The depressive episode I started yesterday persists, but has been much less severe today. This afternoon I finished the last few chapters of The Joy of X without too much struggle. Now I will have to find a new book for my light math reading. I have several options in my library already, but I would welcome recommendations, as well.
The final chapter of The Joy of X was about infinity and included a treatment of Cantor’s diagonal argument that the set of real numbers is uncountable. (I’m sorry, non-specialist readers, but I’m not up to explaining what that is right now, though it is fairly accessible.) The Joy of X did not account in any way for the fact that some numbers have more than one decimal representation (e.g. that $0.1\overline{0}=0.0\overline{9}$). I’m sure a more formal presentation of the argument would have. I intend to think for a while about how I would do it before looking up the accepted method. Not today, though.1
- To do. ↩︎
glad to hear you are phasing out of the fog
Cool, I never thought about 0.10̅ = 0.09̅, though I know enough about infinite series to know it does. (I also never thought about how to print an overbar macron on a Mac, but now I have).
Neat, huh?
In the process, I had a really bad idea.
The Apple Keyboard viewer, whether showing US keyboard or Unicode Hex Input keyboard displays a list of words at the top. I am guessing they are words that have a good probablility of following what you just typed.
So, it should be possible to compose really dreary English text, lets say a short story, by always selecting one of the displayed words, and periodically adding some punctuation.
“Let’s hope that it will be a short story. ” is an example I just typed. Here is another:
“It was a great idea but it’s not so cool now that I am doing it. I’m still trying to make it work though. If it doesn’t make sense then I’ll just have to go back and get a replacement head.”
I’ve played that game on my phone. It can be pretty funny.
Call it AS, Artificial Stupidity. Any good suggestions to make it ASS?
Not so far, but I will think about it.