Programming is like

Programming is like Buddhism. No one can tell you how to do it. You must do it for yourself. You are the only one who can get in touch with your own reality.

Programming is like the Matrix. There is a difference between knowing the path and walking it. I can only show you the door. You have to go through it.

Programming is like mathematics. There is a crucial relationship between syntax and semantics that fills the soul with ecstasy.

Programming is like the brain. The line is blurred between what is static and what is dynamic.

Programming is like the mind. It is everything and it is nothing. It is you and me, and everything in between.

Programming is like music. The answers are out there, it just requires the right kind of person to capture it and tell it to the world.

The answer to life, the universe, and everything is out there, it just takes some time for the global consciousness to understand everything there is to understand. Communication is critical.

Better start rethinking your symbols, math

Currently bothering me: LaGrange’s Theorem. The theorem states that if G is a finite group and H is a subgroup of G, then the order of H divides the order of G. That’s cool. Except the symbol for “the order of a group G” is “|G|”, and the symbol for “divides” is “|”, so the theorem states “|H|||G|”.

Someone better get on this and rewrite some textbooks with a different symbol for “divides”. I propose @ or $.

I spent my revision

I spent my “revision” (review) class thinking about the area between a square and the circle which circumscribes it, and the formula for determining that area for a circle of arbitrary radius.

Fermat rocks, Ramanujan is cool

Pierre de Fermat.

Pierre de Fermat rocks. Fermat made some outrageously sophisticated mathematical propositions, claimed them to be true, and then stated that he didn’t want to write them down because they would be too long. Check it out for both Fermat’s Last Theorem and Fermat’s little theorem.

Also cool if you don’t know him is Ramanujan, a mathematician whose genius was his insight. Whereas traditional results in mathematics are derived in proofs using previously proven statements and known rules of production, he was able to simply “see” immensely complex equations, the same way you or I might have an intuition for what is a pleasant melody. Ramanujan is to math as Mozart is to music. Think big. They were both able to reach out, capture art, and express it in a way that we mere mortals could understand, even though that might be just the beginning of its beauty.

At this point, you should be thinking about deterministic processes, specifically their limits in recreating the human mind. That’s what I think of anyway.

Also, note that I am blatantly paraphrasing Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter thought it was massively intriguing about forty years before I did.

Tupper’s self-referential formula

Tupper’s self-referential formula plots “itself”. The formula looks like this:

Tupper's self-referential formula.

The graph of coordinates satisfying this inequality looks like this:

Tupper's self-referential formula plot.

This is a little bit cool, but it’s not a very…meaty “strange loop” (a self-reference in Douglas Hofstadter’s terminology), so to speak. This formula plots what appears to be the image of itself, a syntactic mirror, and here the syntax is very specific. The significance of the formula expressed here is tied to its syntax (the syntax we use to understand and express it). If this same formula were expressed using a different notation (i.e. a different syntax), the plot may be the same, but the plot no longer would mirror the image of the formula.

I prefer self-references that are semantically linked, linked by meaning (not necessarily exclusive of syntax).

On The Matrix

While reading about the connection between my favorite discipline, Buddhism, and my favorite film, The Matrix, a topic on which I must expound later, I came across this old (1999) interview with the Wachowski brothers, responding to questions from users online about the movie. The following are what I find to be the most interesting questions (in italics) and subsequent responses by the Wachowski brothers.

Are all the religious symbolism and doctrine throughout this movie intentional, or not?
Most of it is intentional. One of the things we tried to do with the Neb for when we were shooting “in the real world” was use long lenses to separate the humans from the backgrounds, as opposed to when we shot the Matrix we used short lenses to place the humans in specific deep spaces. We also tinted all of the lights blue in the “real world” and green in the Matrix.

[Concerning the a]gent training where woman in red dress appears
People don’t realize how important this scene is. Because we are all staring at the woman in the red dress! There’s actually twins and triplets that we hired in that scene. And all of the clothes are based on black and white costumes, like nuns, chefs, brides, sailors. We had the idea that Mouse just doubled people instead of making originals. But we couldn’t afford to do it digitally, so we ended up hiring as many doubles, or as many twins, as we could find in Sydney. It was kind of like a bad dream on the set.

Could you say a little about the sound design which was terrific such as the slo-mo bullet ripple effects, Foley effects.
Dane Davis is a genius. He built all of these sound effects from all kinds of original sounds. He’d put bullets on strings and whirled them around his studio, he digitized raindrops against windowpanes to create the sound of the Matrix code.

This one is awesome and explains why I loved this movie before (and after) knowing anything about Buddhism, mathematics, or quantum physics:

Did ideas from Buddhism influence you in making the film?
Yes. There’s something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time.

The television in the oracle’s apartment is playing an old horror movie, with giant white rabbits hopping around in the streets. I know you noticed it the first time you saw the movie.

Do you think The Matrix will develop a cult following in the decades to come?
We hope it’s as big as the Night of the Lepus.

What is the significance of Neo eating the Oracle’s cookie?
There was a piece cut out of the movie that explained the significance more. It’s hard to explain.

Why were they only able to jack in through hard lines, but still able to communicate over cell?
Good question! Mostly we felt that the amount of information that was being sent into the Matrix required a significant portal. Those portals, we felt, were better described with the hard lines rather than cell lines. We also felt that the rebels tried to be invisible when they hacked, that’s why all the entrances and exits were sort of through decrepit and low traffic areas of the Matrix.

The rest of the questions and answers are pretty lame. Come to think of it, these are probably also pretty lame, unless you are me and you’ve seen this film a couple dozen times.

My favorite Wikipedia page

My favorite Wikipedia page is the list of unsolved problems. Some of my favorite topics: cognitive science, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, philosophy. This page summarizes my raison d’étre.

London is a magical place

London is a magical city of hope and wonder. I’ve been here for a couple of weeks, and I’ve found some interesting differences between this culture and the one with which I am most familiar: white American suburbia. Here are a few:

A slight change in inflection makes a spoken language exponentially more difficult to understand.

The abbreviated form of the word “mathematics” is “maths”, even though it is way more difficult to say than “math”.

Every corner has a pub.

It is hard to find frozen cookie dough.

Just about everything looks old and important.

Love, Actually is perhaps the greatest film ever created in the history of films. Well, that’s actually the same wherever I go.

Many Indians live here.

For some reason, the English are very frightened of getting electrocuted. Every electrical outlet has an enable/disable toggle. Also there are no outlets in bathrooms.

That is all for now, I will post more when I encounter them.