Author Archives: rpflee

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

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Physicists use the term “spontaneous symmetry breaking” when any one solution of a symmetric problem is not symmetrical, but the whole set of them is. This is precisely what happens with the quintic, or even the quadratic equation.

— January 10, 2004

— This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 201)

— John Baez

2012.07.26 Thursday ACHK

天使與傻瓜

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If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

* Self-Sacrifice

– George Bernard Shaw

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天使, 犧牲自己的利益來追求自己的理想.

魔鬼, 犧牲別人的利益來追求自己的理想.

傻瓜, 犧牲自己的理想來追求別人的利益.

智者, 透過實現自己的理想來追求別人的利益.

– Me@2009.09.14, 2010.03.11

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2010.03.11 Thursday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Grassmann, 3

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The motivation of Grassmann algebra is

to re-use the boson formulae in fermion calculations

by re-interpretating the symbols as Grassmann variables.

— Me@2012.03.06

2012.07.25 Wednesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Semantics

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The formal description of a process of assigning a logical value (true or false) to all formulas is called a semantics of the classical propositional logic.

— Cse371, Math371, LOGIC, Fall 2011

— Professor Anita Wasilewska

2012.07.24 Tuesday ACHK

History 3.2

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The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.

— Winston Churchill

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Studying history helps you predict the future by teaching you which things are old enough to be permanent.

– Paul Graham

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2012.07.24 Tuesday ACHK

Anthropic principle, 3

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The correct version of anthropic principle should be called the anti-anthropic principle, or the law of large numbers:

given a large enough sample size, the probability of a sample fulfilling your requirements is close to 1.

— Me@2012.03.06

2012.07.23 Monday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Good teacher 2

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Bad teacher 2

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The answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It’s much like being a doctor. You can’t just treat a patient’s symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what’s actually wrong with him, and treat that.

– Paul Graham

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2010.05.29 Saturday ACHK

The Dark Knight Rises

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The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you’ve got a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s like an extended version of a regular film. Once you get into a fourth film then it’s just episodic, and I just can’t see him getting excited about making another film where basically you’re just wheeling in different villains.

— Emma Thomas

2012.07.22 Sunday ACHK

Fighting the last battle

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The second-system effect refers to the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/360 on the 360 series.

Explanation

Although expressed as a problem of software design, the second-system effect is observable throughout all human design effort. It is somewhat akin to the idea of “fighting the last battle.”

People who have designed something only once before, try to do all the things they “did not get to do last time,” loading the project up with all the things they put off while making version one, even if most of them should be put off in version two as well.

Examples could include DOS to Win95 or Unix to GNU, using a simple metric like source lines of code to mark the difference.

— Wikipedia on Second-system effect

2012.07.21 Saturday ACHK

想不出來 1.2

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I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

– Paul Graham

If you have really mastered a skill, it has already become your second instinct, and then you will seldom notice it.

– 13.10.2002

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

– George Bernard Shaw

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

— Self Reliance

— Ralph Waldo Emerson   

— Me@2012.07.19
 

2012.07.19 Thursday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Batman Begins, 6

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To conquer fear, you must become fear. You must bask in the fear of other men. And men fear most what they cannot see. You have to become a terrible thought. A wraith. You have to become an idea! Feel terror cloud your senses. Feel its power to distort… to control. And know that this power can be yours. Embrace your worst fears. Become one with the darkness.
   
— Henri Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul

— Batman Begins

2012.07.19 Thursday ACHK

Indie Game: The Movie

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Indie Game: The Movie is a 2012 documentary film by Canadian filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot. The film documents the struggles of independent game developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes during the development of Super Meat Boy, Phil Fish, during the development of Fez, and also Jonathan Blow, who reflects on the success of his Xbox Live Arcade game, Braid.

The film bookends itself with Jonathan Blow’s opening monologue about how indie gaming differs by offering flaws and vulnerabilities, making the games more personal.

— Wikipedia on Indie Game: The Movie

2012.07.18 Wednesday ACHK

Newton’s Third Law

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Newton used the third law to derive the law of conservation of momentum; however from a deeper perspective, conservation of momentum is the more fundamental idea (derived via Noether’s theorem from Galilean invariance), and holds in cases where Newton’s third law appears to fail, for instance when force fields as well as particles carry momentum, and in quantum mechanics.

— Wikipedia on Newton’s laws of motion

2012.07.18 Wednesday ACHK

想不出來 1.1

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這段改編自 2010 年 3 月 20 日的對話。

我以前在不知不覺間，假設了別人會知我所知東西；又或者，連我都想得出的東西，別人都會想得出。我有這類假設，是「自我中心」的一個表現。我後來發覺，我的這類假設，有很多時是錯的。

實情是，我想到的東西，別人未必想到；反之亦然。從是教學的人，尤其要留意這一點。

— Me@2012.07.17 

2012.07.17 Tuesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

To the Moon

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GOG.com

In GameSpot’s 2011 Game of the Year awards, To the Moon was given the “Best Story” award, … It was also the highest user-rated PC game of 2011 at Metacritic.

— Wikipedia on To the Moon (video game)

2012.07.16 Monday ACHK