k.e
Posts: 1948
Joined: Mar. 2006
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| Quote | (quoting Thurber)
"It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption." So Berlinksi has his fun at the expense of people who actually get their hands dirty in their foolish attempts to augment the body of knowledge in biology. |
(stolen from ......lost mouse pointer AKA the dog stole my homework..snickker)
he he he
Poor old Berlinski, he is suffering from irrelevancy syndrome since his monumental faux pas in front of some of the worlds leading mathematicians.
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(from http://zenoferox.blogspot.com/2006/04/so-much-smarter-than-you.html)
Once upon a time in Prague .........
Berlinski goes to Prague University to lecture on Tychnoff's theorem, a sophisticated result from topology. One of his hosts is Professor Swoboda, a mathematician. “Swoboda is extraordinarily intelligent,” Berlinski tells us. Please remember these things. Berlinski is giving a math talk attended by an extraordinarily intelligent mathematician. Here is an extended quote from the middle of his narration:
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I am supposed to talk about Tychonoff's theorem, but to my surprise I find myself explaining the elementary calculus to a roomful of mathematicians, re-creating in my own mind the steps that Bolzano took in order to define continuity. For some reason I feel it absolutely crucial to explain how the concept of a limit is applied to functions. No one seems to mind or even notice.
“A function indicates a relationship in progress, arguments going to values. Given any real number, the function f(x) = x2 returns its square, tak? ... In go arguments 1, 2, 3, out come the values, 1, 4, 9.... As the arguments of f get larger and larger, its values get larger and larger in turn.* ... Now imagine,” I say, “arguments coming closer and closer to the number 3, tak?”
I walk back to the blackboard and show the men in my audience what I mean, writing, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, ..., before the function.
“What then happens to the function? How does it behave?” I ask, realizing with a sense of wonder somewhat at odds with the hard-boiled pose I usually affect, that a function is among the things in this world that behaves—it has a life of its own and so in its own way participates in the drama of things that are animate.
“I mean,” I say, “what happens to the values of f as its arguments approach 3?”
I look out toward my audience. Swoboda and Schweik are looking at me intently, their faces serene, without irony. It is plain to me that they do not know the answer yet.
“They approach, those values, the number 9, so that the function is now seen as running up against a limit, a boundary beyond which it does not go.”
Swoboda leans back and sighs audibly, as if for the first time he had grasped a difficult principle. The room, with its wooden pews and narrow blackboard, is getting close.
I say, “The concept of a limit, as it is applied to functions, is forged in the fire of these remarks.”
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There's more. Much more. But enough. Can you explain this passage to me? Berlinski begins by admitting he is talking about elementary calculus, but then has his roomful of mathematicians rapt in awe as he reveals that values of the squaring function approach 9 as its arguments approach 3. College students would not be surprised by this result, let along a roomful of mathematicians.
I presume Berlinski intends this as an extended metaphor, because otherwise he is cruelly mocking his Hungarian Czech colleagues. The point of the metaphor, however, is completely and entirely lost on me. His absurdist account continues with yet another elementary limit. A moderately competent Calculus I student would dispatch it promptly and math teachers could do it in their heads, but Berlinski presents it to his audience with drama and mystery. The mathematicians leave the seminar at its conclusion and trudge down the street, exhausted. “Their tread is heavy and tired.”
I know how they feel.
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His projection of his high school angst as an uber nerd must have seemed to him the ultimate 'I got even with those jerks' but you guys missed the best bits.... T&A.
Yes serial misogynist Doc. B. has exiled himself in the capital of doggy style and femdominity.....gay Paris; where coiffured poodles of both canine and ape species reign supreme.
The stale smell of Gauloise and garlic are not for him, he gets to " watch the inaccessible leggy young women". He should know I sppose. His own personal H3LL ...... he must be loving it.
His sock puppet performance as 'idon'treallycare' on Good Math, Bad Math, and David Berlinkski thread as well as here
As tango half way down and his subsequent 'independent' defense of himself here ]Berlinski responds complete with sock puppet whothefuckreallygivesashit.
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So as the self styled enfant terrible of the creationist political religion he likes to have a bet both ways, gay?
Well, he wouldn't be the first.
Maybe he got lucky , he has kept his appendage down for a while.
Various amusesments attributble to Doc. Faux
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I happen to know that Talk Reason maintains a secret account at Smalto’s in Paris. Word is that Wesley Elsberry has just ordered suiting in a mink-worsted blend …
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Berlinski on Berlinski: What Trees Does He Plant?
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/04/05/131034.php
Berlinski accepts the mantle of DI Fellow, one suspects, because they're willing to pay him the sycophantic homage he believes is his due. He's on record as saying that the idea of Intelligent Design "Theory" doesn't interest him much. In the linked "interview" he describes his attitude towards it as "...pretty much what it has always been: warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public towards my ex-wives." The fact that Berlinski has had wives is somewhat more surprising than the fact that he has a collection of former ones.
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their posts convey that characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs, with even the names--Sir Toejam, The Reverend Lenny Flank,--suggesting nothing so much as a group of guys spending a great deal of time hanging around their basements running video games, eating pizzas and jeering at various leggy but inaccessible young women.
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Wow. That's some sentence. One gets the feeling that Berlinski eschews the utility of the full stop out of his utter glee in hearing himself go on and on unimpeded by bothersome punctuation. It's also interesting to note that he ascribes low-lifeism to "the men who contribute" to PT without saying that it's the commenters there and not the actual contributors that he's referring to. Otherwise he would have to admit that the intellectual assets of PT contributors are considerable; you can see for yourself here.
By and large they're people who are doing something to make the world a better place other than sitting on their fat asses in Paris disparaging all who would deign to believe that mere science, and the actual work (here one sees Berlinski reacting to the sound of the word as Maynard G. Krebs would) that scientists do on a daily basis is worth nothing more than some occasional self-worshiping intellectual masturbation.
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So what? Berlinski is a Homo and I'm a mathmatician sum that -DT
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The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane
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