#spherical cows

[nerdymemes]

[fnord888]

@argumate

In theory, selling a perpetuity should be less scary than selling a maturing bond with equivalent coupon.

[e8-12]

🎶 I'm alright Nobody worry 'bout me. Why you got to gimme a fight? Can't you just let it be?🎶

An interesting video on YouTube.

[e8-12]

Topology and canines

Regardless of the definition of a chair one uses as a topological axiom, people are basically extremely complicated and emotionally unstable chairs for dogs.

[selfmaderibcageman]

prof talking abt absorption cross-sections and assuming all small molecules are essentially spheres in free space all i can think of is him

[isaacsapphire]

Are programmers congenitally stupid

Specifically, are programmers, on account of some intrinsic aspect of being programmers, inherently tending to be absolutely fucking morons when it comes to political philosophy?

Like, I am CONSTANTLY having this problem: I see a programmer who seems fairly smart and interesting, so I listen to their political philosophy stuff. After a while, I realize that the programmer is an idiot who appears to live in a different reality.

And there seems to be a pattern to this. My current theory is that becoming absorbed in a world of 1. No geographic boundaries and very very low geographic costs 2. A world where everything is no/low cost instantly clonable 3. A world where they can control absolutely everything if they are clever enough (just off of the top of the head) has warped their perceptions and made them fucking useless at political philosophy.

[parkparadigm]

Internally, software projects may persist long beyond their sell-by date because they are attached to an executive’s priority item. They may be overly literal regurgitations of inadequately considered customer specifications (see the glorious short, The Expert, or Bob Cringely excoriate IBM for using customer requirements as weapons). Most interesting, to me, is where individuals in positions of power on a project (perhaps a product lead, or an architect, or a lead developer) are shielded from the consequences of failure due to the influence of a senior executive. The latter case happens most clearly in nepotist situations, but smaller shops with expert beginners in possession of seniority or disproportionate influence are a not uncommon occurrence, as well.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/05/15/power-gradients-and-spherical-cows/

[sibaku]

On the WURSTKATASTROPHE and hairy spherical cows

For the non-German speaking people: The word in the title literally translates to SAUSAGE CATASTROPHE.

You may ask yourself "huh?" and you would be right to do so.

Today I was browsing Wikipedia for some maths stuff. Then the magic of Wiki happened and I clicked one of the many links flying around. I landed on the page for half-integers. These are somehow related to the problem of packing 4-dimensional spheres as tightly as possible (the least amount of space wasted). I read something about that stuff before, so I searched for links leading me to the German page about packing a finite amount of spheres. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorie_der_endlichen_Kugelpackungen

This is where the WURSTKATASTROPHE comes into play. If you would like to pack a number of spheres (say, oranges or so) with as little wasted space as possible, what would you do?

Well, the theory of finite sphere packing will tell you, that the form of a sausage would be best (you line them up), BUT this will only work until the WURSTKATASTROPHE takes place. Starting with 55 spheres, the sausage form won't be the best anymore, instead some sort of clustering would fit better. Man, what a disaster!

But don't despair, for there is the WURSTVERMUTUNG (literally sausage conjecture). If you were to live in a higher dimensional plane (starting with 5D), the sausage form would always be best. Sadly, this isn't proved yet.

There are some kinda weird things in maths. I will now explain the second part of the title.

Let's start with the weird thing. The hairy ball theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem) . It states (paraphrased), that if you had a ball full of hair, you wouldn't be able to comb it in such a way, that no hair would stand up. In other words: There would always be a cowlick.

What can you do with that. Well, you can model some realistic real life scenarious. Let's assume you had a perfectly spherical cow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow), just as you can see running around on the fields. You are asked by friends to show it to them, since they like cows. Of course you want to show its best side! So you comb it, but oh noes! Your cow will get a cowlick and there is nothing you can do about that!

Knowing the maths could have prevented you from doing all the pointless work!

It's fun reading about weird mathy things and there are quite a few :)