Viewing profile — CurtMonash

Perhaps the point is to signal virtue while they actively pursue the opposite.

Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?

A large fraction of the problems assigned in the Ross Program were of the form "Prove or disprove, and salvage if possible." The rest were usually a calculation, meant to motivate …

I first heard that kind of story about a thesis defense at Princeton. The twist was that they had been short one person to judge it, so they roped in a professor who was available …

No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. …

I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested…

My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946. JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made t…

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. …

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in…

I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that. (The plot of the bo…

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online. There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started som…

Lovely man. I wanted him to be my adviser, but he was on leave my second year of grad school, and I changed direction greatly. When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked hi…

My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A

I type em dashes as double hyphens. Sometimes the software resolves them to a true em dash, but sometimes not. I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct. I do have issue…

My English professor criticized me for allegedly excessive use of em dashes in 1973. Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.

ab and (-a)(-b) can each be quickly proved to be the additive inverse of (-a)b. So they equal each other. No intermediate theorems are really needed.

I was one of several math grad students who started at Harvard at age 16 or 17 aroud the same time. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi went on to conventional academic math careers. I took…

I was told that a book published in honor of Oscar Zariski's 80th birthday included a paper by Oscar Zariski, either proving or at least making progress on a longstanding conjectur…

Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his stud…

I stopped reading early, when the article said that in the 1970s one big relational database did everything. In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't eve…

I'd completely forgotten that one!! I just recall the (non-mathematical) poem about the haircut. Certainly that section generally comes more to mind these days in the age of LLMs .…

Robert Heinlein's "... And he built a crooked house" is both hilarious and mathematical, although perhaps in different parts of the same story. https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauf…

Like many classic science fiction "novels", including Foundation, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos is really a collection of linked novellas. The last one has the hero and heroine r…