Mike Hardy

Members
  • Posts

    130
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About Mike Hardy

Profile Information

  • Interests
    mathematics, probability theory, statistical inference, miscellaneous oddball other stuff
  • Location
    Minneapolis, MN

Mike Hardy's Achievements

Newbie

Newbie (1/14)

0

Reputation

  1. A bit of a change of subject, but recently I've had occasion to think about some ways in which incentive structures in universities stifle the development of teaching a subject to those not majoring in it.
  2. Why should one be alarmed by the fact that she _cited_ the writings of a nazi? Leonard Peikoff cited the writings of numerous nazis, including Hitler, in his book _The_Ominous_Parallels_. Everyone who's ever written about Hitler in a scholarly context has done the same. And frequently in non-scholarly contexts too.
  3. OK, so we can see _atoms_, but we cannot see _an_ atom. -- Mike Hardy
  4. "For Whom the Bull Tells"? "Principals of Mathematical Psychoanalysis"? "Who Is Leonard Peikoff"? "Ich hab' heute nichts versäumt Denn ich hab' nur von dir geträumt"?
  5. "The Fountainhead of Awareness Shrugged"? "Floating in the Summer Sky, Ninety-Nine Red Brains Go By"? "The Sycamore Lechers"? "Buddhism for Physicists"? "An Inconvenient Gore"? "The Twilight's Own"? (Geez, why didn't I ever feed Roland that one? What's wrong with me?) Should I keep guessing until I get it right? The more guesses, the higher my score, right? -- Mike Hardy
  6. OK, now I'm trying to figure out whether "Anacrist" means "anti-Christ" or "anarchist"......
  7. I have to laugh. That isn't an English sentence. "While" sounds somewhat like the German word "weil", which means "because". But "while" is like the German "während", except that in English, "while" is used only as a conjunction and not as a preposition ("during" is the corresponding preposition). In that case German fails to make the preposition/conjunction distinction that English makes, but then there's also a case where it's the other way around: the German words "vor" and "bevor" both correspond to English "before", except that "vor" is only a preposition and "bevor" is only a conjuction. (And while we're remembering not to be deceived by such resemblances, let's recall that German "Gift", spelled and pronounced exactly like English "gift" (but always with a capital initial "G" since it's a noun) means something quite different.) You all wanted to know this. Right? -- Mike Hardy
  8. And that must be your main point here. Right? -- Mike Hardy
  9. 19 Ayn Read Bull Loons? J [Edited to change the spelling error "Red" to the correct "Read"] Jonathan, that is an excellent pun, worthy of Roland Pericles. Maybe I'll plagiarize it. -- Mike Hardy
  10. OK, being too dumb to discuss what Roland Pericles might call the "prose and cons" of this topic, I "hear buy" (as Roland would say) offer for readers' consideration this example of representationalist art, found in the world's largest non-military cemetery: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Hh-friedhof-ohlsdorf-bombenopfer.jpg> Carlo Karges, among others, is buried there. If you don't know who Carlo Karges was, he's the author of a work that all of you know but may associate with someone else's name. -- Mike Hardy !!! A good illustrator is good, and a mediocre representational/realist artist is mediocre? Couldn't (ok, I could, but I didn't) resist it. Ellen ___ I have to agree with this one. -- Mike Hardy PS: Ellen are you writing something for publication? You've suggested on some occasions that you're guilty of having a life, so I hope that or something like that is why.
  11. !!! A good illustrator is good, and a mediocre representational/realist artist is mediocre? Couldn't (ok, I could, but I didn't) resist it. Ellen ___ I have to agree with this one. -- Mike Hardy PS: Ellen are you writing something for publication? You've suggested on some occasions that you're guilty of having a life, so I hope that or something like that is why.
  12. The proof that it is an ellipse, in the sense of having two foci, such that the sum of the distances from a point on the curve to the two foci remains constant as the point moves along the curve, can be proved by a variety of methods, including that of Dandelin spheres. Dandelin spheres can also be used for the intersection of a plane with a cone. That's why the term "conic section" is used. Look up "Dandelin spheres" on Wikipedia. -- Mike Hardy
  13. Merlin, if it's tilted relative to both, then it's an ellipse. I don't know what you mean by an "oval", but the shape of the intersection depends only on the norm of the gradient of the plane, and not on the direction of the gradient. -- Mike Hardy
  14. I do something somewhat like "thinking in images", but I can never be sure how much if any of it makes sense until I can reduce it to words and/or mathematical notation. (I could add something about physicists not caring whether it makes sense, but that might be sarcastic, so I won't.) -- Mike Hardy