Mastodawn

XScreenSaver 6.15 is out now. A whopping thirteen new savers this time:
New hack by me, worldpieces.
New Shadertoy hacks brought into the fold: bestill, bubblecolors, darktransit, downfall, driftclouds, goldenapollian, noxfire, prococean, rigrekt, trainmandala, trizm and universeball.

I fixed a bunch of Android bullshit, too (some of which meant needing to reimplement glRotatef etc. from first principles). Android's implementation of GLES is a buggy mess...
https://jwz.org/b/yk5c

@jwz It is immensely reassuring to hear that I am not the only person who finds Wikipedia articles about math incomprehensible.

David Lawrence Miller 1d ago

@drwho @jwz my understanding is that most wikipedia maths articles take a cue from actual maths text books and are only comprehensible to those already familiar with the topic

https://aperiodical.com/2022/05/didnt-graduate-texts-in-mathematics/

@millerdl @drwho As Wikipedia is constructed entirely of the "Appeal to Authority" Fallacy, it would be entirely on-brand for them to use the excuse of, "We suck so bad because these other people also sucked exactly that bad." https://jwz.org/b/ykOr

Wikipedia: Constructed entirely of the Appeal to Authority Fallacy

It's more important for something to be quoted than for it to be true. That is the Wikipedia Way. Wikipedia is the encyclopedic version of the old Zagat restaurant review books "where" "every" "word" "was" "in quotes" "because" "someone" "said" "it". The canonical example of this is when the author of Station Eleven could not get her Wikipedia page to stop claiming she was married, any change

Fish Face 1d ago

@jwz @millerdl @drwho if you tried to construct an equivalent but "fix" this problem, you'd end up with something entirely different, and it would suck in an even worse way, though.

People disagree, even over stuff which is objectively true or false.

@FishFace @millerdl @drwho I think you just said that if people tried to *teach* mathematics rather than *define* it, that would be worse. My sympathies to every educator ever I guess.

Fish Face 1d ago

@jwz @millerdl @drwho I wouldn't try to learn mathematics from encyclopedia Britannica either.

You can't learn mathematics without doing practice problems, which IMO have no place in anything which calls itself an encyclopedia.

So no, I don't think it's worse to teach maths than to define it, I just think those are different, valuable tasks

The Doctor 16h ago

@jwz @FishFace @millerdl Some teachers do lament that. Apparently, teaching a thing, and explaining a thing are two different things. Two different skill sets.

I don't know, I'm not a teacher, but it makes a little sense.

@millerdl @drwho @jwz Math was a complete mysterium for me until I had to take a course in basic algebra and realised that it is a language you have to learn and train your brain to adapt to that.
I still find math quite hard, but it is utterly fascinating and I took some more courses in it (and ended up working with multivariate analysis for a couple of decades, but on an engineering level so understanding was less of an issue).

David Lawrence Miller 1d ago

@GoblinQuester same here, but somehow ended-up doing maths as my job! I do think that the textbooks don't help with this. On the other hand, now being on the other side (sometimes delivering mathematical courses etc) I frequently get the temptation to order/talk about things in the same way. It's like at a certain level of abstraction/understanding you start to think that way of doing things makes sense!

@millerdl Exactly, and I think the schools before university do kids a disservice to not explain that. There is just about the numberts, and not the language behind.

@millerdl @drwho @jwz Not entirely fair to Saunders MacLane, but okay, point made.

Fish Face 1d ago

@drwho @jwz they suffer from the same problem everything else on Wikipedia does: the people who write the articles are close to the topics and so generally don't write context for people who aren't.

Demallien 19h ago

@drwho @jwz yeah +1 for Wikipedia mathematics articles sucking hard for anyone that doesn’t already know the thing they are describing.

Will Henney 18h ago

@drwho @jwz To be fair, the Simple English page is pretty good https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion

Quaternion - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Doctor 16h ago

@whenney @jwz Sometimes, yeah. Simple Wikipedia is a good resource for some things; nowhere near as comprehensive in scope. And the division still exists.