h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I thought I'd better come and say hello. You seem to have made quite a splash here, although somehow I can't see that you'll get many people joining your abstinence club.

Personally I think its quite a negative philosophy, and evidence of an unhealthy society (and given that we Brits are generally considered prudish, that's getting pretty bad). I can see there are already wiser souls than me collecting to debate that one with you though, and abstinence at 16(?) is not altogether a bad idea.

So then, assuming this damned browser stops trying to switch to traditional Chinese characters, I suppose I'd better have a poke at your faith in mathematics.

The first step being that 1+1=2 is a gross simplification. Ooh this is odd, it goes into lingual descontructionism, perhaps appropriate if you consider maths a language, which I do. The thing being that if you have 2 beans and another 2 beans then you have 4 beans or a quote stolen from Blackadder.

The trouble is, the things aren't actually beans. A bean is a label for the image we have of these things after we strip away all the differences between what we perceive them to be. So language is based on reductionism, and therefore so is the maths based on it. There you have it: maths is an approximation to the world.

Given this, and given human nature (the world wants to be deceived), does it not seem more likely that humans invented maths as a description of the world, rather than discovering maths as a property of the world?

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I think you're probably right.



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Possibly. I can't see any good counterargument, so I'll have to acceptthat as a signigficant possibility. I'll let you know if I do find one, though.

Well that's killed any conversation .

Sorry.

Hey there again.

Well having seen you commenting about not being happy in more than a few threads now, I think it would be irresponsible if I didn't try my hand at making it a little easier for you to find your way.

I'm not one of the wisest, nor the most eloquent or experienced or people here, but I am still at school so maybe I relate. Or at least give my own take on some of those Buddhist teachings.

So, what things are bothering you?

There is no path to happiness, happiness is the path.

I'll get back to you later.

Since you're still in school, you'll understand when I ay that I have too mcuh homework to talk and shouldn't even be online at all.

Touche.

But homework is not something to be taken so seriously. There is more to education than just the schooling, after all.

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True, but there's so much of it...

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Mostly homework and weakness.

Homework that makes me too buisy to actually compose the song I've been thinking about, or develop an idea I've had about Dyson spheres, or to read much.

Weakness that makes it hard for me to concentrate on homework.

For concentration take a break every half an hour.

Well I hope you have something good in mind for those Dyson Spheres cause they're really starting to get cheesy .

Consider the homework from a wider perpective. Which bits are actually making any sort of difference to you? How much isn't actually at all interesting or helping to you? Taking these bits, is it really worth putting much time and effort into them?

A mathematician is constructively idle .

I'd never have learnt anything if I'd bothered with schoolwork.

On the other hand I never got into MIT either.

Noggin

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I think I have a good one. I'll post more about it here on the guide if it looks like it should be possible. I'm not sure if it would work.


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It's all pretty interesting this semester, now that I'm done with health and US history classes. Still, the math homework is HARD and takes a while to get right.

I probably won't either--I got the application a month ago and still haven't the slightest idea what to write for the essay. At least I've done rough fdrafts of the U-Maryland and Chicago essays.

See now I'm just confused...

Hello there again, been poking around people's spaces tonight so I thought I'd give you a nudge and see if you've been just lurking or have taken a break from the site or what.

Anyway come alive sometime, the Gods' thread is still going nicely and not around in squirqles like you'd think.

Oh, and I usually get in trouble for saying things like this (I prefered your hair long, the jeans you have at home match better, sigh...), but your old name was nicer IMO, although I've never been a fan of alliteration I guess.

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I was too busy with my high school senior project. Now that I've graduated high school, I'm back--at least for a while. I was fafiated, not gafaiated.


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Good. I'll take a look--and look over some people's user pages to find some good threads. Yours, Noggin's, Az's, Hoovooloo's, maybe Math's and whoever else is on my buddy list--it has been a while.

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My hair was never long--at least since I've been in charge of getting it cut I've kept it short enough that I get mistaken for a boy pretty often. But I do sort of like the old name often--and it's enshrined in my login name. So I think I may change it again.