Okay, I'm going to assume uncle remmers isn't ignorning me and proceed to ask
an off topic question.

Is there any logical explanation why, when I'm almost 33, finally have a real
clear understand of Point Set Topology? I find this sort of odd that a branch
of mathematics I learned 13 years ago and never really understood at the time
is finally starting to sink into my skull now.

62 responses total.

Seems to be yet another example of the way the mind assimilates and
problem-solves at an unconscious level.  The pieces were there; your
brain was organizing them, and perhaps incorporating new bits of
information that you didn't realize were connected, over a 13-year
period and you weren't even aware of it.  When the final result bubbles
into your consciousness, it seems to come out of nowhere, by magic.

Examples from my own experience:

(1) I work on a crossword puzzle, get stuck on some words, put it aside.
 Next day, I pick up the puzzle again and the answers magically jump out
at me.

(2) From my student days - I'm taking a math course, all during the
semester I'm in a state of vague, uncomfortable frustration about the
concepts, feeling like I'm not getting it.  Then, the night before the
final exam, I'm going over the material, and BANG!  Suddenly, it all
makes sense.

The brain seems to be pretty good at background tasks.

As long as you don't nice your brain with booze like Chad does, it does
seem to be pretty good at that. ;-)

I loved the book "How to solve it" by G Polya.

Re #1: I have also frequently observed # (1).  But my hypothesis is that 
taking time off allows mental impediments - accumulated detritus from 
thinking? - to get cleared out. I don't think the brain independently 
continues to work on problems you haven't been able to solve. You have to 
return to the task yourself.

In regard to # (2) above - I found that the best way to surmount a problem 
of understanding a concept is.....teach it. That is, organize the material 
so you understand it well enough to teach it to someone else.

nharmon,

Will you please quit shut your fucking mouth before I drive over to
Temperance, MI and fucking beat you and your fat ass wife up. Topology is 10x
harder than Calculus 3 or Linear Algebra. So just fucking shut your mouth on
something you know nothing about and go back to trying to figure out the
fucking difference between a Perl reference, a C pointer, and what the
controlling terminal is on Unix you fucking retarded tech monkey.

#4:  I'm not su sure about that.  I recall at least one case where I
was working on trying to solve a problem for a couple of months, and
finally gave up, feeling that there wasn't a solution to the problem.
A week later, I was lying in bed after waking up in the morning,
staring at the ceiling, letting my thoughts wander from one thing to
another without direction, and suddenly the answer to the question I
had given up on popped into my head out of the blue.  I wasn't even
thinking about the problem at the time, and I don't know of any reason
for that subject to have popped into my mind at that particular time.
I wasn't sure at the time whether the solution that popped into my
head fit all the facts of the problem, but it seemed plausible enough
that I had to jump out of bed to check my references to verify that
it actually did (and it did).

That is consistent with my hypothesis, that the "block" to that realization
dropped. But let me ask, what was the nature of the "solution to the problem"
that popped into your head. Did the solution use any concepts *that you
could not understand*? If the brain had been "working" on the problem while
you were not conscious of it, it is likely to have gotten well beyond your
current understannding. If it was just the next step, then it seems more
likely it was just "unblocked".

Well, to explain the problem and the solution here would not be a
simple matter.  I ended writing a complete essay on the subject, which
I have since misplaced, and plan on trying to reconstruct.  I'm sure
from reading what you've written on grex elsewhere that the subject
would not interest you anyway.  I had to do with reconciling two verses
in the Bible with the rest of the Bible in a way that would avoid
contradictions, and I had come to the conclusion that that wasn't
possible, and that something had been lost through mistranslation
over the centuries.  The solution had to do with applying a particular
word in the original Greek in a different way than I had heard it
applied before, but that was not inconsistent with the actual meaning
of the Greek word (to be exact, it was applying the Greek word "porneia",
which means "sexual immorality" to a marriage rather than to relations
outside of the marriage).

Oh lord

From point set topology to biblical studies in 10 responses, with an
intermediate stop at brain function.  Only on Grex...

Gotta love the systems conference.

Re #8: you're right: I consider all biblical scholarship as mostly 
sophistry, since the bible is a mishmash of folk tales written down at 
different times by different people in different languages, and then 
distorted in translation.

Regarding #12; We are now moving very, very far away from the focus of this
conference.  If you want to debate religion, please take it elsewhere.

I probably said more about the actual problem than I should have.  I
was just giving one example of a time when I was no longer actively
working on a problem and the answer came to me out of the blue.  I
wish I could have come up with one that involved programming, and
there probably is one, but it doesn't come to mind right now.

A question: would the answer to your problem that came to you suddenly be 
the answer that all scholars in the field would agree upon? Or was it just 
an answer that satisfied you? Also, in subjects like that, what is the 
link between the problem and the answer? That is, is it deterministic 
(even if not unique), such as in programmming or other realms of science?

I have had sudden "insights" in science from reading a book or paper, and 
finding an approach that I could use in an entirely different area not 
envisaged by the authors I read, to solve problems I have been 
considering. I suppose this is more "serendipity" than unconscious 
reasoning.

Answers in programming are not necessary deterministic.  It is possible for
two different programmers to come up with different, yet equally reasonable,
solutions to the same problem.  Hence, its designation as an engineering form
rather than a science.

That's why I wrote "even if not unique", as one can have multiple
deterministic routes to the same end. 

The same is true in science. There is a famous story about Norbert Wiener, 
the "father of cybernetics". He was teaching a class at MIT and went 
through a long, involved, mathematical derivation. Afterward a student 
questioned an intermediate step. Wiener studied the blackboard for a 
minute, and then turned to the student and said "I get the same result by 
a different method".

(I recall Wiener walking the halls at MIT reading, while keeping a finger 
trailing along the wall as a guide.

Adding 5 and subtracting 4 isn't wholly different from adding 7 and
subtracting 6. On the other hand, there are so many different ways to
write a "Hello world" program that each likely does it all differently.

Regarding #17; I guess what I'm saying is that even the process doesn't have
to be deterministic.  Plenty of engineer descisions have been made on the flip
of a coin (yes yes, one could argue that that's actually deterministic, yada
yada yada).

I think the moron in #18 was looking for the word verbose.

Re #19: that's an important point. In fact, many engineering decisions are 
*optional*: you don't even have to flip a coin to get the same result by 
many different choices. It just might not make any difference, so the 
choice might depend on who you like to order from, or which catalogs you 
have. The process is only then "deterministic" because it hardly matters 
how some choices are made. There are also optional ways to write scripts 
for any particular purpose. A philosophical question: if the route to D 
from A can go through either B or C with no otherwise distinguishable 
difference, was D reached in a "deterministic" manner if you don't know 
which was taken? (I think the word "deterministic" isn't the right word 
for what we need.)

#15:  Would all scholars agree with my solution?  Maybe not, but from
my reading, they don't all agree on any other explanation.  On the
other hand, I discussed it with a number of people, including several
who had studied Biblical Greek, and was able to convince several of
my conclusion.  One pastor even showed me an article that he had that
agreed with my conclusion and had additional arguments for it that I
hadn't thought of.  The few people who I discussed it with who
disagreed with me used emotional arguments based on why they didn't
think God would be so strict, but they couldn't give me any arguments
based on scholarly study of the text using the original Greek (or even
using the English text).

I think rane might be ignoring me . Like I care. This fag probably has to be
the dumbest PhD i've seen yet. Anyhow for cross, mcnally, and the rest that
don't have me on ignore yet, I would like to point out that certain aspects
of Mechanical Engineering are probablistic. I say probablistic as opposed to
heuristic.

This is going back to my ME days.....

Say one department measures every 5th gear with a certain degree of accuracy
and writes this down in a log book. Now I take this log book and enter in the
numbers on a computer. I would get a chart of points that would hopefully fall
within the accepted limits. If these points start going outside the accepted
limits, then I can infer that something funky is going on on the production
line. In this case, I would be using probability to make a decision.

I'm not too sure how this relates to the discussion. I think it just sounded
cool.

Regarding #21; Short answer: No.

Re 23:

If Rane was not filtering you, I think he would point out that you are
not using probability, but rather statistics. Probability is used to
predict future events, not past events. An example of using probability
in mechanical engineering would be determining something like mean time
between failure (MTBF) based on actual failure rates.

Re #23: djdoboy is describing the statistical procedure involving "control 
charts" and related analyses, for determing whether a manufacturing 
process is within "specs". It is an interesting application, especially as 
related to balancing "producer" and "consumer" risks.

I would not get into a debate between applications of "probability" and 
"statistics", since the latter is based in the former. The formal 
distinction is what a "statistic" is: a value created from measurments, 
such as mean or a standard deviation or an F-ratio, etc. Probability 
theory provides the bases for expectations of how statistics will behave.

(The general advice on Grex is to ignore jerks, though I do like to tease 
them - but I don't recall what brought up the subject.)

nharmon, you never took a real engineering class in your entire life, so just
go back to writing more shit ass perl scripts. Also, you fucking moron, we
used average, but not the mean. And now to point three you fucking moron. The
data I collected was a statistical sample. When I used this data to predict
the chances of a failure using a certain type of hobbing machine, I was using
probability.

Now again, just shut the fuck up on nothing you know jack shit about.  Just
sit here and get overwelmed by people that know what they are talking about
you fucking useless piece of shit.

Nharmon, does you stupid ass even know the difference between the average and
the mean and why we might possibly use the former and not the latter? I
thought so. Fucking idiot. 

I think I need to quit having these discussions with certain grexers about
finding new ways to fill keesans email on this site with 38.4 Megs of spam
and maybe just write some kind of script that will automatically check my
spelling and correct it when I do a post on this forum. 

This response has been erased.

Average: djdoboy's ability to offend.
Mean: djdoboy's behavior 23 hours a day.

Seriously, you used the AVERAGE and not the MEAN? That is pretty funny
because I was taught the mean is a method for finding average. If you
didn't use mean, what did you use? Mode? Midpoint? Median?

And it really is called "Mean Time Between Failure", here you can look
it up and learn something: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF.  Of
course, it assumes a linear failure rate, when we all know computer
components do not have those. They usually either fail extremely early
(defect in manufacturing), or else they fail after a long time (wear and
tear). In such a case reliability usually forms an upside-down bell
curve. Oh wait a minute, you said you didn't use mean. So you took some
other way of calculating average, not mean, and used that to form your
gaussian distribution? I'm not sure your model would be reliable.

Listen nharmon, you stupid fucker. You have consistently shown that you don't
grasp what you have learned. This has been demonstrated in you fucking
pathetic attempt to solve a pretty simpe Perl problem in thread 85 and your
inablity to still build a chat bot, even after you've seen the source code
to what me and penis pump wrote.

Maybe this is why I worked as a Mechanical Engineer and you have yet to make
it beyond tech monkey. Second point. The bell curve is ONE method to model
what is going on. Second thing you fucking idiot. I was speaking of problems
that arose during production, not after the thing was already in the consumer
market. There is a difference you fucking moron. 

I can't believe you are trying to speak of something you know nothing about.
You are a fucking waste on this forum. I normally don't wish people ill
fortune, but in your case, I hope you fucking get hit by a car. This world
would then have one less dumb ass. I'm done try to argue with a person that
can't make it beyond tech monkey.

Go off and fucking die you piece of shit. You are a fucking blemish on this
forum.

From party:

    trancequility:  rite hite call it average, general electrical called 
    it average, american can called it average
    nharmon:  chad; called WHAT average??? WHAT??? median? mode? 
    midpoint?
    trancequility:  the one where you sum up the numbers and divide
    nharmon:  divide by what?
    nharmon:  the number of numbers?
    trancequility:  the one that you learn in 5the grade

So apparently when Chad wrote to me asking "does you stupid ass even
know the difference between the average and the mean", he himself didn't
really understand the difference. Actually, he understood there as not
being a difference.

"The mean of a collection of numbers is their arithmetic average, computed 
by adding them up and dividing by their number." 
http://www.ptti.com/html/help/Mean_def.htm

(It is actuallly surprising that there isn't a difference between the 
meanings hidden somewhere in statistical theory terminology. "Mean" 
derives from its sense of "middle" (value), while "average" apparently 
arose in maritime law in regard to the distribution of charges or expenses 
by "the generally prevailing, or ruling, quantity, rate, or degree; the 
`common run." (from OED).)

What if I compute another type of average, such as a geometric average?

A professor once advised me not to look for sense in terminology and notation.

The "geometric average" is the same as the "geometric mean". Likewise for
other types, such as "harmonic" and many varieties of "weighted". 

I wasn't looking so much for *sense* in the terminology, but was observing
the mysterious failure to give different definitions to "mean" and "average".
That's not taking advantage of an opportunity to obfuscate conventional
usages. 

Regarding #36; We're talking about the meaning of the unadorned `mean' as per
the definition you posted.  According to your definition, the mean is defined
specifically in terms of the arithmetic average; you never defined the
geometric mean.

Are we talking about different things? I am observing that "average" =  "mean"
in arithmetic usages, and that also applies to all kinds of averages and
means, including all those named. I don't understand what point you are trying
to make. Are you asking me to also define geometric and harmonic, and other,
means (averages)? That wasn't my point. 

I am pointing out that your definition is inadequate.  In particular, you
defined mean (unnamed) in terms of a named average.  It does not follow that
mean is in equivalence with average as a reult.

My latter point was that it doesn't really matter.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss