Viewing profile — jfarmer

No, it's really sets of measure zero. The Cantor set is an example of an uncountable set of measure 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_set The indicator function of the Cantor…

"Almost everywhere" means "everywhere except on a set of measure 0", in the Lebesgue measure sense. Here's an example of a Riemann integrable function w/ infinitely many discontinu…

The picture isn't quite so clean in the constructive context, which is what many of these proof systems are rooted in, e.g., https://mathoverflow.net/questions/236483/difference-be…

So they'd need more robust experimental designs and statistical methods. They exist. And unlike the university context, there’s a glut of data. A basic technique: https://en.wikipe…

Seems like a straightforward solution would be to get people to opt-in by offering them credits, increased limits, early access to new features, etc. Universities have IRBs for goo…

Plants "want" nitrogen, but dump fertilizer onto soil and you get algal blooms, dead zones, plants growing leggy and weak. A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, a…

I think of it like this: Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradic…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" ex…

From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct , the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." “The fallacy in these ve…

I sometimes find Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication helping in thinking about situations like this. Link: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi…

CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them. The essay: ht…

From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct : “The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one …

John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking wate…

Always a pleasant surprise to see Peirce linked here! He influenced many people, both directly and indirectly, but had a...difficult personality. He has many thousands of pages of …

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are …

I sometimes use a Turing Tumble to demonstrate this: https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/ I've also had occasional success first convincing them they know how to add "mindlessly", …

I did this years ago to demonstrate to my students that the "exact solution" can still be written in code. There are implementations in Ruby and Python, with some benchmarking code…

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer …

Love this. The way I think about it is that you assume a level of responsibility whenever you tinker with default affordances. Your "feature" isn't restricted to whatever narrow co…

If folks are looking for terms to Google, try "spectral graph theory" and "algebraic graph theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_graph_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

I'm not proposing anything WRT the depth or scope of the material. If the premise of the material is that phrases like "dot product" can be used freely or with minimal explanation …

I understand that, of course. Is your goal to make it feel like a typical university course or like something else? If like a typical university course, start with a syllabus and a…