> The mathematician and philosopher Alex Bellos suggested in 2014 that a candidate for the lowest uninteresting number would be 247 because it was, at the time, "the lowest number not to have its own page on Wikipedia".
I never know what that means. People seem to only use it about people they don't like. Seems like Russell conjugation - I have a vision, you have plans, they have an agenda.
What's your (actual) agenda?
p.s. Thinking more about it, it doesn't seem a question that ever has an answer. Seems like it means something like "I don't like that person, what they believe, what they say or what they do. They're so different from me I can't believe they're for real. So I'm going to insinuate they're guided by some concealed nefarious scheme. I heard a right-wing person use the phrase and I thought it was a pretty cool and effective debate tactic. Makes me sound like I've easily seen through their amateurish attempt at deception." Please correct me if I'm wrong, and it's actually a genuine question.
Yes, and no limited-time demo version to try things out - you bought a copy-protected disk in a box in shrink-wrapped plastic from a shop. I remember when Turbo Pascal came out - at below $100 and not copy-protected it seemed revolutionary, virtually free, like they were giving it away, it was so much cheaper than the usual $500 price tag.
I wasn't replying to you. You seem to think you have everything worked out. It's (just) your opinion; other people have other opinions, points of view. Claiming that people who don't share your opinion—which you are aggressively promoting here like it's objective truth—are simply deluded, doesn't come across as very nice! You are here to teach the Truth on this subject, not to listen or learn - to lecture, not discuss, it seems. Why would you, when you have it all worked out and others are just deluded.
According to another comment on this page by the GP,
>> ownership of digital products
>There is no such thing. Data is just bits. Really big numbers. Asserting ownership over numbers is simply delusional.
I'm a musician working on an album at home at the moment. It's a bit odd to hear I'm delusional, or worse, "simply delusional", for thinking that the music I'm making will be in some sense mine! Maybe I should go back to painting, where I'm making an object at least, and maybe not so delusional in the eyes of the GP, not just numbers? Not sure.
p.s. I want to put "my" music on Bandcamp. Jazz and latin stuff mostly. The Australian music licensing org APRA/AMCOS informs me for 3 or more songs, I should pay them a flat fee of $300 per year to cover the licence fees, then more if I sell more than a few hundred. Seems like a lot, to put songs I performed online, but maybe I can just tell them no, that asserting ownership over numbers is simply delusional, there's this guy on Hacker News..
Hmm come to think of it, money in a bank is just numbers..
From the preface, "After many years of pressure and encouragement from friends, I decided to write up the graduate course in engineering I teach at the U.S.Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. ...In this series of lectures I try to communicate to students what cannot be said in words—the essence of style in science and engineering. ...I have found that the personal story is far, far more effective than the impersonal one; hence there is necessarily an aura of “bragging” in the book that is unavoidable."
You can watch him giving that 31-lecture course in 1995 here
Enjoy! It's wonderful. (The last lecture is the famous "You and Your Research" that he gave many times.)
I've really enjoyed his books too, from Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers to Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. They're all drenched with experience.
Gee. Steamed veges (potatoes, corn, broccoli, beans, carrots, brussel sprouts etc) with a lil vegan butter, salt, and herbs or minced garlic on top is one of my favourite things in the world.
I looked at a few pages on the site. I kept expecting some reference to Whitehead's process philosophy from the 1920s but it never came.
"Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another."
Being picked last for every team ever wasn't great for that. It was humiliating, time after time. But worse was then being bullied in the compulsory showers every time for supposedly wanting to have anal sex with everyone, I guess because I was into music and science, not sport. Although, outside school, I was in weekly soccer, basketball and sailing competitions, and did a lot of kayaking, windsurfing, table tennis, roller skating, swimming, bike riding, tennis, handball etc etc. I can hardly believe how sporty I was compared to now, yet still was considered super-unsporty!
Ah this is another dismissive comment I guess. Maybe people like me are over-represented here! (And who this "HN crowd" I read about? Everyone but you?) I reacted to your language, I think - you presented yourself as just pointing out a fact, when you got dismissive comments from a tough crowd without your level of knowledge and understanding.
The 3 wonderful Roger Nelsen books Proofs Without Words entirely consist of equations & inequalities from various mathematical fields 'proved' in intuitive pictorial form.
"the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number, thus producing a contradiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Incidentally, the last line of that article is:
> The mathematician and philosopher Alex Bellos suggested in 2014 that a candidate for the lowest uninteresting number would be 247 because it was, at the time, "the lowest number not to have its own page on Wikipedia".