Metablog

Isn’t life wonderful?

Well, I’ve finally made some progress on my algebra editor. (Really, it’s more of an environment for the construction of formal systems at this point, but I plan to make it extremely algebra-friendly, such that using it will be much faster and less error prone than pen and paper for most students.) I did this by giving up the idea of implementing it in Lisp, and instead using a language that I use professionally, C#, to really get something done with it. And it really works. I have it to where you can add, edit, delete, and organize axioms, and create theorems and proofs and apply axioms to parts of them. And it’s all saved to disk, too. For instance, if you have

(+ (+ a b) (+ c d))

and you want to change it to

(+ (+ a c) (+ b d))

you need to use two axioms. The first is additive commutativity. It says that any (+ x y) can be transformed into (+ y x), where x and y match any expression. The second is additive associativity, which says that (+ x (+ y z)) can be transformed into (+ (+ x y) z) (and vice versa). So let’s see how this pans out with our problem, shall we?
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All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

– Paul Graham

Ah, finally. I finished my first post. I have like five more drafts in the works (two with similar length to the previous). I really must work harder at this.

Greetings everyone. So I’ve decided to start a blog. We’ll see how it goes.

Initially, I think it’ll mainly contain my spontaneous outpourings (well, incited, but otherwise random) that would otherwise have ended up in the comments thread of this or that blog. But I’ll try to get some longer pieces prepared here and there.