Firm rice versus congee

Haven't cooked dry rice and a salty compliment in a while. Sugar high... salty spike... same amount of sodium, probably, but in congee it's spread out.

Transmogrification

A mathematician may be a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

I, am just a machine for turning chicken into mosquitoes.

Dissonance in reading form

Spending much time in superficial reading, parsing morphemes and syntax without semantic referents, I learn something about how I read. Any effort to shut out data streams has a dissonant effect on my cognition. This seems to explain why reading around a noisy mother, in a state of haptic discomfort, is unproductive.

The stream of consciousness must focus, while reading, on catching every slightest image in any sense modality, that the imagination conjures up by association with what is being read. Since the field of internally generated imaginations, and the field of images recognised from the sensory nervous system are superimposed, any attempt to block out imagery from either causes dissonance in how one is processing one's overall stream of consciousness.

This is very insightful. I am then led to think about my kinesthesia, constantly, as I read. The haptic imagery and response-time against intention makes evident when I have sat for too long. I hope that this unifies my study of kinesthesia, with my study of how to read efficiently. More observation, and reaction, followed by analysis, are required. More general practice within and about this hypothesised system.

Breadth-first traversal

... is like last-in-first-out (LIFO) processing... is like a "stack."

Ok, so maybe it was obvious to others, and maybe it's occurred to me before, but it just struck me.

Bumpkin life

For the time being, I've taken to swatting ants like mosquitoes... one at a time.

Knives

So little that I know about them. Sharpening, honing, stropping, bolsters, steels, heels...

... all I know how to do, is cut, and use a waterstone sometimes.

New businesses

It's all or nothing, at some point, so what do you get for waiting?

Finding the right partners, and firing them up, is key.

Rock'n'roll...

"Typeless" Haskell?

I like breaking things. That's just a caveat regarding the non-seriousness of this post.

Before I dug into Erlang and Haskell, I wondered, "what features / semantics do I have to throw out, to make the world's most accessible programming language (i.e. JavaScript) a little bit faster?," in the same way that some derivatives of Python throw out implicit typing, and thereby ease auto-compilation to C.

Now, having figured out how Erlang works at the user level (mostly), and how Haskell works at the user level (moderately), I'm wondering, "what features / semantics do I have to throw out (or hide) in Haskell, to make it easier to use for low-performance computing?" So I thought, hmm, could one write, in Template Haskell, a macro that performs duck-typing at compile time?

Haven't put much thought into it, but Fay seems to take a decent stab at this sort of thing, albeit a distinct problem than what I am referring to above. Fay tackles compilation, from a Haskellian dialect to JavaScript.

I am, above, interested in a Haskellian dialect for general purpose computing, which is "as easy to learn (and therefore more bug prone)," as JavaScript, at the expense of performance. I'm not bothered if it doesn't compile to JavaScript.

Priorities

Someone with unlimited interests, has to impose some sort of prioritisation, or go nowheresoever. I'm reading about the construction of muon-proton atoms, and schoolboy fights between financiers on live TV ($HLF, nuf said), and pondering briefly in the cool night air... the paths I have foregone. Priorities make us who we are.

That's what I thought would make a great seed for a matchmaking algorithm, once upon a time.

Aside, for the umpteenth time in years, thinking of buying a >40" TV monitor but noooo I have too much hardware already. Old stuff. Wear it out.

I miss trying to be a lover. I miss trying to be a trader. I miss tying to be a normal employee. But for the time being, at least I don't have to miss being an uninterrupted student of quantitative studies, and the language about it.

Diesel? Gas?

I was wondering about the difference between diesel and gasoline internal combustion engines. You can't use gasoline (petrol) in diesel engines because it ignites too early. so what's to stop one from constructing a compression-ignition (read: diesel engine style) engine with different pressure parameters, so that it is optimised to run on gasoline? I'll bet there are lots of complications that make the optimisation a volatile one, but it turns out there are compression-ignition engines
for petrol too... at least at the research level.

On other thoughts about chemicals, I'd name a girl Sarin. Or a boy, for that matter. Yes, I would. (I was wondering what an aggropunk might do with the birthname "Serene.")

A month in paradise

Those of you who prefer to get high off chemicals, fast cars, kinky islands, or strange cultures, just wouldn't get this, eh? Today's the 25th, so I've been living properly in Bandar Sungai Long for a month now. It is a great place for studies - yadda, yadda, this is covered in recent posts. Quick recap: countryside, no noisy mothers, no dirty housemates. Moving on then.

I just took a trip down to the Kajang city hall to help my flat vendor / landlady with some errands. I picked up the checklist also, for registering a coffee shop. Just in case I might want to do one. Operationally, I'm sandbagging, of course. I've got enough cash and credit, barring emergencies, to cruise for 3-6 months. Yesterday, I started pinging friends and acquaintances about potential long-term gigs. If nothing comes back, after this round of research, I'll be looking for a non-desk job near my new home. Maybe waitering. Maybe logistics at a hypermarket.

This is not the time to be rushing. I'm defrosting some meat by the sink. Coffee is steeping. I hope to get some reading done, today.

Barriers

With the installation of the flat, and the (practical) write-off of the options fund, there now remains just a single wall of protection for my study project. The job-or-business hunt, as planned for this scenario, puts the reconstruction of a second wall into place. The infinitesimal chance that the options fund reinflates significantly, would then be the emergence of a third wall. I need to balance a continued meditation on past mistakes (so that they stick in memory), with construction projects for the future.

"Zen"

Rain, new toys, sheets, watermelon. Reading. Life is perfect for a while.

This is a after some dead lifts, bench presses, and pull ups, a cold shower, and testing of the new 5W CFLs.

Warm body under sheets, watching rain fall through the street light.

Fate and individuality

No one deserves their life; we merely execute upon what we are given; the rest are platitudes. And society, is very good at coming up with platitudes. Platitudes are a systematic cybernetic for social order. Believe in yourself. Believe in something metaphysical. Believe in your friends, and family, and countrymen, and colleagues.

Life is not fair. God is not fair. Life is a word. God is a word. Fairness is your feeling, about what those words should mean.

Believe.

(Gotta make the best of it :) I memang lansi all these people who talk about butterflies and dignity :p; Scary. But such is a life of relative solitude. At least potential loses are clearly your own. Less fudging around other people's problems for now.)

Chicken shit bench pressing. Second set of twenty reps, I'm bouncing at the bottom. Thunder and lightning and grey. Moody day. Moody weather. Revising the complexities of yesteryear. Can't wait for the US market to open. :)

Summoning a web crawler

TIL: if I publish an article, and want search engines to crawl it immediately, I can do a custom search that tells the engine where to look, e.g. "Site:xyz, Period:last_hour". It seemed to work once, but I have not tested this widely.

Assholes and trolls

It's been a recent theme in stuff I've read, and more recently in my conversations with people on the Internet. People tend to already have a preconception of whether you're trying to get a rise out of them, or trying to engage them in an informational conversation.

• A troll is trying to get a rise out of you.
• An asshole doesn't really care how you react.

Usually, I am an asshole. That is of course meant, within the context of the definition above. I suppose it is a badge that I wear with pride.

On a related note, whenever I don't care what job I ultimately get to do, I make a point of being as prissy and / or abrasive as possible - I figure that the potential employers that remain, are the ones that would like working with me.

The CFLs have landed

So I finally got E27-sized compact fluorescent lights, and E27-sized sockets with attached wall-plugs. Now I need to figure out where they go. I end up rearranging my living room desk, since now there's a shortage of plug-points, and I have to add cable. The study desk is now against the wall, instead of in the middle of the room. This also reduces glare when working, as I face the wall, not the outside. Let's see how this goes. Function first, for now.

The next decade (finally)

I have been waiting for this for a long time. Am I the only fucker around here who plans his life around earnings announcements? Anyway, the next decade is going to be focused on the acquisition of material wealth. It is not that I need the money, really, but more a project to find out how much I can make - one should try to find out at least once in a lifetime. (After that, if successful, I can probably retire to do research for good. If not, I will return to my basal model of earning on a hand-to-mouth basis.)

So, with long-term housing infrastructure firming up, I am seriously considering a long-term day job for the cash component of a sex-and-cash model. Feelers are going out to various parties, and I am rustling up old leads for potential business partners. Rock'n'roll. Wondering if it is my fate to never have financial capital, and free time, at the same time.

Aside, the day begins with a trip to my flat's vendor, to try and speed up our transaction, by helping the lady to do some paper work. I really am too nice to my counterparties. That probably explains why I tend to get screwed often. Just asked for 39% of my previous asking price for a salary. I figure, I'll make it back anyway. It's this kind of optimism that gets me fucked over, sometimes. Maybe too often. On the other hand, I probably just like fixing problems more than I like knowing that I will / have spare money.

Thinking about my most recent asking salary, I recognise that I only asked an abnormally high price for Malaysia in order to protect my studies. Now with the flat having been secured, I have one more barrier of protection for my research, and I can comfortably bring down my salary demands. Ultimately of course, a day job is a second barrier of security.

Telling all potential employers: I can do one thing for ten years, if you have a plan. Not the most impressive pitch, I'd say.

My year ends!

As they say, $AAPL whiffed - it delivered mediocre performance against popular metrics, though its cash pile is growing at a steady clip - so whether the stock recovers or not, over the this final quarter that I have bet on, I'll be looking for jobs after a few more hours of sleep.

$AAPL cash and equivalents

Last year was a complicated year, but I am glad that amidst miscellaneous trauma, I managed to implement key priorities. Got a few months of studying done, set up the flat I'm now in (hopefully for good), killed off last bits of filial distraction, and managed to do it all without going into any serious debt.

Pretty much wiped out all my cash and equity though. That's the maximum risk I've been willing to take - but it hasn't really gotten there yet. Getting a job now is still just a precaution. Perhaps I don't value / challenge myself enough financially, and that is why my performance is mediocre / poor. As stress built up in other areas, I had severely deprioritised micro-management of investments in favour of a naked long-term position. I also trashed a so-called non-relationship that was just returning less and less on resources, and that is sad, but such is life. Besides that and entertaining the mother for 15 months, the most stressful bits were chasing lawyers (more of that to come), and chasing an ex-employer on statutory fulfilments.

As much as these are all wonderful people, I have been hugely relieved to be done with these particular scopes of interaction.

It's really hard to not-understand a new language that you're learning, or its environmental context, among other vaguely-understood subjects that are being studied under a broader plan, while needing to frequently explain yourself to (and anticipate the needs) of a partner, while trying to figure out where the resourcing leaks are in the relationship, while needing to frequently delete everything you hear your housemate-parent say because it gets stuck in your head without intrinsic value-add, while your investment portfolio is crashing, while sandbagging finances for a flat that refuses to transact, while you are intentionally jobless. Hey, but I tried. It was fun. It turns out that I'm much, much, better at active asset management than picking what to buy and hold. Losses happen. This time, still within preplanned limits, albeit extreme ones. One day, you die.

Moving on! Up next, I wonder what the decade will bring. I am excited. But first, as promised, forty winks.

$aapl PE 2x less than $csco etc. let's wait another quarter. Bunker up! Nonchalance, stupidity, and desperation, are each sufficient causes for bravery. I often wonder if I am more the first, or the second. What I've learnt from trading $aapl for 9 months : my market intuition is way better than my product intuition, is way better than my intuition of fundamental growth potential due to a company's internal team (viewing it from outside).

2012-02-27: The one thing that keeps coming back to me about the past two years: don't wait for fools. Cut them off, fast. Even family. Otherwise sloth ensues.

CLINTON SHRUGGED

A very intelligently executed shrug, but a shrug, none the less.

Retroaction

I've been thinking about digging up old writings to post on this blog. Perhaps it will happen soon. I have been meaning to massage some of them into publishable form, for some time now.

Upskilling my "refugee" neighbour

Warning: horrible flip-flopping between past and present tense, which I've noticed in the drafts, but which I haven't had the patience to edit out completely.

Call me gross, it's 0111 hours, and I'm eating unheated sardines that came out of a can, while writing this. I just got back from some social therapy at the corner shop, where I had an almost unpleasantly sweet cup of Alicafe.

The "coffee shop," is a typical Malaysian kopitiam, where the owner or chief tenant rents out stalls and space to other food vendors for MYR 600-700 per month. A Myanmar Muslim guy who used to cook at the 24-hour mamak restaurant nearby had left, and set up his own business at the kopitiam. He pays another chap MYR 1,500 * per month to help him out.

* Compare: minimum wage in Malaysia is MYR 900 per month

I'm told they don't have visas, and are in Malaysia on special UN documents of some sort.

The employee is a second-year university drop-out, who was going to major in English (literature?) before quitting school back in Myanmar - he then worked for a couple of years before coming to Malaysia. He's been here a few months now. The first time we talked, a few weeks ago, I was the first person he had spoken English to in months - he says again, he is still lacking in confidence, in using this language when conversing with Malaysians.

Tonight we talked about business. He told me that four stalls in this kopitiam sell rice meals, and there are many more nearby. He said that his partner and him are inexperienced at cooking much else - he makes drinks, in Malaysian style, his partner has been a cook of five years, and handles the Malay-Mamak-and-Thai genre of dry and wet cookery fairly well. I suggested that they sell pasta, pointing out that one can improvise off three basic ingredients which are all immediately available at the supermarket across the street. I explained to him the difference between the construction of kopitiam coffee, and espresso, and suggest that they invest in an espresso machine.

This was the second time we talked, and the second time he had told me that he would like to learn how to use computers. He has no time to visit the netshop nearby, otherwise I would be teaching him how to use the Internet. I have old computers that I can loan him, but without pipes, he probably won't get far in a hurry. I make him this offer: if he can get the kopitiam boss to install WiFi Internet access, I'll GIVE him a computer, and teach him how to use it. It's a long shot, and probably not going to work.

Meanwhile, I'm still wondering if I should just rent the next shop and set up a 24-hour espresso bar with WiFi Internet, then hire these two guys as my cook and floor staff.

Pathos and marketing

I seem to care a lot about ths corporate function, and the industry that serves to provide it with outsourcing services. If not for great sympathy for marketers who seem to be doing absolutely dumb stuff, about people, I would probably forget that function. Not exactly sure how they tolerate so much banality, and so-called art, while defining themselves as so-called, "cool."

TIL: Deleuzian buggery as a recent approximation of Socratic impregnation. (From suggestions on Twitter and subsequent Wiki reading.)

2012-02-19: I'm either an idiot, or a minimalist - "marketing" and "supply (or demand or value) chain engineering" are the same thing in my head.

Entertain me

You do shots, I do math. We're both having a good time destroying something, right? Right.

Generally, when ploughing through texts at the morphological level, before I understand the semantics, I often wonder if my enterprise is a total waste. Aren't I silly?

Perfect brightness for backlit reading

LCD displays and the like... a low contrast against the general field of vision is good. The backlight should be just bright enough so that if one angles the screen away, the words are visible, yet the screen then feels too dark.

Reading books

It seems I've forgotten how to muster the time management to read long, hard books. I can read most non-technical business books in about an hour (well, I did at some point). But rarely have I in recent years tried to read a book slowly, because it was worthwhile.

Currently I'm 69/300 pages into a book on "formal methods." I need to remember how to behave like a book reader once again. No doubt I'll have to read this one a few times, before I get it. Can't remember if I ever had to do that with a business book. I have just completely avoided fiction for almost a decade now.

Faster reads, more iterations. Just like product developing. Probably, for technically reasons that are fundamentally the same.

Kitty conversations

I'm reminded that while I stay away from people, I gradually forget why I bother to pursue esoteric subjects like mathematics. Perhaps I need to put more emphasis on socialising, during this period of study. The path forward will be clearer in a day or two. Either it is back to work, or more liquidity for social interaction. I hope, it is that simple.

Cleanliness

I live in a flat with white floors, and new dirt is obvious the day after a thorough cleaning. While I would like to keep the place spotless on a daily basis, I can find no reason to do so, beyond mere aesthetic appreciability. Therefore I have enacted a rule to avoid (distracting myself from studies by) cleaning the flat more than once per month, in the absence of guest visits.

Rules are of course, meant to be broken. But do call ahead, if you intend on dropping by. Or be prepared to deal with the "lived in," state of my residence.

Update: I have determined that I can clean the whole flat, mopping floors, scrubbing toilets, and other basics within two hours. So this level of maintenance will probably happen on a weekly basis. Beyond that... we shall see.

Ruckus

The 24-hour mamak restaurant downstairs is under renovation. At 0149 hours. You can hear an impact drill going off. Someone's already out there yelling them down.

This is no where near my recent bedtime. I just find it funny. Following a day spent on cardiovascular exercise, and attempting to consume and socialise normally right before $AAPL earnings armageddon, I find myself opening the doors and windows, turning up the ceiling fan, and cooling my flat down. The lights go off. I have fed myself with fruit and other things. Perhaps I have had too many coffees today.

In the dim light flowing in from the public stairwell, I prepare my mind for quantitative studies. They've started with the angle grinders. Soon, while I'm reading one of the more holistic pieces on Swartz, there is silence. But they may still be welding. I lower the contrast of lighting in the flat. It has a calming effect on my mind. Less computation required, perhaps?

Mobile OS wars

Wondering about the difference between Tizen and Ubuntu Mobile APIs, not that I have the slightest amount of time to devote to finding out.

Brilliant abstraction

"Simplicity is the key to brilliance," said someone in my Tweet stream.

Sure, I get it. This idea is often bandied about. But people like complexity too. So what gives?

I think the answer is that what's really valuable is accurate abstraction. A crappy (a.k.a. leaky) abstraction breaks easily. A solid one phase-shifts from rule, to implementation, and back, easily. Too lazy to write examples here, for now, probably making this a bad abstraction. Abstract thinkers may get the point.

Forgetting how to speak

It happens quite quickly. Living and working alone, I sometimes do not speak for days. My throat gets raspy. I forget languages like Malay, and Chinese.

Yup. Imma hyperextrovert. Yup. I live/work alone and don't talk to people for days. Just gotta deal. LOL

What's in a meditation?

The quiet of the night, silhouettes of mountains, lights of streets and homes beneath, motors and youth. These are good for meditations.

I just had dinner, then lifted some weights, and I'm still a bit phlegmy from a recent infection. My sense of my body is not full in control, so I sit down to collect my thoughts about my body, as they impact my mind on a moment to moment basis. After a few minutes, I have a better sense of where various tissues are, and how they are behaving. This is a basic study of the what oneself is.

I peel, slice, and eat a grapefruit. Wild dogs bark nearby. Hoi! This is not the grapefruit you are looking for...

Sketchy kids

0130 hours. A white Myvi drives by my quiet street. It parks on the corner, turns its lights off. Three Chinese male youth in a variety of casual / hip clothing disembark. The driver does not. They are relaxed, walking towards the row of shops. One, in a white t-shirt removes something he has been holding underneath it. A longish object, which from up here looks like it could be a bottle in a bag, or a machete in a bag, or just a long straight bag. He leaves it under an old grey / green Kancil parked facing the street, back to the shops. The youth walk into the five-foot way. A few seconds later, they go back the way they came, and Mr. White T-shirt retrieves a similar looking object from under the Kancil. It could have been the same object. They get in the Myvi, and the Myvi leaves.

Controlled REM: "protip"

Eye muscles get stressed. In the "age of information overload," we use our eyes too much. Rest and recuperation can be accelerated by careful, intentional study. Relaxing the muscles which control the finer movements of the eyeballs, from time to time, can help to reduce that factor of overall fatigue. Since it's most easily done with the eyes closed, the subsystem of the brain which processes the live graphics data from the eyes also gets a bit of a rest.

Everyone should practice this.

Social calisthenics

Often enough, when work does not afford me a great budget of time or money for complex social engagements, I pay instead for the privilege of sitting at a public eatery or watering hole. There I do my work, while indulging in the sounds of a crowd.

I like crowds. Crowds are comforting. They make me feel a lot more normal. Sometimes, I wonder if I will grow mad, before I grow wise.

Every day since moving to the countryside, however, I am thankful to have no dangerous noises such as my mother nearby. A neutral environment is far better than a costly one.

Frugal living?

It's 21-Jan. Operating cashflow * month-to-date (RM328) i.e. ($109). Armageddon, or no $AAPL armageddon, I might want to get myself a treat.

* Not a rigourous calculation. Note also, that I am a non-working student, and my income is $0.

Art of skimming: long-term gains

I find myself digging hard, and slowing down, at the junctions between subjects and predicates that I do not understand. And, I forget to avoid such friction.

Now, this is me reminding myself not to slow down: read everything fast. What is easily understood comes to light quickly, and what is not is made evident by the quantity of space in between what is understood.

When time is providant, pursue re-readings.

Repeat until all is understood, if time permits. Otherwise, move on.

What's in, an "uncorrelated," market?

Folks on Twitter are jibbering today about why the KLSE is majorly down today. Generally my thought is that it's risk-on in developed markets, and Malaysia being a so-called uncorrelated market, gets funds pulled out of it as a result. This happens on a monthly to quarterly scale, if I correctly understand my trading experience from last year. Moreover, we do have elections within a month or three, as they've noted, and therefore it's time to be risk-off-Malaysia.

I asked myself, what does it mean to be an uncorrelated market, beyond the superficial difference in one descriptive statistic? I then had a thought, that "uncorrelated," markets such as ours are probably distinguished by being "inversely correlated," but within certain short-term parameters. A rising tide lifts all, and so in the longer-run, an export-oriented economy, like Malaysia, will follow the trend of the global economy. But in the shorter-term, as Malaysia is an "alternative investment market / asset class," fund flows between places like Malaysia and developed markets seem like they should be inverse: when people are steadily growing confidant about the direction of popular investments (volatility goes one way), they are jittery about the direction of unpopular ones such as we are (volatility goes the other way).

Not that I have any serious training in economics. I'm just a student trying to learn how to trade, and pay the bills. I might even have misunderstood some of these terms completely.

Note: in case you didn't know about this, the KLSE is said to be rather inefficient because capitalisation is dominated by two large government funds. That might have something to do with our uncorrelation, a pure musing on my part, and I have not done any quantitative analysis in this area. A dominance of capitalisation however, may not imply a dominance of trading activity - but we are also known, from what people tell me, as a market with a relatively high degree of insider trading. I am not a professional trader, or finance professional of any sort, so take anything you read here with a mug of salt. Many other writers in Malaysia have far more developed thoughts than this. Just search for their blogs online.

Further point of interest: Japanese markets were thrashed today. Japan is Malaysia's third-largest trade partner, after Singapore and China (the largest). It would be interesting to graph (model the network of) economic regions, as trade partners, with edges weighted by share-of-mutual-trade, to see if this graph could lend us any insight into the correlation of markets (for various asset classes) in each pair of economic regions. I'm sure there's lots of data that could be used to generate more directed and undirected edges, for a network model, and it seems that someone somewhere should be doing this already. Don't the big think tanks and research operations do this on a global basis? One wonders to what degree.

Annihilation of intuition

I don't think I've posted it on this blog (edition), so I'll wax lyrical now. Most people enjoy intuitions - they find that their emotional, intellectual, and other parts of life, are enriched by intuited insights. All that's well and good, but intuition just happens to be a pet peeve of mine.

I wish for us to straighten out our models of intelligence and humanity, and convey them effortlessly to machines. Everywhere I go, I seek out intuition, and what is known only by intuition, and I seek to kill it through longstudy.

Longstudy of course, involves intuition, but I suppose that is what is classically referred to as climbing the ladder, then throwing it away.

Rocking the pseudo-intellectual thing

Post-breakfast of a $1.35 steak and oolong tea, ruminations on my statistical abnormalities result in this thought.

Creativity and learning are both destructive processes. The limit of your ability in these, is the limit of your tolerance for annihilation.

Exactly 140 chacters. Didn't even have to massage it. Because change is destructive, by definition.

$AAPL has an iPhone "MATH" ?!

Ok, the only thing that crosses my wires when they whisper that about a potential 4.8" model, is the fact that Siri runs on Wolfram-Alpha search technology, which is built by a company that runs Mathematica. Yes, that Mathematica. Go figure.

Don't tell me, $AAPL is going to take on $TXN, and come out with a device that targets quants in business and academia?

BNF-uckery

A chap on Twitter, who might have seen some of my written interests on optimising the language layer of mathematics, sent me a link. It was to some work by a Raymond Boute, who works on formal methods in quantitative fields, ranging from mathematics to electronics. It uses Haskell to implement tools, which I am therefore thankful for having learnt last year. (He also sent me some other links to writings by Djikstra, which I have saved to Pocket. Thanks.)

In the first chapter of the Boute PDF, I am looking at Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation for defining context-free grammars (CFGs) again. I remember first engaging with BNF when I was reading the Golang specification in 2010/2011. Later, I remember reading it in the context of figuring out the Erlang compilation chain. I'm not sure if I encountered it in studying Haskell.

Anyway, no point me trying to tell you what BNF is, except that it's a pattern used to summarise the rules of a language('s syntax). You can search for it on the Internet if you're into that kind of thing.

I am no expert here.

Update: Hoare Triple... Pre-Post Formula... emergerd... how many more of these funny names do I have to remember? (why do I do this -_-) No serious complaint of course - I guess if I stick to this, I'll get it allll eventually.

AKA McRib

1982. God, the Prosperity Burger is older than I am...

Towards less opaque mathematics

Language, too often, thou art dirty.

I say it too often because I feel it too often. Conventional mathematical language overcomplicates math. I was relearning the language of exponentiation and logarithms today. These are merely inverse ("opposite") functions. Here's a teardown.

\[\begin{bmatrix}aˆb = c\end{bmatrix}\]Where

• a \(\equiv\) "base"
• b \(\equiv\) "index" or "power"
• c \(\equiv\) "a to the b-th power"

... versus...

\[\begin{bmatrix}\log_a c = b\end{bmatrix}\]Where

• a \(\equiv\) "base"
• b \(\equiv\) "logarithm-of-c to base-a"
• c \(\equiv\) "a to the b-th power"

I mean, look, the verbal description (as read aloud) is clearly asymmetric, let alone the graphic morphemes of the notation.

Big sigh. So much friction in the language layer.

I want a mathematical morphology that is Pythonesque, one way to write anything, and it makes the most sense. Can we have such a revolution? It might make math a lot more popular. I'm almost sure it would increase the acceleration of quantitative literacy in the human race.