jwz2d ago

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

Show threadThe Doctor2d ago
@jwz It is immensely reassuring to hear that I am not the only person who finds Wikipedia articles about math incomprehensible.
Show threadDavid Lawrence Miller1d 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/

Show threadHteph
@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).
Mar 31 at 8:03amWeb
Show threadDavid Lawrence Miller1d 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!
Show threadHteph1d ago
@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.