Nagging questions (AMA)

[Dsanders 5,747]

Why do we generally procrastinate and in addition, why is it so hard to form a habit without having it fall apart within the next few days, weeks, or the next few months if lucky?

 

Do you speak or have a interest in any particular foreign language? What are you thoughts on language and do you think linguistics is a good subject to major in college? The reason I ask this is because I am currently planning on majoring in Spanish once I get into college, and I've been considering getting into Spanish linguistics, but I can't really seem to find a PhD program that seems ideal and promising for me around here in SoCal. xD

 

And finally, what is your favorite aspect in mathematics (if you have one particular favorite) and why?

Edited November 6, 2014 by Dsanders

[Twilight Dirac 721]

 

 

Do you speak or have a interest in any particular foreign language? What are you thoughts on language and do you think linguistics is a good subject to major in college? The reason I ask this is because I am currently planning on majoring in Spanish once I get into college, and I've been considering getting into Spanish linguistics, but I can't really seem to find a PhD program that seems ideal and promising for me around here in SoCal. xD

 

You can sure as heck do worse than majoring in a foreign language.  Mastering a second language is always useful.  However, it may be less than an ideal candidate for earning a Ph.D. in.  A Ph.D. is a research degree, and I am not certain how much research can be conducted in the field of knowing Spanish.  Just earning the degree requires you to discover something nobody else on the planet knows.  For the sciences, this is actually quite easy, but I am not certain how this would work with Spanish.  I almost think you might end up doing a bunch of historical and anthropological research, both to earn the Ph.D. and to actually use it.  The difficulty associated with earning a Ph.D. in Spanish is probably why you aren't seeing it offered in the first place. 

[Dsanders 5,747]

You can sure as heck do worse than majoring in a foreign language.  Mastering a second language is always useful.  However, it may be less than an ideal candidate for earning a Ph.D. in.  A Ph.D. is a research degree, and I am not certain how much research can be conducted in the field of knowing Spanish.  Just earning the degree requires you to discover something nobody else on the planet knows.  For the sciences, this is actually quite easy, but I am not certain how this would work with Spanish.  I almost think you might end up doing a bunch of historical and anthropological research, both to earn the Ph.D. and to actually use it.  The difficulty associated with earning a Ph.D. in Spanish is probably why you aren't seeing it offered in the first place. 

 

I see well, that's just been a little consideration of mine for some time now. I had a decent idea of what it would require to get earn a Ph.D. but I wasn't aware about the amount of research that would entail. I've read a bit into earning a Ph.D. in Spanish and there are in fact several programs that are offered at colleges throughout America and especially in Spain, which is of no surprise to me. However, I have yet to find anything in California.

 

If all else fails, I may just settle for a Master's Degree. My main goal right now is simply to learn as much about the language and culture as I can, but if earning a Ph.D. involves more research than learning, then I suppose I'll pass on that one.

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

Is it true if you shake a polish man's hand, in Poland,  with one hand in your pocket, he'll probably punch you?

 

Polish man that I played ping-pong with told me this.

[PsychedelicPony 440]

What is your take on this philosophical argument?

 

If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, whence comes evil?

If God is omnipotent and evil exists, then is he not omnibenevolent?

If God is omnibenevolent and cannot stop evil, then is he not omnipotent?

[SasQ 1,379]

Sorry for long delay, my Internet connection was broken.

I'll try to answer these questions in a LIFO way (that is, from the most recent back).

 

What is your take on this philosophical argument? If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, whence comes evil? If God is omnipotent and evil exists, then is he not omnibenevolent? If God is omnibenevolent and cannot stop evil, then is he not omnipotent?

If you really want to discuss it philosophically, let's use the way philosophers think, that is, using logic.

In propositional logic, every proposition is considered true, unless it can be shown to be false.

And there is only one way to prove something false: by leading to a contradiction.

If all your deduction was correct, coming to a contradiction, or paradox, means that your assumptions (the ideas you started with) were wrong. And the only way out of the paradox is to change these assumptions.

 

In your example we can see the following assumptions:

1. Evil exists.

2. God is omnipotent.

3. God is omnibenevolent.

And one more assumption which is convoluted, but it's still there, because 2 and 3 are basing on this assumption:

4. God exists.

 

In your example (and many similar examples involving God), you have demonstrated as much as three contradictions coming from these assumptions. This clearly means that some of your assumptions must be wrong. Either:

1. There is no evil (but we can easily see that there is, so this one cannot be false), or...

2. God is not omnipotent, or...

3. God is not omnibenevolent, or...

4. There is no God to begin with, which automatically makes 2 and 3 irrelevant.

 

You can show through other similar paradoxes, that ideas of omnipotence and omnibenevolence are inherently flawed. For example: If God is omnipotent, then He should be able to create a weight which He couldn't lift. But if He couldn't lift it, He cannot be omnipotent. Actually, you can replace God by Mickey Mouse and you'll get the same result, which means that the paradox is independent of who's omnipotent, but the sole idea of omnipotence is self-contradictory and therefore impossible. And the same can be demonstrated for omnibenevolence.

 

So either there is God, but He cannot have those impossible traits, or He Himself is impossible.

 

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Is it true if you shake a polish man's hand, in Poland, with one hand in your pocket, he'll probably punch you?

Not true. Unless you're a Jew or black

 

Just kidding.

Well, some old uptight people may see it as disrespectful when you hold your other hand in your pocket when you handshake them, since they may think that you have something to hide, or that you don't want to make this minimal effort to put it out for them. But I really doubt anyone could punch you for that. This would make them the bad ones, right?

 

There's a lot of superstitions and stereotypes about nearly every nation, Polish not excluded. (That they're poor, they drunk too much, they will steal your car, they beat foreigners etc.). But most of them false, or based on singular/exceptional cases generalized to the whole nation. You know, one bad apple can spoil the whole lot.

 

Nevertheless, there's one trait which is quite universal among many Poles: they like to complain on everything, but they rarely do anything to improve it.

 

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@@Dsanders, I don't know if one can get a Ph.D by studying languages, unless you do something extraordinary about it. But I also disagree with @@Twilight Dirac that to get a Ph.D one has to discover something which no other human knows. If this were true, then where can I get my Ph.D? If this were true, then there won't be so many Ph.Ds around, because it's not easy to discover something no one discovered yet (though not impossible). Getting Ph.Ds in our modern world become a standard path of scientific career, so people get their Ph.Ds from just making some research, writing a scientific paper about it, and that's pretty much it sometimes. It's nothing particularly more complicated than writing a master thesis, and I know it from people who have Ph.Ds.

 

But the more important question, in my opinion, is: Why do you need that Ph.D at all and what for? One doesn't need to have a Ph.D to make scientific work, or to discover something, or to be smart. I'd even say that the official scientific career may be limiting sometimes, because you will need to comply to the mainstream theories and agree with what the rest of scientific community think. I', for one, prefer to be a dissident scientist, because then I can do whatever research I want, and no one tells me what I can learn, and what I cannot. It means no grant money for the research, but I think that when one is determined and enough, one can find patterns in Nature everywhere, not needing any big money. I'm a good example that it is possible: I made many experiments with electricity, quantum physics etc. already, and I made some instruments myself from everyday objects (such as a spectrophotometer from a toilet paper tube and a broken DvD disc, or a Van der Graaff's high voltage generator from a can of beer and a duct tape). If you have lots of money, you can waste it on building LHC to smash atoms and still have no clue of how they work. But if you're smart and you know where to look, money doesn't matter, because you can get the same information from some simple experiments with everyday objects. (Did you know you can easily reproduce the double-slit experiment yourself? Or measure the speed of light with microwave oven an a bunch of marshmallows? Or observe quantum tunneling on your kitchen table? )

 

I stopped my educational career at a degree of IT engineer (or Bachelor of Science, if I understand U.S.'s educational system correctly). Many people ask me why don't I make a master degree or a Ph.D. But I always reply that to this point I already figured out that no school can teach me the things I can learn myself, and I don't know about any school which teaches the things I discovered on my own (sometimes on the contrary: they teach people the exact opposite, deliberately, to mislead them), so I'll stick to my way as long as it works so great.

 

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if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? This can't be that hard to test, all you'd need is a simple audio recorder. Set up a tree to fall at the push of a button (say a mechanism that will saw the tree down or something) and drive far far away. Push the button, then go back and retrieve the tape. How have we not tested this already?

You have answered your own question already.

Or have you?...

Sure the audio recorder would reveal that the tree makes a sound even if no one is around. But what's the difference between a tape recorder and a human ear? They both "sense" sounds, so from the point of physics, they're both "observers". So we still don't know if it is the observer which causes the observation, or is the sound a part of "objective reality" and will be there even if there's no ear or audio recorder.

 

If you dig a little bit deeper, you can simplify this problem to single atoms: If there are two atoms, one of them excited, will it always radiate light which can be "perceived" by the other atom and excite it? What if the other atom is not there? Will the former atom send its light anyway or not?

 

According to Einstein, and most of the physicists of today, excited atoms emit light "spontaneously" and in an unpredictable moment, which can be described only by probability. No surprise, since they based all quantum physics on probability ;P But this idea, in my opinion, is false, and it is misleading physicists since the times of Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen friends who invented this deception.

 

There was a guy named Dr. Herbert Walther, who in 1990 made an experiment with such excited atoms. He put one such atom in a resonant cavity, which you can imagine to be a hall of mirrors. The atom put in such a cavity then "sees" only itself, and no one else it could exchange his energy with. And as long as there is no one to "see" him, this atom stays excited. It doesn't emit light "spontaneously" when there is no one to receive it. Dr. Walther could hold this atom excited however long he pleased, proving that there's no such thing as "spontaneous" emission. He had got a Townes medal for that, but no one would ever hear about that, because it disagrees with what the mainstream wants you to believe. Dr. Walther's experiment confirmed a prediction made several years earlier by Dr. Milo Wolff, who said that there are three conditions which need to be fulfilled for interaction to occur:

1. Atoms must "see" each other (that is, the quantum waves of one of them has to reach the other, and vice versa, because they carry information about their states);

2. Atoms must "agree" with each other (that is, their waves must be in resonance to allow for energy exchange);

3. It must be benefiting for both of them (that is, it has to minimize their total amplitude).

If one of these conditions is not met, atoms remain in their present state without exchanging any energy.

 

Applying it to the tree, we can say in a huge simplification that the tree falls because it can be heard. In more detail: It falls because of shitloads of interactions between its atoms and the atoms in the environment, including these which produce sound waves when it falls, exchanging vibrational energy with all the "listening" atoms in other trees, rocks etc. So in the case of the tree, we can say that there is always someone (or something) which can hear it.

 

----------

 

@@SCS: Your question I'll leave for the next time, since it is very detailed, and to answer it in a satisfactory way (for me and you), I actually need to write a bunch of articles on my website I planned to write for a long time. Long story short, and just to wheat your appetite: Your questions and doubts about calculus are perfectly valid, and they show that your brain already sees the holes in present-day calculus theory; the holes which I've seen too, and they nagged me since many years, until I finally cracked that and found the answers which straighten the misconceptions and solve the problems which couldn't be solved by Newton and Leibniz, and many generations of scholars afterwards. Now I'll just tell you that you can do calculus without any need for infinitesimals or limits, just simple geometry and algebra with finite magnitudes. When I write these articles, I'll let you know for sure.

Edited November 6, 2014 by SasQ

[Twilight Dirac 721]

 

 

But no seriously, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? This can't be that hard to test, all you'd need is a simple audio recorder. Set up a tree to fall at the push of a button (say a mechanism that will saw the tree down or something) and drive far far away. Push the button, then go back and retrieve the tape. How have we not tested this already?

 

 

I always found this idea quite absurd.  Of course it makes a sound, all the physical mechanisms for doing so are in place even if you are not their to observe it.  What I find particularly odd is nobody ever proposes the converse of this situation.  It a falling tree somehow managed not to do something that occurs every time it is observed just because no observer is present, why not have the falling tree do something that is never observed just because no observer is present?  How about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, does it suddenly turn purple?  That proposition makes just as much sense, but nobody seems befuddled by it.

 

 

 

@Twilight Dirac that to get a Ph.D one has to discover something which no other human knows. If this were true, then where can I get my Ph.D? If this were true, then there won't be so many Ph.Ds around, because it's not easy to discover something no one discovered yet (though not impossible). Getting Ph.Ds in our modern world become a standard path of scientific career, so people get their Ph.Ds from just making some research, writing a scientific paper about it, and that's pretty much it sometimes. It's nothing particularly more complicated than writing a master thesis, and I know it from people who have Ph.Ds.

 

The standard explanation is that to earn a Ph.D., you must add to the total sum of human knowledge or something along the lines.  A simple paper will not suffice.  You can obtained a Masters with Thesis by writing a technical paper, but not a Ph.D.  You must discover something new.  

 

It is actually quite easy to discover something new when you start to get highly specific, highly specialized and highly technical.  I earned mine by making a twisting beam of light, another professor already knew how to create it mathematically, but I came up with a specific arrangement of optics needed to bring the required mode superposition into reality to create the twisting beam and that got me a Ph.D.  A colleague of mine showed that if you focused ultrafast light with a sufficiently short focal length lens, it could filament without the assistance of the Kerr effect, which is usually consider the culprit for that kind of effect.  A lot of the other physics related to filamenting light were understood, but nobody caught that nuance.  That earned him a Ph.D.  The whole original contribution thing is not that hard to do once it gets this absurdly specialized.

 

 

 

According to Einstein, and most of the physicists of today, excited atoms emit light "spontaneously" and in an unpredictable moment, which can be described only by probability. No surprise, since they based all quantum physics on probability ;P But this idea, in my opinion, is false, and it is misleading physicists since the times of Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen friends who invented this deception. There was a guy named Dr. Herbert Walther, who in 1990 made an experiment with such excited atoms. He put one such atom in a resonant cavity, which you can imagine to be a hall of mirrors. The atom put in such a cavity then "sees" only itself, and no one else it could exchange his energy with. And as long as there is no one to "see" him, this atom stays excited. It doesn't emit light "spontaneously" when there is no one to receive it. Dr. Walther could hold this atom excited however long he pleased, proving that there's no such thing as "spontaneous" emission. He had got a Townes medal for that, but no one would ever hear about that, because it disagrees with what the mainstream wants you to believe. Dr. Walther's experiment confirmed a prediction made several years earlier by Dr. Milo Wolff, who said that there are three conditions which need to be fulfilled for interaction to occur: 1. Atoms must "see" each other (that is, the quantum waves of one of them has to reach the other, and vice versa, because they carry information about their states); 2. Atoms must "agree" with each other (that is, their waves must be in resonance to allow for energy exchange); 3. It must be benefiting for both of them (that is, it has to minimize their total amplitude). If one of these conditions is not met, atoms remain in their present state without exchanging any energy.

 

Actually this phenomenon is widely recognized and well understood.  It goes by the name of "photonic crystals" and "photonic bandgaps".  Basically, if you can design a material or cavity that won't permit energy transfer at the frequency of spontaneous emission, you can keep an atom in an excited state.  It is a rather active area of research and these structures are now being designed into optical fibers.  They got nothing to do with Dr. Milo Wolff's rules, as an atom doesn't need to "see" anything to radiate into vacuum, but blocking spontaneous emission is doable.

[SasQ 1,379]

Dsanders, on 06 Nov 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

Why do we generally procrastinate

We procrastinate because we have something more interesting to do Look closer at the words you use to describe what you plan to do. If you use words such as "I have to do it", "I must do it" etc., then you will feel a huge strain stopping you from doing it, because your subconscious mind don't want to be forced to do anything. It prefers a good play and fun, and to do what it is naturally attracted to. If, on the other hand, you use words such as "I want to do it", or "I'd like to do it", or "I love to do it", then no one, including yourself, would need to force you to do it – you will do it with pleasure.

 

People think that being an adult is about forcing themselves into doing dull and unpleasant things, so they do this harm to themselves. Notice how little kids can do something for hours when they have fun, and no one needs to force them into doing it. This is the difference between passion and duty. Try to find more passions and limit the amount of your duties, and you'll live a wonderful life, without any need for procrastination.

 

One can also procrastinate because of being afraid of success. This might seem strange at first, but notice that success often brings some big changes into your life, and changes mean that you would have to adjust to a completely new environment, and learn to survive in it from scratch. There are some deep natural instincts which tend to avoid such changes, because maintaining status quo means more control and the comfort of safety. Success means that you will need to go out from your comfort zone, and this might sometimes be scary. Therefore people sometimes prefer to continue their work on something instead of completing it, because working on it is something they know and understand, and when they finish it, their status quo will end and they're scared about what changes would it bring. And what would they do then instead, when their work will be done?

 

Once I figured out a neat trick to fight procrastination: Since we procrastinate one thing to do something else which is more fun but usually less important, set yourself a goal which is even bigger and more important than what you have to do originally. Then you will procrastinate that bigger goal by turning down to the "less important" thing you had to do originally

 

Once a friend asked me what to do, because he had to learn some math to the exam, and he was procrastinating it by playing video games. Then he was angry on himself that he is "wasting his time on silly stuff" instead of learning math. (Nice going: do something and blame yourself for it, perfect masochism ) So I told him: "Stop complaining and play these video games for the next several hours. Give yourself this time, only for playing, without any bad feelings, forget about the math. Play for such a long time until you tell to yourself: Gaah, I'm so bored with this game! Let's try learning some math for a change..." And it worked, because there's a limit in everything, even in playing games. Everything can become boring after some time. And if not... well, then maybe your destiny isn't math, but being paid for beta-testing video games? ;D

 

Dsanders, on 06 Nov 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

and in addition, why is it so hard to form a habit without having it fall apart within the next few days, weeks, or the next few months if lucky?

As above: It is called "passion". How come I can spend hours, days, weeks, months, even years, on digging through books and learning the secrets of the Universe, math, physics, ancient history, making instruments and performing experiments? Why I don't get bored or fall apart? Because this is my passion, this is what drives my whole life, something I could do without end. It is fun, it gives me thrills, I feel like a king when I discover something no one on this planet could know, and when I can share my knowledge with others. That's what my cutie mark is all about Maybe it's time for you to find yours?

 

Dsanders, on 06 Nov 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

Do you speak or have a interest in any particular foreign language?

My native language is Polish and I'm pretty fluent in English (still not perfect though). But I tend to know a bit of every popular language, to be able to understand some % of what is written in it, so I also know a bit of French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Usually not to the point to speak in these languages, but enough to know some basic phrases and grammar, and be able to decipher sentences with the help of a dictionary. It's because when I study scientific books, I often encounter some old books which have never been translated to English, so I need to read them somehow in their original language to figure out what they're about. It's a hard work, but it's worth it.

Especially that sometimes English translations are censored.

Yes, you've heard it right. CENSORED.

 

Once I was digging some information about atomic spectra and I found an English translation of the original paper by J.J.Balmer about how he cracked the code of the hydrogen spectrum. The text was somewhat weird, it sounded like something was missing there. He was referring to some "geometric construction", and a description of his method he used to figure out the correct formula, but there was nothing like that in the paper, nor any pictures. So I started digging deeper, and I found scans of old scientific annals where there was the original paper of Balmer in German. And when I started analyzing it, trying to decode its meaning, it turned out that indeed there was a lot of stuff which has been edited out! And these were not coincidental fragments, but the most important ones, where he was describing his method, and his views on the Ether (another subject banned from Science) and harmonic properties of the hydrogen atom. The geometric construction was still missing, though: at the place where it was supposed to be, there was only a blank page. Fortunately I found this illustration at some other place. I managed to translate a whole lot of this text from German to Polish, and what I found was more amazing than I expected. It turns out that Balmer didn't found his formula for hydrogen spectra through trial and error, or some random number crunching, but he deduced it from harmonic properties of atoms, and using a neat geometric construction rooted in antiquity, a form of harmonic analysis, to find a common "base tone" (as he called it) in these wavelengths. But Alfred Schuster, who was at these times a president of the Royal Society, was a great opponent of harmonic theories, and did his best to ban them from Science. He was trying to discredit Balmer's works many times, until he succeeded. What's more, Balmer could be considered a true father of atomic theory, since his formulas and predictions set out the route of all future development of this science, and he even predicted how his formula could evolve to match the spectra of other atoms. Rydberg simply ripped off his formula, flipped his constant upside down, multipied it by four, and in this form it is now called Rydberg's constant. After that, Niels Bohr took this formula too, flipped upside down and did some simple algebra to transform it from wavelengths to frequencies, and then from frequencies to energies. But instead of using harmonic wave structure, as Balmer did originally, he perverted this theory into his infamous planetary model of the atom, which is so much wrong that I wonder how it could be accepted in science at all ;P

 

But back to the subject...

I needed to make sure that I translated it all correctly, so I gave it to someone who speaks German and Polish to check it. And this person told me that I did a very good job. There were just several simple styllistic errors, but nothing has been translated incorrectly. I even did one thing better, because I figured out that the word "verhältnisse" was supposed to mean "ratios" and not "conditions" suggested by Google Translate and several dictionaries. That person couldn't believe when I told her that I don't know German and I haven't ever learned it. So it seems that my technique of studying languages works pretty well

 

Dsanders, on 06 Nov 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

What are you thoughts on language and do you think linguistics is a good subject to major in college?

I think that schools are the worst place to learn languages (and pretty much anything else). Quoting one of Polish NLP masters and self-development coaches, Matt Grzesiak: "An infant can learn the language of his parents in a year or two, with no grammar study or workbooks, just from listening. Then I don't know how much one has had to f**k up teaching languages in schools that it takes several years and a student is still unable speak in that language!"

 

If you want to learn some language, do it the way infants do: Immerse yourself in that language. Listen to native speakers (news, radio broadcasts, youtubers, movies etc.). I, for one, like to play MLP episodes dubbed in a foreign language, side by side with the English version, so that I know what do they speak about in the dubbed one, and I can learn the pronunciation and grammar "by ear".

For the vocabulary, start from writing down a list of words which are basic and most frequent in any language; words such as the verbs "to be", "to do", "to have", "to want", "to like", "to go" etc. Most of them will be irregular, because these verbs are often taken from some older version of the language, which had its own rules, or they're a mixture of words which has been adopted for that purpose, because they're basic and has to be short due to frequency of use (it's especially evident in French and Italian). And you will notice that they often have something in common; e.g. French "voir" = to see, "savoir" = to know (seeing and knowing are often related in many languages; in Polish: "wiedzie?" vs. "widzie?" ), "avoir" = to have.

Try to find out not only what the word means, but also why does it mean that and what's the history of this word, because the history often reveals some connections with other languages, common roots, or sheds some light on the meaning. (For example, I once found this way a connection between English "guess" and Polish "q?os" = voice of speech). This is called "etymology". People often use languages like a parrot: they simply repeat words that they learned to cause particular outcomes, but not understanding what these words actually mean. It's ironical, since they use their native languages as if they were foreign languages. I once shocked my French friend when I told him that "un"/"une" in French, which is an indefinite personal pronoun, such as english "one" (someone), comes from the word meaning the number one (in English too, actually). And this is a common pattern amongst many European languages (e.g. German "ein"/"eine", Italian "uno"/"una", even English indefinite articles "a"/"an" are shortened versions of "one"). He was shocked, and he said that he uses French language for over twenty years but he didn't noticed it

 

Dsanders, on 06 Nov 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

And finally, what is your favorite aspect in mathematics (if you have one particular favorite) and why?

Hmm... I always loved geometry, because it was about drawing, and I like drawing Geometry makes math visible. I hated it when my math teachers were forbidding me to draw geometrical solutions to equations and write algebraic formulas instead, because it was like learning music through writing notes instead of playing the actual instrument. I often say that algebra is a programming language for geometry: it allows one to manipulate geometric shapes in a symbollic way without the need of drawing elaborate figures all the time. But it can be used in this "shortcut" version only after one understands what these algebraic symbols represent, and where those equations came from, not the other way around. Behind every equation there's always some geometry, and it is usually enlightening when you figure it out. (For example, when you see some pattern repeats periodically, look for circles, because periodicity means that a circle is hiding there somewhere.)

 

On the contrary, I always hated trigonometry and statistics.

 

Trigonometry, because it was about some irregular functions which doesn't give "nice" and "round" values, but usually some transcendental numbers one cannot express in any closed form, just ask a calculator about a crude approximation. And there was a lot of weird rules which I had to learn "by heart", because no one had any explanations. It took me many years to figure out that school teachers were lying, and that trigonometry is not about triangles, but circles and rotations. I understood trigonometry only when I needed to crack it to make rotations in computer graphics, and when I figured out where those weird formulas come from. Again, it turned out, that there is a simple geometry hidden behind all of it, a geometry of the most perfect figure – the circle; and all these squiggly sinusoids were just shadows of that circle. In school, I was like the prisoners of the Platonic cave, being able to only watch the shadows of the real world. Studying geometry allowed me to escape that cave and see the real world.

 

Statistics, because it is a "scientific method of lying". It is so good at it that it can even deceive those who use it. I've been told that it is all about randomness and uncertainty, and I don't like randomness and uncertainty. I don't like such skulduggery. But with time I figured out that this was also a lie. There's nothing about randomness in statistics. All these patterns, such as the "normal distribution", come out naturally from combinations and properties of numbers. Go figure: Make an arithmetic triangle (also known as Pascal's triangle, although Pingala from ancient India discovered it centuries before Pascal), take the numbers from any of its rows, and graph them, and you will get the normal distribution.

 

 

Sure, you can get the same graph from flipping coins, but this still has nothing to do with randomness, but with combinations of bits (binary digits) which make sequences of particular lengths. It's easy to see it by doing that experiment yourself: Flip a coin 10000 times (don't freak out, you can flip 100 coins at once and repeat it 100 times, no big deal) and write down the results. Then start grouping these results in different ways and plot them. You will always get some sort of normal distribution. So it doesn't depend on the results of the actual coin flips, or how do you group them, but on the patterns in combinations you can make from them. The more coin flips, the less is the influence of random errors, and the more is the influence of simple patterns in numbers.

 

I still hate statistics. But now the reason is different: Now, when I understand how it works, I'm mad when I see how it is used to deceive people, especially in quantum physics, to convince people that our world is a random unpredictable chaos impossible to grasp with our minds; since it's the opposite of what it really is.

 

In mathematics, I also like calculus, because it is a way of describing changes, and changes are what physics is all about. But here again, it took me many years to figure out how calculus really works, because we're being taught it at schools in a very wrong way, full of contradictions, superstitions, and plain old bullshit. And again, lots of formulas no one can explain (unless one digs through several old books, down to the ancient Greece and India, to find out how it all begun and what geometry hides behind it).

 

Wow, I typed nearly 12000 characters I definitely need to get a life... http://mlpforums.com/public/style_emoticons/mlp/tongue.png I hope it answers your questions well.

[Dsanders 5,747]

WelI hope it answers your questions well.

Thank you for dedicating all your time here to share your vast knowledge and personal thoughts of the world with us undeserving members. We need more knowledgable people like you and SCS.

 

As a result of your answers, several more questions come to mind.

 

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The second question that you answered was not intently directed at getting tired of doing what you love, but more specifically about establishing new positive habits that you are not used (e.g. exercise, diet, writing, reading, practicing hygiene, etc.). There are instances where people who want to improve their lives try to implement these new and beneficial habits, but they always end up regressing and quitting after a while. Like, why is it so hard to keep a New Years resolution, or why do many people give up trying to lose weight after the first three months or so. Is it a psychological issue? Or perhaps there is some physics involved (entropy)?

 

 

In regards to your languages of interest, what language do you feel most comfortable with speaking after English and Polish? If you had to speak with a native of that language, with how much fluency would you be able to speak?

 

 

You answer to my question about your favorite area in mathematics was especially interesting. If you think statistics is full of lies, unless I stand corrected, wouldn't that be very ironic considering that one of its most common and popular applications is calculating probability? What are your thoughts on mathematical probability and do you believe that the mainstream interpretation of it is misconstrued?

 

Now for a couple questions that are completely new and unrelated to the aforementioned subjects.

 

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I've seen you mention this quite a bit, but what are your thoughts on humanity? What sort of path do you believe we are going on and how can much of the corruption and deceitfulness in today's society be reversed?

 

 

Now on the matter of lucid dreaming, since I see that you are quite experienced with the subject, is it true that there exists existential elements as you travel deeper into your dreams, clues that can lead you to discover things that are unexplainable in the conscious realm? I have heard stories of lucid dreaming experiences in which people end up having learned so much more in their dreams than they ever could in their own reality, stories in which people have met "dream guides." I have also read of people meeting their "twin flame"/soulmate in the dream realm. I am highly skeptical of the last two aspects I mentioned but nonetheless, it all appears interesting to me. I would love to know your take on this but I should warn you that this matter goes more into the area of metaphysics and spirituality.

 

And finally, the simplest question (I think) I have for you today. For those out there who are unable to dream, how does one dream? Or more so, recall dreams since experts say that we dream every night, whether or not we are aware.

 

 

That is all for now, take months in answering these questions if you need to. On an additional note, I'll be responding to your lessons tomorrow morning. I haven't been able to lately due to stressful situations but I know that I will have the time tomorrow. Take care friend.

Edited November 24, 2014 by Dsanders