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Sometimes I'm riffing with my friends and I get struck with the need to record the conversation, and lately I've been meaning to record more mundane anecdotes from daily life. Since this blog is partially meant to serve as an archive, I thought I'd write some of it here.
Our regular teacher wasn't in for theory of knowledge (epistemology in IB-speak) today, but we were supposed to discuss whether the moral character of an author could be separated from the value of their work with a list that ranged from Ye to John von Neumann. The trouble was that almost none of the mathematicians on the list had any significant shortcomings. I mean, the only shortcoming they could think of were that Erdős used amphetamines, that Gödel suffered from paranoia in his seventies and starved himself to death, and that Galois was a political radical who got himself killed in a duel. I didn't really see any of those things as immoral, and my friend (whom I will refer to as the Maginot Line from this post onward) didn't either. I joked to him that if they really wanted to make an argument on a morally-controversial mathematician, they should've listed the Unabomber.
A good friend of mine (whom I referred to as the snowboarder in this post) was stuck writing a math competition for six hours today. Another friend graciously decided to order her a coffee so she'd have a lifeline for the last two blocks of the day. However, she apparently misclicked a few times and ordered a six-shot espresso instead of the regular three-shot one, and then the heart palpitation-inducing drink didn't even go to our friend in the end because it was given to a trivia teammate of ours who was also writing the competition. I don't even want to imagine how that tasted, or the aftereffects it produced.
Another topic of the day: optical computing & photonic logic, which is exactly what it sounds like--light as logic gates, replacing electrons with protons. Very, very cool technology being worked on right now, architecturally unique compared to other forms of quantum computing. Most of the details fly over my head.
Our regular teacher wasn't in for theory of knowledge (epistemology in IB-speak) today, but we were supposed to discuss whether the moral character of an author could be separated from the value of their work with a list that ranged from Ye to John von Neumann. The trouble was that almost none of the mathematicians on the list had any significant shortcomings. I mean, the only shortcoming they could think of were that Erdős used amphetamines, that Gödel suffered from paranoia in his seventies and starved himself to death, and that Galois was a political radical who got himself killed in a duel. I didn't really see any of those things as immoral, and my friend (whom I will refer to as the Maginot Line from this post onward) didn't either. I joked to him that if they really wanted to make an argument on a morally-controversial mathematician, they should've listed the Unabomber.
A good friend of mine (whom I referred to as the snowboarder in this post) was stuck writing a math competition for six hours today. Another friend graciously decided to order her a coffee so she'd have a lifeline for the last two blocks of the day. However, she apparently misclicked a few times and ordered a six-shot espresso instead of the regular three-shot one, and then the heart palpitation-inducing drink didn't even go to our friend in the end because it was given to a trivia teammate of ours who was also writing the competition. I don't even want to imagine how that tasted, or the aftereffects it produced.
Another topic of the day: optical computing & photonic logic, which is exactly what it sounds like--light as logic gates, replacing electrons with protons. Very, very cool technology being worked on right now, architecturally unique compared to other forms of quantum computing. Most of the details fly over my head.
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also, optical computing sounds awesome and i cant believe ive never heard of that :-o