Sometimes I want to be able to have a file hanging around in a local version of a git repository that I’ve checked out. For example, I often create a shell.nix that specifies build dependencies without installing them system-wide. Here’s how I add a shell.nix to the root of a repository while also instructing git to ignore it – and without adding or making a modification to `.gitignore:
I wrote a little tokenizer for Python – well, rather, some Racket code that calls out to the native Python tokenizer. This was a fun excercise, becase it could allow for micro-interpreters to be written for Python or Python-like languages like bazel in Racket.
Hopefully it’s obvious, from the perspective of a hacker, creator, or engineer that math is decisively “not real.” In other words, it’s a system that we created that seems, in many cases, to describe aspects of reality wildly effectively. This should not be controversial; for even Newton and Leibniz’s mathematics of calculus – now treated as gospel – is merely a system that is radically effective at describing empirical physical phenomena, such as the trajectory of a rock launched from a trebuchet.
Lest we forget this, one risks being led to feel subservient to those that came before (whether one is the teacher or student, such a reality in its totality is plain tragedy — which is sadly seemingly non-obvious to most); and of course to discount mathematics entirely is to impoverish oneself of a tremendously useful system, albeit oft understandably. Seen from this perspective, it is not mathematics that poses this challenging paradox for us, but anything systematic yet useful.
Regarding the difficulties so many encounter with mathematics, myself having been on one side and then the other – nearly failing a middle school algebra class and then “getting it” at some point – it is my hope that teachers may find themselves more compassionate; and that we may remember that although there may be something that resembles the truth, there can be multiple ways of expressing it. More concretely, it is my hope that further ways of communicating eexisting known truths of mathematics in not the ways they have been historically present, but in either a kind of synesthetic manner (c.f. Buffon’s needle for pi) or in a translational one (i.e. in the way that the same truth can be communicated in two disparate human languages, say, Greek versus Sanskrit). For we all stand to benefit from a more understanding world by helping others and ourselves to understand.
Persons are known not by the intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the impersonal “law” and to abstract “nature.” That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, its demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused. To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking to the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who “saves himself” in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.
All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakyo Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.
