The joys of knowing the local language

Coming back from giving a math lesson, there were two little girls (around age 6) staring at me, giggling, as I unlocked my bike.

Dialogue in Dutch with the two 6-year old girls: ( Read more... )

Anyway, their childish energy lifted my mood for half an hour or so.

I noticed something unusual: this little girl had a distinct Dutch accent when speaking English. I guess I'm just not around children much, especially not multilingual children. It's not common to hear children speaking with an accent, in any case.

I was also amused by the fact that they thought I was Dutch.

My English is much much better than by Dutch, but my English sounds foreign everywhere, because my accent is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (maybe because I spent 4 years in England, followed by 5 years in America, followed by an English girlfriend).

Yet, in Dutch, my accent is convincing. So, before my "advanced Dutch" (grammar, vocabulary, fluency) gets tested, I can keep the appearances. (although this could easily change if I go live in Belgium)

So in Holland, I can pass for English (or American, depending on the person) and I can pass for Dutch (but only for a while).

FormalBlog

Jean-Paul Delahaye - Shortcuts in Proof, via rweba
articulates many of my ideas (which are mostly spread out and disorganized).

* Goedel's incompleteness theorem is not an argument against the program of formalizing mathematics.
* Mathematical notation is often ambiguous and context-dependent (I once wrote a dictionary such ambiguities)
* He mentions that "formal proofs" are not all there is to mathematics reasoning, quoting "Proof without Words". However, Delahaye seems unaware of Bundy's program to formalize diagrammatic reasoning as well.
* Human mathematical reasoning seems too dynamic to fit into static logical "boxes". (This is the reason I believe in coherentist "foundations", and desire a system for progressive concept refinement, not unlike software methodologies: you want a design that is flexible and modular enough to be robust to future changes in representation)


Here it is:

Shortcuts in Proof
Jean-Paul Delahaye
Universite des Sciences et Technologies de Lille
( Read more... )

IdeaStorming: underdetermination and information theory

uncritically philosophizing:

* Physics is hard to learn.
* Therefore, the collection of physics theories contains a lot of information.
* Therefore, there must a lot of experimental data to account for, otherwise such complex theories would not be warranted. (What's the relationship between the information content of data observed (theory-relevant information, excluding noise) and the information content of the theory)


criticism:

Problems: physics could be hard to learn due to a priori knowledge (mathematics contains very little information, and yet it is hard)

Is physics hard in the same way that math is hard?