Re: Proposal: 6NF

Cimode wrote:
> paul c wrote:

>> I have never understood what beauty has to do with mathematics and vice
>> versa and I hope I never do as I feel that would make me less human and
>> my aim is to become more so.

Yes, what pleases the eye or one's consciousness seems different for us all and pointless to try to quantify even though social engineers keep trying, I guess because they want to apply math that they are familiar with and call those narrow results answers or conclusions. It does please me that some of mathematics can be used to reason about other parts of mathematics, I guess this is beautiful for some people if not me. When I see a short proof or an economical analogy of one, I like that too. It is the elaborate mechanisms people come up with to twist what the bare metal is capable of that bugs me. When it comes to business systems I've yet to meet an executive who isn't satisfied with division by zero resulting in zero.

Rightness is just as subjective as beauty. While I wish that consumer machines used base 10 arithmetic, as long as they don't then let the lawyers use a specialty program or paper-based tables to get the right mortgage calculation. That seems a natural kind of variety to me and life being a short as it is, we should just get used to it, just as we are used to not being able to find an exact Imperial equivalent for a 44 millimeter Metric nut fastener.

On the other hand I can't deny that it is a human trait to maintain motion/activity in a direction that has the fewest obstacles even when the returns diminish rapidly, eg., the anti-smoking movement has basically won its cause where I live (practically nobody aged 40 or younger smokes anymore) but the restrictions on the aging smokers continue to increase in severity. Meanwhile cancer rates might be rising for other reasons which the eco movements mostly ignore, being mostly concerned with saving the planet for the use of future generations of a species that may be at the top of the food chain but is definitely less civilized than many of the so-called lower ones, just look at how various mammals and birds treat each other compared to the way we treat each other!\

In the so-called computer advances of recent years, I think the ones that ended up hitting the street are less a result of reason and more a result of accident.

p Received on Sun Oct 22 2006 - 17:21:25 CEST