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Ask HN: Teach me something new

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Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#411
post #356

Take a few minutes to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu Gotta spell anything over a voice line? Use it. No more screwing around with "B.. like Bryan, and then U, like .... under". s-c-r-o-l-l-a-w-a-y: sierra charlie romeo oscar lim…

The word "Yankee" originates in calling early Dutch colonists Jan-Kees, Jan and Kees being common Dutch male names.

Jan is the equivalent name as John, Ian, Ivan, Ewan, Euan, Yan, Jean, Juan, Giovanni, Hans, Shaun, Sean, Jock, many others.

Amazing how many terms for 'foreigner from ' or 'random man' all resolve to variants of the same common name.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#412

Consider arm sized, hand sized, fingernail sized, and pinched-fingers "tiny" sized. About 1000, 100, 10, 1 mm. Tray of cookies, hand-sized cookie, chocolate chip, and tiny crumb - yum. Now zoom 1000x, taking tiny sized to arm sized, and they become 1000, 100, 10, 1 um. Call this microview, with microscopic microorganisms measured in micrometers. A grain of salt is sized like a cardboard box, a head hair like a hand-s…

There is a book from the 80ies/early 90ies "POWERS OF TEN: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe" by Philip & Phylis Morrison. That is exactly that.

It was also a 1977 short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#413
The most commonly used and arguably most useful form of logic, First Order Logic (FOL) is not powerful enough to describe even the natural numbers. In whatever ways we may try to describe them, we always end up with potential extra elements that we cannot account for.

Let me describe what I mean.

When we want to describe a structure, for example the natural numbers with their usual arithmetic (addition, multiplication and so on), we first decide on a language to use. Our language should contain the symbol 0 (so we can identify the first element) and symbols for the functions S (successor function), + and *. We also introduce variables such as x, y, etc.

Then we write down a list of axioms for the structure, i.e. logical statements that should characterise that structure. Such statements in first order logic are built out of the symbols we introduced, together with equality (e.g. 2+3=5 is a statement, where 2 is an abbreviation for S(S(0)) etc.), logical connectives such as "not", "and", "or", "implies", etc. (e.g. not(1 = 2), or "1 = 1 AND 2 = 2") and importantly quantifiers, "for all elements" and "there exists an element such that" (for example: "for all x, x = 0 OR there exists a y, such that x = S(y)").

A structure for a specific language is nothing more than a set of elements together with an interpretation for all the symbols. So, for our language we may just take the natural numbers with the usual interpretation of +, * etc. But we might just as well have chosen the single-element set {aardvark}, where 0 is interpreted as aardvark and all functions evaluate to aardvard no matter their arguments, i.e. aardvark + aardvark = aardvark. That's silly, but allowed. The natural numbers with their usual interpretation of symbols satisfy all the sentences I introduced above; we say that this structure is a model of that set of sentences. Our aardvark-structure is not a model of these sentences, since not(1 = 2) is not true in it (remember that this is just an abbrevation of not(S(0) = S(S(0))) and in this structure, this evaluates to not(aardvark = aardvark), which is false).

We can now take the set of all statements which are true in the natural numbers, a.k.a. the theory of natural numbers, Th(N). This set is clearly infinite (for example, it contains the statement "n = n" for all n), but that doesn't bother us. Clearly, the natural numbers are a model of Th(N). But are there other models of Th(N)?

Well, in a sense trivially. I can just define the structure {aardvark0, aardvark1, ...} where, for example, aardvark2 + aardvark3 = aardvark5, and so on. That's also a model for Th(N), but if that feels like cheating it's because it is: these structures are exactly the same except for the names of their elements. We therefore call them "isomorphic" and treat them as the same.

But are there models of Th(N) not isomorphic to the natural numbers? Yes, there are.

Let's introduce a new symbol to the language, call it c. Then add to Th(N) the infinitely many statements not(0 = c), not(1 = c), not(2 = c), etc. There is no way we can interpret this symbol c in the natural numbers and make all these statements true: eventually there has to be some natural number which c is equal to.

But now comes the kicker: By the compactness theorem of first order logic, whenever we have a set of sentences so that all finite subsets have a model, the original set has a model. Now, for any finite subset of Th(N) plus the infinitely many statements involving c, we have a model, namely the natural numbers (since the subset is finite, there is a biggest n for which not(n = c) is in the set of statements; then interpret c as n+1). But then, by compactness, the original set of sentences has a model.

So there must exist a structure that makes all statements true that are true for the natural languages (i.e. that is a model for Th(N)), but that also has some element c that is bigger than anything that can be "reached" by applying the successor function arbitrarily often to 0. What does such a structure look like? Well, it turns out that such an element must live in a so called Z-chain, a set of elements that "looks like the (positive and nonnegative) integers", but is totally disconnected from the natural numbers (this is because in Th(N) every number that is not zero has a successor and a predecessor); so in essence this structure contains the natural number and, disconnected from it, a copy of the integers. In fact, we may have more than one copy of the integers.

Compactness is a really powerful and weird theorem. It can be used to prove that any set of statements that allows for infinite models has infinite models of arbitrary cardinality (i.e. "as big as we want"). It can be used to construct an extension of the real numbers that contains "infinitesimal", non-zero elements (smaller than any positive real number), which is what motivated so-called nonstandard analysis (and makes Newton's and Leibniz's original intuition of "infinitesimally small quantities" precise). And so on.

If we want to actually describe the natural numbers uniquely, we have to turn to a stronger logic, such as second-order logic. In second-order logic we can't only quantify over elements, we can also quantify over sets (or, equivalently, properties). We may for example say "for any set, if it is not empty, it has a least element" (a statement that is true for the natural numbers if we introduce the usual ordering). We can then in second-order logic formulate the principle of induction, which suffices, with some other axioms, to describe the natural numbers uniquely (up to isomorphism, of course).

However, second-order logic has significant downsides. In particular, there exists no proof procedure in second-order logic that is both sound (it only proves true statements) and complete (it can prove all true statements). That means that, in practice, it's often not all that useful. We do have well-behaved proof procedures for first-order logic and that's why we usually stick to it.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#414
post #239

Harmonicas are amazing instruments. At first people assume them to be like toys (you can buy really cheap ones everywhere) and initially the concept seems really easy: 10 holes, drawing air produces some notes and blowing air produces other notes. But the more you get into it, the more amazing it gets. Soon you discover that you can bend notes by positioning your tongue in a specific way and your repertoire increases…

Fabulous addition. For anyone looking to see what a master harmonica player looks like, highly recommend looking up blues traveller / John Popper. In particular, there’s a live performance of no woman no cry that has John Popper alongside Ziggy Marley. Mind blowing. Watch it. You won’t regret it. https://youtu.be/9zk0HFG5mDw

harmonica solo starts at 4:30

https://youtu.be/9zk0HFG5mDw?t=270

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#415

Most rape victims in the United States are men: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.

Men are most often victims of violence generally including murder as well. You wouldn't get that impression reading the news. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_men

Depends on whether you interpret something being on the news as a measure of how common it is.

This is often demonstrated with the two hypothetical headlines "Dog bites Man" vs "Man bites Dog".

One is expected based on its ubiquity, and so a poor headline, where you want some emotional reaction to hook readers.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#416

The big bang was extremely hot; the universe now is quite cold (microwave background). It was a continuous process of cooling, implying that there was an interval where the entire universe was comfortable (there are at least a few papers on this, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 , but I like it more just as a strange thing to thing about).

Comfortable but not necessarily livable?

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#418
post #257
post #110

I watched a piano/music teaching video from the 60s yesterday that made it all "click" [1] Most modern music chords patterns are easy to find out on piano. Start on any of the white keys, and play 7 white keys left to right. That is called a mode: a series of notes separated by certain intervals to compose a song. Different modes have different vibes. Atmosphere of the song ( sad or happy) is directly correlated by h…

> correlated by how "willing" the notes are to resolve to the mode root (the first key of 7 you hit). I've heard this explanation many times before, and I still don't understand how notes can be "willing" to do anything, or how a note can "resolve" to the root. Can someone ELI5?

If you play an F# then a C, does there not seem to be a "relationship" between the notes, that is different from if you play G then C? I think for most people it intuitively makes sense when they hear the notes. To me it sounds like F#->C is "awkward" whereas G->C is more "satisfying". Not sure if the explanation is in culture, neurology or physics or what, but to me an "emotional" relationship between the notes seem apparent on listening.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the other weird things I referred to is best described as discovering that I could be awake and asleep at the same time. I think it might be another case of our naive ideas about cognitive processes being a little oversimplified. It sounds like nonsense, of course, but that's because we naively assume that sleep and wakefulness are opposites--that they are mutually exclusive. What if we're wrong about that? Wh…

Sounds like multiple PhD theses/journal articles could be mined from CFS + modafinil.

I know what you mean, but I don't know how the heck you could arrange for just the right combination of large doses of modafinil and profound exhaustion at just the right times.

To give you some idea of how profound my fatigue was, let's start with the fact that I've been extremely sensitive to stimulants of any kind since I can remember. A can of coke past 8PM would keep me awake half the night. It's a trait that I apparently inherited from my mother and passed on to my daughter.

After I developed CFS, I could take a full dose of an amphetamine and sleep like a baby. I know because amphetamines were one of the alternatives my physician tried for controlling my sleepiness and attention problems.

Modafinil and armodafinil are the drugs that worked for me. By the way, please don't anyone assume that they'll do the same thing for you that they did for me. Everybody's different. Talk to your doctor, not some random internet storyteller.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do me a favor some time and try to read through the scotoma, if you remember to. I think that I would have just assumed I couldn't do it if I hadn't been reading something really interesting when the scotoma started. It's only because it came on while I was already reading that I discovered that I was able to continue. If you remember to try it, the results will be interesting no matter which way they turn out.

I have migraine once or twice a year, and the most recent attack indeed interrupted my reading, quite simply did not see the letters through the zigzag. As it gradually covered the focal point of my vision I was trying to "squint" mentally but eventually gave up. There was no followup headache, just a slight vertigo.

Interesting data point. I just have the one experience to report, so far, but I fully intend to test it out again the next time I have an episode.
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