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Author Topic: nαzιsm is Satanic and Anti-Christ  (Read 18576 times)

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Offline claudel

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nαzιsm is Satanic and Anti-Christ
« Reply #165 on: September 23, 2013, 11:21:59 AM »
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  • Quote from: bg2
    … Someone who understands a second-order Taylor series is, intellectually, on a higher plane than someone who never went past algebra. …


    The higher mathematics is a rarefied plane, no doubt about it, occasionally an exalted one. But don't count on remembering what a second-order Taylor series is, what Legendre polynomials and Lagrange multipliers are, or how to expand a triple integration if you don't stick with this stuff once you finish college and grad school!

    I write from bitter experience, with my own college years having ended rather more than forty years ago and with my having a genuine and demonstrated aptitude for math (780-something in the math SAT and 800 in the advanced math achievement test in 1961/62). For better or worse (probably better in my own case), I lost all interest in this area of human endeavor during my sophomore year and fled screaming to the liberal arts program.

    I'm sure you know of or have read Whitehead's famous statement in Science and the Modern World: "The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit." But do you recall the sentence that follows it? "Another claimant for this position is music." There are planes and planes, in other words, and this whole business is even more complex than your comment suggests.

    My point? Whether the topic is nαzι badness or Fellay madness or someone's sadness, please recall that intellectual modesty, albeit an undersung virtue, is a most attractive one. Tell someone that he's stupid or ignorant or that he's unequipped or unqualified to speak about this or that topic, if you will—you might even be dead right!*—but in this era, when the matter of many college courses is less challenging than what was expected a hundred-odd years ago of users of the eighth-grade McGuffey's Reader, consider confining talk of planes to flight-capable objects that we are all more comfortable getting out of than getting in to. It's both safer and wiser.
    ________________

    * And I plead guilty to having directed all those characterizations at things Trad Guy 20 has written, as he can attest.


    Offline clarkaim

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    nαzιsm is Satanic and Anti-Christ
    « Reply #166 on: September 23, 2013, 04:44:27 PM »
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  • What an erudite way to say, "don't be an arrogant ass!!"   Truly an excellent post.  Thumbs up.