0db532a0
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
I’ve temporarily moved away from London to somewhere a lot smaller, but I live in a much nicer and bigger place for less than half the price.
I invite people over and am invited over. We talk and things, or sometimes watch something and talk about that. I can make a cup of tea or maybe even coffee, and I don’t have to pay through the nose for it. I can cook for a group for less than the price of a single meal outside.
No one gives a fuck if you’re not drinking in your own home. I’ve been drinking a lot less. It’s a sobering experience.
I wonder whether Gödel would have pursued the Proof if he did not believe in an omnipotent god.
Before picking up this book as an undergrad in pure maths, I still had romantic ideas about a separate platonic universe and the divine authority of mathematics to explain all human thought.
This book, along with studying the various geometries, each with a different choice of axioms not necessarily based in ‘reality’, destroyed the majority of that romance.
It's a really nice book. Lots of beautiful illustrations and interesting ideas with code snippets for generating those illustrations. I found it fascinating as a kid. The message wasn't too important for me, and I didn't really have the background to draw my own conclusions from it anyway.
Someone on IRC, who was a big fan, introduced it to me.
I actually started programming with this very book, copying the examples from it into Python and then Scheme (introduced to me by that same guy) and Common Lisp. I respect Wolfram's dedication. It's the type of dedication that brings us things like Mathematica and TempleOS.
The guy who introduced me to this book and then Scheme had contacts at Wolfram Research and later sorted me out with a free copy of Mathematica. I could never have afforded that with my pocket money, and I wasn't at university yet. He was a big underdog in the community and had his own problems too. What a great guy.
He's still going strong today: http://xahlee.org/
There's something to be taken even from book like this. It would be good to revisit and re-evaluate the book as someone who now has a semblance of an education in the area. I wish I didn't sell it.