Ghost Fishin'

ghost fishin'

I’d like to share a couple of highlights of my discord messages today.

7:42 pm

AAAAAAA I HATE INDUCTION

The book my team is using as a reference suppressed a really specific detail of a proof by hiding it as an exercise

And it’s like 8 pages of induction

11:40 pm

Frothing at the mouth ok there are a couple of problems with my induction and the actual proof is like three lines of triangle inequality.

anyway, the moral of the story is that in a δ-hyperbolic geodesic space (one where any point on a side of a triangle is within δ of the other two sides), any 8δ-local geodesic (a path that is preserves distances between any two points within 8δ of each other in the domain) stays uniformly within 2δ of the geodesic connecting its endpoints.

So I played the lifegain banding defenders deck I asked about at pauper night yesterday. I went 0-3, but I was up at 40 life at one point so that was fun.

Magic The Gathering tip: don't forget to include a wincon.

Second tip: lots of life gain is not a wincon

Magic the Gathering tip: real bandingchads know that playing banding is a wincon on its own

at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.

I didn't expect to be so annoyed by this take.

It's a reasonable take.

But also the point of mathematics is the exploration of beautiful truths, and the more we lose sight of that, the worse off we are.

Sure we have pedantry to back up, prove, and clarify our beautiful observations, but the observing is the fun part.

(Just read some of and highly recommend Martin Weissman's "An Illustrated Theory of Numbers" and holy cow is it beautiful)

Potentially a hot take but the whole point of mathematics, especially pure mathematics is to be pedantic. We want to be sure what we're doing makes logical sense.

Sure you have experiments to back up your flimsy mathematical arguements but we care about details because that's what maths is.