3,4,5) and B=(1,1/2,1/3,1/4,1/5) I am not able to see a equation which repeats.
 
@RamanaVenkata No, it doesn't have to be that way. What I gave is, ahem, an example.
 
@JonasTeuwen: In case you took this to mean that I might turn off you, you are mistaken : )
 
QED
I took it that way
 
3:17 PM
@Matt Click on a user's name; on the popup there is an "ignore" option.
 
@Matt I haven't read Bachman and Narici, btw. from your university you can download Werner from here.
 
Great. Asking for an explanation is "aggressive and impatient"; staying silent is apparently bad too.
2
You can't please everyone, I suppose.
 
@JM I want to try it (say, on you, if you don't mind =)). Can I set it back to normal after the experimenting?
 
@Matt The book I've linked is great. You do have to know some measure theory though.
 
QED
3:18 PM
regarding bullying
 
Relevant? Is this an emergency situation?
 
@tb: Thanks. @JonasTeuwen: I'm not too keen on Springer books... maybe I get both from the library and check them out and decide then.
 
@Matt What do you have against Springer books? Many of the nice ones are published by Springer!
 
@Srivatsan Yes. Click on the user name again and pick the correct option... :)
 
@JonasTeuwen Except for the yellow cover, may be =)
 
3:19 PM
@JonasTeuwen They are expensive (unless you're lucky, like moi)...
 
You can paint the cover black.
 
@JM: Thanks. And will it work both ways, i.e. will they also no longer be able to see my messages?
 
They are expensive but Wiley and so on is way more expensive.
 
I like Springer books. I wish I could have a whole shelve of these nice little yellow books...
 
@JonasTeuwen: : D
 
3:20 PM
not that the contents are necessarily very good, but it looks nice and uniform.
 
@ZhenLin I have three shelves of Springer books!
 
I like Dover books.
 
Come, experience the world without JM.
=)
 
@Matt They can see yours. They can still write, but it'll be as if the room's an echo chamber.
 
Ah, too bad it only works one way.
 
3:21 PM
@ZhenLin They don't look very uniform. The horse ("springer") is sometimes on a different height. Even with sequels to books.
 
@Matt Dover books are awesome.
 
So yesterday I read someone dislikes Kunen for the typesetting, today I read that someone can't stand Springer (I know many who can't stand Elsevier), others to LaTeXify wonderful books written with typewriters. Look at the contents for heaven's sake!
3
 
Hah, yes, that's true.
 
@tb I realised my folly. I tried reading the book. I didn't understand it. =)
 
@tb: Yes. My dislike is based on trauma. : )
 
3:22 PM
So you place the blame outside of you? :D. Cool.
 
Of course.
But admittedly: I am actually currently reading a not yet published Springer book and it's quite alright.
 
Ah, Welcome back, @JM. =)
 
The flip side being: would it be too much to ask that looking at the contents would not make my eyes bleed? :)
 
@Matt Sort of reminds me of the kids who play hide-and-seek and just close their eyes.
 
@tb: What does? That I wrote I don't like Springer books in general?
 
3:24 PM
@Srivatsan It was quiet, no? :)
 
@Matt Can't see me if I don't see you.
 
@JM :)
 
@Matt If you click on the little arrow in front of the "@Matt" you see what comment I was referring to.
 
@tb: Oh!
OK, done.
 
@Zhen: that's a shiny new badge you have...
 
3:28 PM
@tb If math is like poetry, why care about the contents? =)
(just kidding...)
 
@JM: Huh, that's nice. I wonder which 10 things I said got starred.
 
There's never any knowing.
 
@ZhenLin Pick from this
 
@HenningMakholm what is that a reply to?
 
Zhen Lin just above.
 
3:31 PM
FWIW: I care about the contents of poems. That's why I can't see Jabberwocky's appeal...
 
QED
Jabberwocky illustrates how morphology works
 
Morphology? I thought it was just nonsense words.
 
@JM I was just kidding around; meant to be harmless tease.
 
QED
morphology is about how words are composed from morphemes
 
@JonasTeuwen: Regarding our conversation yesterday: The reason why it particularly upsets me if I make a mistake when doing maths is because I have been told that I "can't do maths". So every time I do something wrong it feels like a confirmation of that. I don't value unasked for opinions of unqualified people, so I went on to study maths anyway (and got quite far for someone who cannot do maths) but I can't seem to get rid of it.
 
3:33 PM
@Srivatsan I know; I was just saying I take poems seriously, too. :)
 
@Matt They have told me the same thing :-) (and I'm now a PhD candidate). What year are you in? And you're at ETH right?
 
@JM I was flipping a coin between art and poetry.
 
QED
Jabberwocky puts morphemes together to make new words that only have a touch of meaning left over from the regular uses
 
@JonasTeuwen: I'm in year 3. Yes.
 
@Matt Well, then you certainly can do math way better than most people.
 
3:35 PM
@JonasTeuwen: They really told you the same thing? And it doesn't influence your performance at all?
 
Yes, they did. And not anymore.
 
: D
 
Hooray. We are defining the Borel hierarchy in class!
 
@tb: Did they also tell you that you couldn't do maths?
 
@Matt If you got this far you can be much more confident about what you can do.
@Matt Hah, I guess not.
 
3:36 PM
@Matt Well, sort of, they told me I couldn't do anything at all.
 
@JonasTeuwen: Yes, in theory : )
@tb: what?? That's outrageous.
 
"They" seem to fail quite often.
(They said the same thing to me :D and wanted to send me to a school for the mentally challenged...)
Well, I might be mentally challenged, but not that much.
 
I can't quite believe what I'm reading...
 
@JonasTeuwen ever read Profession by Isaac Asimov?
 
If it helps: I couldn't do the multiplication tables until I was nine or so...
 
3:38 PM
@JonasTeuwen: *le what?! : O I'm so glad I told you, I was so worried you guys might start to think the same about me once I let you in on my dark secret!
 
QED
It's only a problem when you start telling yourself that you can't do it
2
 
@HenningMakholm No I didn't. Can you recommend it?
@Matt Yes, so stop worrying and do the stuff you like.
2
 
@JonasTeuwen I don't think Asimov has ever written anything crappy... :)
 
Oh. You got a star for that : )
 
@JM Hm. He wrote a lot and not everything is like nightfall :)
 
3:40 PM
@JonasTeuwen Love the bomb.
 
@JonasTeuwen I like it very much; it's somewhere in The Complete Stories. Intelligent boy grows up, finds that his brain is incompatible with the auto-teaching machines everyone else use, is sent to live in a House For The Feeble-Minded.
 
@Matt What does *le mean?
 
Great. I'll check it out.
 
@tb: -> memebase.com -> rage comics
 
@tb Okay, I'll amend to "I've never read an Asimov I didn't like." :)
 
3:41 PM
@Asaf: What? Surely you know that already?
 
@tb: It doesn't really mean anything, it's just a meme.
 
@Gortaur I have never experienced it that it was this foggy for that long... I can hardly see the building across the street!
 
@Matt I despise Richard Dawkins...
(but thanks for the explanation)
 
@tb Well, what's the RD connection?
 
@tb He's the quintessential "pompous windbag"...
3
 
3:45 PM
Dawkins invented the word "meme".
 
@Srivatsan Richard Dawkins coined the meme "meme" in "The selfish Gene".
(a poem!) :)
 
@tb: I haven't read any of his books but does memebase have anything to do with him?
 
Nowadays, people use "meme" in the loose sense of "bits that make the rounds on the Internet". Like lolcats...
 
or internet memes in general...
 
This is the first thing that comes to my mind, not Dawkins.
 
3:47 PM
@Matt I'm not entirely sure Dawkins intended his word to be that popular... :)
 
lol
 
Oh, he wanted it to be popular. He just wanted it to be popular with the meaning he had assigned to it.
 
With somebody as stuffy as him, I can't quite tell...
 
- well, why is this guy this unpopular? I didn't like him either, but I thought that was just personal. // Plus his incessant trash-talking of religion isn't making things any better for me.
 
"Haha, I know this and you don't! Neener-neener."
 
3:51 PM
@tb has gone quiet, I wonder if he's reading rage comics now. They are funnier when drunk though...
I've read too many and gone off them a while ago, they're more or less always the same.
 
QED
it's not socially acceptable to make definitive statements about things like God
 
@QED Ok, that makes sense.
I guess we might want to nip this discussion at this stage though. =)
 
Agreed.
 
@Matt No, I looked at them briefly but figured that they are way above my head...
(seriously)
 
Below is probably a more accurate description.
 
3:54 PM
I'll try again when I'm drunk, promised :)
 
The problem with memes is that they are only funny after being used repeatedly : )
Nah, I don't. I don't want to be guilty of making you waste your time.
 
Segue: is there a quick way to find out who edited a specific part of Wikipedia?
 
Apart from checking the edit history?
 
Is there any emphasis on quick?
 
Yes, when that edit history is long, it takes me ages.
 
3:55 PM
What Sri said.
 
yes.
I was hoping for a slicker way to do it but these things are organized in a way that isn't transparent to me.
 
I think binary search is the only viable option.
 
Going to log off to get some more work done. I'll see you later!
 
@JM That seems to agree with the "unit of [internet] culture" idea of a meme.
Sorry to backtrack, but I was skimming what I've missed.
 
4:11 PM
hi all
 
g'day
 
4
Q: Semidirect Products in category theory?

Martin BrandenburgHere is a quote from the wikipedia entry on semidirect products of groups: There are also far-reaching generalisations in category theory. They show how to construct fibred categories from indexed categories. This is an abstract form of the outer semidirect product construction. Do ...

 
@robjohn I suppose so. :)
 
why do we need index categories to generalize the semidirect product?
 
@AlexeiAverchenko I know nothing of categories.
 
4:13 PM
aren't simple morphisms that have sections sufficient for this?
don't be so mean :(
 
mean?
 
He's just saying he has no categorical expertise, Alexei.
On the other hand, he is the Mean Square...
 
@JM Indeed. :-)
@AlexeiAverchenko I'm sorry if it seemed I was being mean at you. Your name was prepended by the reply mechanism.
 
@robjohn i was just kidding :)
'cos you're mean square :)
 
@AlexeiAverchenko I wasn't sure to what the "mean" was referring.
I try to not be mean. There is much to much of people being unfeeling on the net because it is a fairly impersonal medium.
However, as you say, I am the mean square.
 
4:23 PM
@AlexeiAverchenko There's the notion of Beck modules which seems to have to do with the question at hand. But I'm not really in the mood to think about this now.
 
Any idea why this answer of mine was downvoted? Perhaps I should have left out the concrete example.
 
@tb you said you used to be very proud of that scary article of yours
it implies you're not as proud of it now, why?
 
@AlexeiAverchenko I don't know what scary article you might be referring to, I found them all understandable :)
 
@HenningMakholm Huh. I upvoted to compensate.
(I hate hit-and-run...)
 
@tb i mean the one where you prove that bounded homology of something is dual to something else
 
4:28 PM
@JM Oh, I can survive losing a couple points. But I've been wondering why there were no upvotes before either. The use of division with remainder to get greatest common divisors (and thus principal ideals) seemed such a conspicuous omission from the existing answers.
 
I missed it, for one. Also I always have an upvote backlog...
 
@JM Hi-fi.
 
@AlexeiAverchenko Ah, I see. This one. Well. It's a basically obvious observation and generalization of earlier work of mine, but it answered a question raised about 20 years earlier. I'd like my articles to have a little lower length/contents ratio than that one has.
 
But I am more conservative these days. // I can even survive some days without running out of votes. =)
@tb 11 pages is long? =) // I can't count the contents part, so I will stick to the numerator alone. :)
 
i see :)
i wonder how old i'll be when i'll finally get to write a paper myself :)
being not as proud of a paper seems like a weird thing for me right now :)
 
4:34 PM
Do you mean a paper all by yourself? Or just write a paper, maybe with others?
 
@Srivatsan Actually, no, in fact it's my only article of reasonable length (the others are either much longer or much shorter...) However, it's not exactly a master piece. It only consists of working out some definitions and concluding.
 
Ok.
 
Interesting. Jim Belk's active again!
 
@JM Yeah, I saw him commenting a few days ago, nice to see that.
 
@Srivatsan just write a paper
 
4:36 PM
I see.
 
I'm still missing Shai. It's interesting when he recasts things in probabilistic terms...
 
@HenningMakholm I have no idea, that is the way that I generate Padé approximants. I don't know why somethings are downvoted here.
Not that it answers the question, but the downvote has been offset again :-)
 
Interesting =)
 
Gotta go for a bit. BBL
 
5:17 PM
So, Jim's flip-flopping? :)
 
Ugh.
 
5:36 PM
This whisky smells like a gothic church...
 
...that's a good thing?
(maybe the barrel was stored in a Gothic church, you know...)
 
Yes, it's a good thing.
 
@JonasTeuwen Does it remind you of skulls?
 
No, just the church.
 
So, no shoe polish today, I'm relieved. I'm not sure the church is better, though...
 
5:43 PM
Also a bit of burned rubber.
 
Okay, I've had it. I swear right here, right now that I'm not going to drink any Whisky in the Netherlands in the near future :)
2
 
Hah :D.
 
You should probably not have brought up the burnt rubber... :D
 
It's only a hint :-).
 
Who goes around telling kids that the sign "=" means "is"?
 
6:08 PM
I think I told a kid once to treat it as "is the same as"...
 
Glendronach 8yr is like... chocolate with burnt rubber.
Interesting combination.
 
tsss, and all that in a Gothic church, sounds like a bike gang needed to hide from the police after breaking entrance into a Nestlé factory.
 
Augh, I better go to bed. Later!
 
6:26 PM
@JM Bye!
 
7:08 PM
Could one use prime ideals to devise "(p)-adic integers" associated to rings of integers of other number fields than Q?
 
@anon I'm not sure if this is what you're asking about, but there's the completion process that applies to an arbitrary commutative ring and an arbitrary ideal of it. I'm sure they're well-understood in the setting you ask about. Did you have a look at what Eisenbud has to say about it?
 
I'll take a look.
 
@anon This looks like what you ask about. Also, take a look at Neukirch.
 
7:24 PM
Awesome.
 
7:47 PM
I finally decided to use color in a comment.
I don't think I have used color before, but I could be wrong.
 
@robjohn Nice touch.
 
I can't imagine someone getting to pde's and not seeing direct substitution before.
 
@robjohn "What common mathematical techniques am I expected to use here?" :)
 
rub a couple of neurons together...
 
@robjohn you did see what Mike calls joriki's lament, didn't you?
 
8:01 PM
@tb I asked you a question, but I think I figured out the answer. =)
 
clever boy! :)
 
This comment of mine is interesting, I think.
 
This is a nice inequality: |sum a_j|² + |sum (-1)^j a_j|² <= (n + 2) sum a_j^2. (n + 2 is much sharper than the direct CS one).
 
@JonasTeuwen Um, so sharp?
Oh wait. How many numbers are there? n or 2n?
 
8:17 PM
It seems that the difficulty with this question is continued in this question
 
@robjohn I was saying the same thing to J.M. earlier: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/2490567#2490567 =)
 
@Srivatsan I see that I was not the first to notice this :-)
I should look back more closely...
 
8:37 PM
@anon I liked your answer on the fixed points of the tangent function. :)
 
@tb I hadn't seen Joriki's post until just now. I read the question and some of the comments, and I am not sure what to make of it.
at least in connection with the English proficiency.
as far as the proliferation of partial knowledge in certain advanced areas, I do agree.
 
@anon I think it also answers one of my unasked questions as a side-product. How to formalize Euler's approach to the Basel problem?
 
The English proficiency aspect seems a bit anglo-centric.
 
@anon I am not interested in other/better/more general approaches. (e.g., using Fourier series theory.)
 
@Sri: Oh yes. Euler's was the first approach I learned about on the Basel problem, I thought it was awesome :)
 
8:42 PM
@anon Yes, it is very ingeneous. No doubt.
But I am wondering whether we can formalize it by modifying your answer. At some point, I was even going to post that question in MSE.
I hope you agree that the "proof" given in wikipedia is not rigorous enough.
 
Why not? Just use en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… with the e_i's as the coefficients of the properly normalized Taylor series expansion
 
But with infinite number of terms?
That works only for a finite polynomial, does it not?
 
Oh, of course there is book-keeping to do with the W factorization and showing things converge and so forth. :) (also, my connection is getting slow..)
 
Yes yes. I didn't know this book-keeping until I saw your answer today.
Even then, I don't quite follow all the details.
Hey, got to run. Be back in sometime..
hi @Didier =)
 
See you later!
 
8:48 PM
Well, after normalization, denote the partial products and sums as P_n(x)-Sn(x) goes to 0 for all x, which should show the coefficients work out so long as they converge...
 
The whole thing boils down to showing that sin(x)-x cos(x) = x^3/3 \prod(1-x/r_i)
where the convergence is principal
 
@robjo: W factorization shows that up to a e^g(z) term but you can ignore that because it has no zeros (i.e. we can look at the zeros of e^-g * (sin - xcos) if we wanted to and it'd be the same)
 
W factorization leaves us with an e^g(x), but as with the W factorization for sin(x) we should be able to show that g is a constant.
 
well, my point is we don't even have to in order to compute the answer :)
 
I must be missing something. Why can we ignore the e^g?
Ah, because it won't affect the ratio of the coefficients of the power series?
 
8:56 PM
@JonasTeuwen: You seem to be drinking a lot...
 
Instead of looking at the zeros of tanx-x we can look at x^-3*e^-g*(sin-xcos), which is just a straight-up prod(1-x/r_i)
and that has the same zeros because g(z) is entire
(well, except x=0 which we want out of the picture)
oh wait, but then... well maybe that won't work. nvm :/
 
Knackered. I was looking forward to hanging out with you guys but I think I'm just going to sleep. Good night and see you tomorrow!
 
9:10 PM
@Matt How do you mean?
@Srivatsan Sorry, the sum runs up to n.
Now I'm drinking a fine Bordeaux Supérier.
 
I've got a question about parity as it pertains to permutations. Anyone game?
 
@robjohn I don't know what to think of that part either.
 
He may or may not have intended it, but it sounds as if he is saying that only English speaking people can do math.
Or that only universities with a strict English requirement have good math departments.
I could be reading too much into it, but it strikes me like that.
 
9:31 PM
@robjohn I see what you mean. I agree to a certain extent, but I'm pretty sure that's not what was intended. It is perhaps an obvious truth that the worst questions come from those who are unable to express themselves coherently in English. At least it is extremely challenging to formulate this observation (which I share) in a politically correct way without sounding insulting or condescending.
 
@tb It sort of follows from the fact that the main language on MSE is English.
I know that I would pretty much be unable to answer a question posed in another language.
My French and German are very rusty.
 
@robjohn That's why I said "perhaps an obvious truth".
@robjohn Well, I try at least :)
But yes, I agree that it sort of follows. Maybe the more pertinent observation is that one can sort of see or feel if someone tries but fails, or simply doesn't care about how they come across.
 
What I hate is when people who don't know English that well try to ask a question to the best of their ability and some native English speaker complains about the OP's English.
2
Concentrate on what you know they are trying to ask.
 
Suppose you have a symmetric group S_3 = <ABC>. The identity permutation is ABC and a second permutation, BCA is the id shifted to the left by one. Under composition, it looks to me that the product of two shifts is an element CAB. Factoring each of these, the id, first shift, and second shift into their disjoint products gives me a (possibly flawed) result: namely, that the parity of each of them yields odd * odd = odd, which I know to be contrary to the definition of odd parity.
 
The parity of all those permutations you mention is even.
 
9:41 PM
Well, then it seems I don't know how to find parity correctly.
 
Count how many element pairs are out of order
 
@robjohn I agree, that's really not nice. On the other hand, I believe that every regular user (answerer) has some crowd of "followers" and I for one would appreciate it if people were pointing out to me at least those mistakes that I make repeatedly.
 
<BCA> BA and CA are out of order
 
but the all of them are out of order. that's why I wrote them as one product!
 
@tb I have no problem with people kindly pointing out errors, but some people get nasty about it.
 
9:44 PM
@robjohn I agree to! That is being "anglo-centric"
 
@bwkaplan No, BC is in order
 
well, shit.
 
Since two pairs are out of order, the parity is 2, which is even.
 
isn't CA in order if ABC forms a ring?
 
@bwkaplan don't look at them as a ring, then there would be no "out of order"
It's sort of like trying to impose an order on Z_p
 
9:48 PM
okay, I'll have a third look at how I made my disjoint products. After that, the parity should fall into place. On a conceptual level, it's a world of duh...
 
I think what we have is a general underlying cause, namely habitual disregard for doing the work to learn the prerequisites before doing something. For a native English speaker, this causes bad math questions. For somebody with a different native language, it causes bad math questions and bad English when asking them on an English-language site. This creates a correlation -- there's no need to assume that not speaking English somehow causes bad math, anymore than not speaking Mandarin does.
Indeed, most of this esteemed company are, as far as I can make out, not native English speakers, myself included, but none would claim that we are math impaired.
I propose, however, that the non-native English speakers among us are fairly good at math partially for the same reason that we can express ourselves well in English -- said reason being that we value learning things properly (and tend to strive to correct ourselves if we discover we're in error about something).
4
 
@Henning: I agree with everything you've said.
I am in awe of the non-native English speaking members on MSE. As I said, I could not participate on a board in another language.
 
I basically agree, too. However, I do have the impression that far more than half of the regular contributors (3k+ rep, say) are native English speakers.
 
@tb I have trouble knowing who is native speaking and who isn't. The native speakers are just as capable of writing bad English.
 
My command of the English language is beneath contempt.
 
10:00 PM
I was speaking more about chat regulars than the MSE population in general.
 
Ah, okay, then I agree.
 
@JonasTeuwen Once in a while I notice an odd phrase, but your English is quite good as far as I can tell.
 
Hmm. Okay. I'll take the English language course which they offer to employees.
 
@robjohn But do keep in mind that you are basically forced to use English on a daily basis as soon as you're past the first three years of University.
(at least in my experience)
 
I agree.
 
10:03 PM
@tb more evidence of anglo-centrism
 
I have learned English from the internet :-).
 
@JonasTeuwen "learned" would be better there
or was that a joke?
 
No, it was no joke. :$.
 
I don't really like the term "anglo-centrism" about this phenomenon. It seems to suggest that evil Englishmen have descended upon us and forced us to use their language against our will.
... whereas in reality we choose to communicate in English because, given the state of the world as we find it, that seems to offer the best opportunity to communicate with Russians, Dutch, French, Israeli, ... with the least total investment in language learning.
 
@JonasTeuwen That is a positive thing about the internet. Although it may lead to many people with a little knowledge of deep areas of math when they don't have the prerequisites, I think some familiarity with things allows one to learn more about them.
 
10:07 PM
@robjohn I honestly don't think so. I don't remember when I last read a math book or paper in German in order to learn something that was of interest for my research (and not out of historical interest). French, yes. German, definitely not.
 
Part of learning something well is having some place in your brain on which to hang information.
@HenningMakholm Perhaps it is just my anglo-centrism then that I don't try to communicate in any other language, but I would have a hard time trying to decide on which language I would want to learn better.
 
@robjohn Exactly. Everyone else don't have that problem: learning English beats every other foreign language easily in terms of practical utility.
 
Maybe I just feel weird that everyone else knows how to speak my native language, and I don't know theirs.
It makes me feel like an uneducated boor.
 
@robjohn Sure, but learning languages is a completely different thing. I think that the best way to learn a language is probably to go live in a country where they speak that language. Since I was only 10 I had the internet :-).
 
I should probably feel lucky that my native language seems to be the most universal and be happy. :-)
 
10:13 PM
And really, I don't see how having to learn English in order to communicate internationally puts me worse off than in a hypothetical world where I'd have to learn Esperanto in order to communicate internationally.
 
@robjohn Or be sad that you don't have to learn something new to challenge your brain! :-).
 
@JonasTeuwen There is plenty of math to learn that feels like a foreign language, and that seems more practical, too.
 
In fact, you can also see the opposite phenomenon. Coming from an environment where three languages (German, French and English) are used literally on a daily basis, one sort of automatically chooses the language in which most participants in a discussion feel most comfortable with. I've seen many people who had a hard time learning German in Zurich because there are so many people perfectly fluent in French or English.
 
@robjohn Sure, but sometimes you might get bored from studying math... Then you can study a language! I want to learn... Norwegian!
Or Danish. I have been told that the pronunciation is completely different from how one would write it.
 
@JonasTeuwen Why? Are you a cross-country skier?
 
10:16 PM
Not yet! But that sure sounds fun.
 
@JonasTeuwen Hey, Danish is pronounced just as one would write it. Now, every other language ...
 
When I was 18 I moved to another country, but it was just the neighbor...
 
@HenningMakholm Spanish is pretty good at that, Turkish as well.
 
@HenningMakholm It is? Damn! Then I'll pick Norwegian.
 
@tb They sound completely differerent from how I would write them :-)
 
10:18 PM
I got your point after your correction :)
English, however, and French are pretty horrible when it comes to orthography and guessing how to pronounce something.
 
@JonasTeuwen At least I think you should have all of the requisite vowel sounds for Danish.
 
(I don't know about German, though, probably it is just as bad)
 
German accents are cool.
Thick German accents. Cool.
 
@JonasTeuwen You seem to be missing an n in the last line of your answer here
 
For something completely different, am I being indefensibly stupid here? Didier's comments sound like I ought to be able to see that I'm obviously wrong.
 
10:23 PM
@Jonas: Cauchy-Buyakovski-Schwarz? I have never heard the middle name there. Interesting.
 
@tb As you have noticed before, I'm quite bad when it comes to spelling names...
 
@robjohn Calling it the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky-Schwarz inequality sort of reminds me Arnold's book where the Stokes theorem is called Newton-Leibniz-Gauss-Green-Stokes-Ostrogradskii theorem (and who else you may want to append to the list).
 
@Henning: I sort of thought conditional probabilities still made sense as you used them. I suspect he means that if you let 1/3 vary, then in general the function g is only defined a.e., so while you could integrate g, you cant evaluate it at points. Except, I was sort of imagining (and I think you were?) that g was also continuous. If g is smooth, not just absolutely continuous, then I kind of think g(1/3) is fine, but I'm not that good at this sort of thing.
One of my g's should probably be a joint density function
 
Okay, so I'm not completely at sea here. I'm willing to stipulate to reasonable smoothness conditions on the joint density.
It seems that if g is defined a.e., then by definition I ought to be evaluate it at most points.
 
10:53 PM
Did anyone among you organize his knowledge in such a systematic way?
 
Hmm... the Borel-Kolmogorov paradox seems to be a good argument that it was unreasonable for me (and @Jack) to expect the conditional probability to be well-defined.
 
@tb I might lose myself in a recursive inclusion if I had.
 
@robjohn :)
 
now where was I, now where was I, now where was I, ...
2
 
@robjohn: You were catching up with all the TeX you must write...
 
10:58 PM
@HenningMakholm That is not really a paradox, that is people just not getting their densities right.
 

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