(no subject)

[nibot]

1. I have `liberated' this new icon from the CERN website.

2. The sound of rain on my room's roof is quite pleasant.

3. Isn't it cheating to require a new axiom (the ``Infinity Axiom'') in order to construct the natural numbers, and still call it ``constructive'' (versus axiomatic)? The Infinity Axiom (∃A:(∅∈A)&(∀a∈A, a+∈A)) seems tailor made for the construction of the naturals.

4. vmware is amazing. I can run Windows 2000 and Linux and Plan9 simultaneously, just as if this little computer were actually three. With Mozilla and OpenOffice running on both Win2K and Linux; and with Mindterm SSH running in a Java VM; and connected to my mailboxes via IMAP, it's clear to me that the future of computers isn't with platform independence, it's with platform irrelevancy.

5. (nonetheless, it's still impossible to get any work done in Windows without somehow connecting to or emulating a Unix environment :-)

Comments

[emidala.livejournal.com]

you might as well be speaking chinese: I don't have the faintest idea of what you are talking about. :)

cern

[taylan.livejournal.com]

oh boy, it seems you are going to cern(v.) for the summer. well, are you planning to win a Nobel in future as well? c'mon, you are an engineer, find a job, buy an suv, optimize something but stay out of science. cause i m gonna get that Nobel!, invest the money in biotech business to afford my space trip. i don't think you may have a better plan, probably you'll spend it on springer books(though you can not afford more than a couple, it seems). but, i'd record that historic space walk in my lj (may be something reading like this:"nothing much to see guys, seems kinda empty,not worth the money") and add a billion earthlings to my lj friends list.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

I especially agree with 5.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

It is certainly cheating in a way to add a new axiom to get the set of all natural numbers. That's why, in Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell didn't add Infinity as an axiom, but as a hypothesis on a conditional in front of all his theorems. (The is, they all say things like "If Infinity then fundamental theorem of number theory" or something of the sort.)

But in another sense, it's only cheating if you think of it as added specifically to get the set of all natural numbers. All you really need is to guarantee that some infinite set exists. (Don't you believe that some infinite set exists?) And the standard statement of Infinity is the easiest way to get an infinite set. If you had another infinite set, you could easily construct this one with replacement and separation.