Viewing profile — aeneasmackenzie

They don’t exist as concepts. A rational number whose square is 2 is (convenient prose for) a formal symbol describing some object. It happens that it does not describe any object.…

I hold that the discovery of computation was as significant as the set theory paradoxes and should have produced a similar shift in practice. No one does naive set theory anymore. …

This is really just the constructive/classical argument but I want to be specific. You just named a function and specified a property you want it to have. However no function with …

This document plays at least two shell games, declaring that “homosexuality” as its own concept is recent (within 200 years) but then smoothly omitting this when discussing scriptu…

Industrial knitting machines can make entire garments without human involvement, but a person will probably still fold it and sew a label onto it.

Compcert guarantees that the executable that comes out does what the code that went in said, it doesn’t guarantee much about the code that went in.

This was old news decades ago[0] but people don’t want to hear it. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intell... an editorial written to tell the public that t…

Papal infallibility is not invoked that often. Here’s an example, in section 4 (wherefore…) [0] In particular papal infallibility was not involved in the Protestants’ complaints, a…

This is just a polite fiction and no one is ever punished for giving illegal orders or for following them. Bloody Sunday resulted in absolutely no consequences for 1 Para. Tiger Fo…

“The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made British men the best sailors in the world.”

Elaborate marble runs are very popular, although many people use steel balls instead.

He was “just following orders”, which has been an airtight defense for the members of Tiger Force. If they’re going to be rounded up along with all the other Americans known to be …

AZ average students per class is 18. $21/hr for 2000 hours is $42k. Double it to overaccount for total cost of employee. Where's the $96k remaining going? I'm not going to analyze …

So you claim it was a total coincidence he went after Soviet agents? The witch analogy here is that there are real witches but they are so powerful/well hidden witch hunters cannot…

Look up the total expenditure on education per student in your state, then do a rough calculation of how much of it is actually going to teaching students (facilities, teacher sala…

Just say witch hunt. McCarthy was entirely correct that there were a lot of communists and communist sympathizers, so many that many of the people he thought were helping him were …

You're looking for (setq *print-case* :downcase), no need to mess with the reader.

The history of these discoveries is fascinating and shows that Kuhn’s scientific revolutions idea is wrong but it’s always rounded off to “Copernicus and Galileo” and doesn’t even …

And in the P=?NP case Aaronson uses, the answer wouldn't be "P=NP" (a classical answer -- totally useless) but the actual function NP->P. People just instinctively know that you ne…

Your information is outdated. Cada is at parity with lego now, they have even introduced brick designs that lego later copied (flip flop technic beams). The rest of the Chinese bra…

Aristotle said that denser things fall faster than less dense things and even gave a correct expression for their speed given the limits of his mathematics and notation. https://ar…

It ensures that your X belt input blueprint and your X belt output blueprint are actually using X belts and not bottlenecked on one somewhere. At a certain point it stops being nec…

Re [1] The situation is even worse, when telescopes became available it was discovered that the stars are specifically not point sources. It's just an optical phenomenon, but this …

Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then analysis by…

In case you are not aware, apostolic churches do not and have never claimed to draw their teaching authority from the bible. It is true that sola scriptura groups are in a pickle h…