Thoughts On The Phrase ‘Knowledge Is Power’, And On Learning ‘enough’ About A Skill/topic Before

A new post up on my blog!  Last time we talked about the algebraic numbers, and how just wanting to solve simple equations can create a ton of different numbers.  But they don’t get us everything.

So this time we start off with the idea of measurement, and wind up inventing the real numbers.  The real numbers are weird.  Real weird.  But they show up when we start asking questions about size or measurement.  And in part 3, we’ll see they’re exactly the right way to do calculus.

I have a new post up on my blog, continuing the Fictional History of Numbers series. In part 1 we started with the natural numbers and built up the algebraics, which let us solve equations. In part 2 we started asking geometric questions, and constructed the real numbers.

But the real numbers are weird and hard to define. In part 3 we see one way they're extremely strange, and then talk about why we want them anyway. In the end, we shouldn't worry about the definition of the reals; we should worry about what they allow us to do. And it turns out they're exactly what we need to make calculus function as it should.

fields of mathematics

number theory: The Queen of Mathematics, in that it takes a lot from other fields and provides little in return, and people are weirdly sentimental about it.

combinatorics: Somehow simultaneously the kind of people who get really excited about Martin Gardner puzzles and very serious no-nonsense types who don’t care about understanding why something is true as long as they can prove that it’s true.

algebraic geometry: Here’s an interesting metaphor, and here’s several thousand pages of work fleshing it out.

differential geometry: There’s a lot of really cool stuff built on top of a lot of boring technical details, but they frequently fill entire textbooks or courses full of just the boring stuff, and they seem to think students will find this interesting in itself rather than as a necessary prerequisite to something better. So there’s definitely something wrong with them.

category theory: They don’t really seem to understand that the point of generalizing a result is so that you can apply it to other situations.

differential equations: physicists

real analysis: What if we took the most boring parts of a proof and just spent all our time studying those?

point-set topology: See real analysis, but less relevant to the real world.

complex analysis: Sorcery. I thought it seemed like sorcery because I didn’t know much about it, but then I learned more, and now the stuff I learned just seems like sorcery that I know how to do.

algebraic topology: Some of them are part of a conspiracy with category theorists to take over mathematics. I’m pretty sure that most algebraic topologists aren’t involved in that, but I don’t really know what else they’re up to.

functional analysis: Like real analysis but with category theorists’ generalization fetish.

group theory: Probably masochists? It’s hard to imagine how else someone could be motivated to read a thousand-page paper, let alone write one.

operator algebras: Seems cool but I can’t understand a word of it, so I can’t be sure they’re not just bullshitting the whole thing.

commutative/homological algebra: Diagram chases are of the devil, and these people are his worshipers.

What issues would a Jewish Werewolf face? I mean with a lunar calendar and so many of the holidays near the full moon, they would have to get pretty inventive, just think about sleeping in the succah, or since Yom Kippor is about 4 days from the full moon, it should make things interesting as in most stories weres start to lose control near the full moon.

HMMM! (and thank you for sending me these anons!)

I suspect it depends on what tradition we’re drawing from. Werewolves as a whole are mostly a European thing, although people changing into or communing with animals is pretty much a worldwide myth. 

Some things to think about: If you’re not fully conscious (or not conscious in the same way) when you’re a wolf, are you accountable for any destruction you cause? Does transformation count as work? (Also, if you can’t stop yourself from doing work, you probably aren’t breaking Shabbat..) Can you attend synagogue as a wolf?

 And we do have recorded cases of nice werewolves! In Latvia in 1692, an eighty-year-old man named Thiess confessed to being a werewolf who, with other werewolves, regularly went to Hell three times a year to fight Satan to ensure a good harvest. This would be a great tradition for Sukkot, Shavuot, and Tu B’Shevat, and I propose we all adopt the custom immediately!

Word rhyming is an equivalence relation

Take the definition that two words rhyme if and only if they end with the same sound.

Reflexive: Every word rhymes with itself.

Well, if two words are the same, all their sounds have to match, including the final one, so this point holds.

Symmetric: If A rhymes with B, B rhymes with A.

This one’s really hard to prove, because it’s so obvious. If A rhymes with B, then the final sounds of A and B are the same. They will still be the same if we swap the words around. Please don’t make me explain it more, I’ll cry.

Transitive: If A rhymes with B and B rhymes with C, then A rhymes with C.

Call the sound at the end of word A ‘&’. If A rhymes with B, then B also has to end with ‘&’. If B rhymes with C, and B ends with ‘&’, then C also has to end with ‘&’. This means that both A and C end with ‘&’, and so A rhymes with C.

There we go. The argument no one cares about but me has been made. Rhyme is an equivalence relation. You can all go home.

if you’re a new tumblr user from tiktok or IG or something and only like posts and dont reblog them yeah people will think you’re a bot and block you but you will also make this website actively worse. they want “algorithmic” users like you, served recommended posts through likes, not people who just follow each other and respond to the direct chronological feed. there is a reason this website is still better than the rest, even with all its problems, do not ruin this

Tag yourself I’m Aled’s iPad

wanted to experiment with some brushes on csp so i just sacrificed Regan from @zzztlk and doodled her

Blatantly Partisan Party Review XV (federal 2025): Katter’s Australian Party

Running where: QLD. The party is contesting three House divisions: Bob Katter himself for Kennedy, plus candidates in Herbert and Leichhardt, while in the Senate, a candidate is second on a joint ticket with Rennick First for Group G

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “For those of us on the left, KAP has a few things to like and a lot to detest.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: I’ve already covered a bunch of “dontcha know who I am?” cult-of-personality parties, and here is perhaps the most larger-than-life personality of the Australian political scene: the North Queenslander in the big hat, the man who would let a thousand blossoms bloom, part of the parliamentary furniture itself, the one and only Bob Katter.

Now, Bob is a character but he's consistent one, so instead of reprising the greatest hits that I've featured before, I thought I would present you with some history to contextualise him and his electorate. Katter’s seat of Kennedy is a vast one. It stretches from the Coral Sea coast between Cairns and Townsville, across the Great Dividing Range, and through Outback towns such as Charters Towers, Hughenden, and Cloncurry out to Mount Isa, across to the NT border, and up to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Bob Katter has seemingly stomped the length and breadth of it to become an enduringly popular local member. Although Kennedy is one of the original 65 electorates from Federation in 1901, Katter is remarkably just the seventh person to hold it.

Kennedy was in Labor hands from 1929 to 1966 while Darby Riordan and then his nephew Bill held the seat, but for the last 59 years it has been a family business for the other side of politics:, a Katter has represented Kennedy for all but 3 years. Bob’s father, Bob Katter Sr, won it for the Country Party (later renamed the Nationals) and held it from 1966 until his death in 1990, while the young fella learned the family business as a state MP from 1974. Bob Jr served as a cabinet minister from 1983 under another larger-than-life Queensland pollie, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and in August 1989, Sir Joh unsuccessfully endorsed Katter as his successor as premier. Instead, Bob Jr had an annus horribilis: he went into opposition at the December 1989 Queensland state election, his dad died days before the March 1990 federal election, and Kennedy fell to Labor. The new MP, Rob Hulls, however, only got one term representing this sprawling constituency (and yes, Victorian readers with long memories, that is the Rob Hulls, deputy premier to John Brumby in 2007–10; quite the change of scenery!).

Katter shifted to federal parliament at the 1993 election, winning back the seat of dear old dad, and he has held Kennedy ever since. In 2001 he left the Nationals to sit as an independent: he disagreed with the rise of neoliberal economics (good!) and with some of the Coalition’s more socially liberal policies (bad! especially as the Coalition is uhh not very socially liberal!). In 2011, he founded Katter’s Australian Party, which met with very little success outside Queensland at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections and has since focused on winning seats in North Queensland. It really ought to be called Katter's North Queensland Party.

Bob’s son Robbie has been the party leader since 2020, and at state level KAP holds three seats that overlap with the Division of Kennedy. But Bob is the only KAP representative at federal level; ex-One Nation lunatic Fraser Anning briefly joined KAP as a Senator in 2018 but proved to be too barmy even for the Katters. I see little reason to anticipate any change to the party’s representation this year. If you live in Kennedy, you probably know Katter is a strong favourite to retain his seat; if you don’t, I hope the history above helped make this explicable.

What is Bob emphasising in his campaign this year? Well, per the homepage, “KAP = Castle Law”. Yes, their core focus is a fear campaign that “crime in Queensland is out of control” and people have a “right to defend their home against intruders without facing legal consequences”. Look, I spent my teenage years in a conservative Queensland setting where A Current Affair was as serious a source of news as the 7:30 Report, but shooting dead a trespasser in your garden is disproportionate. KAP states that “Under the current law, people must demonstrate they have only used ‘necessary’ force under the ‘reasonable belief’ that the intruder was entering their home to commit a serious crime”. Seems fine to me! But they think that people “cannot always make split-second, measured decisions in moments of crisis”. The existing law as per their own description already accommodates this: a person fiddling with your gate is obviously a different degree of threat to somebody confronting you in your bedroom with a knife, and going out all guns blazing at the former is not "reasonable". KAP's policy is a solution in search of a problem.

Other policies? Still on crime, KAP has a four-step “send ‘em out bush” policy for young offenders that in practice would just make them more resentful. You won’t be surprised to learn that KAP wants harsher sentences in general for youth offending and backs the LNP’s “adult crime = adult time” approach. Turning to energy, KAP want more coal, more gas, and new nuclear. Other infrastructure policies focus mainly on roads and on dams to support agriculture. Unsurprisingly for a party whose largest donors are from the gun lobby, KAP’s approach to firearms is permissive. And maybe one of their odder policies is that “KAP wants flying foxes gone from populated areas” and supports culling them. Did a flying fox steal your dog Bob? Come on man. Three of seven species of flying fox in Australia are listed as vulnerable or endangered.

And, of course, for a party led by a man whose most famous remark is about crocodiles tearing people to pieces in North Queensland, there is a policy that “values human life above crocodiles”. Enjoy. Should this move you, perhaps you might also want to buy an official “let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” shirt. If so, Bob’s got a shop for that. I am not kidding.

Recommendation: Give Katter’s Australian Party a very low preference in the House and a weak or no preference in the Senate.

Website: https://kattersaustralianparty.org.au/

(For the pol nerds: Bob is currently Father of the House, i.e. the longest-serving current MP, but at just over 32 years in office he is not yet in the top ten ever. If the new parliament goes to term and Bob does not retire before the election, he will be either 10th or 11th  on the all-time list depending on the exact day of election. He needs to serve five years from today to get into the top five, 10.5 years to get into the top two, and just shy of twenty years to pass Billy Hughes’ record of 51 years and 213 days. Keep in mind that Bob turns 80 next month. Now, yes, he served 18 years in Queensland’s state parliament, so as of this year he has been in a parliament for half a century, but Billy Hughes served in the NSW parliament for 7 years; to exceed Hughes’ cumulative time, Katter needs to be in office for another 8.7 years)