Re: File's Owner

FROM : Hamish Allan
DATE : Sun May 25 20:58:47 2008

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Andy Lee <<email_removed>> wrote:

> If I can make a rough analogy, many of our answers have been like different
> re-implementations of an algorithm.  Like the guy on the guillotine in that
> engineer joke, we each think we see what the problem is.  And so we "recode"
> the algorithm our own way, "run" it -- i.e., post our new, improved
> explanation -- and find it still fails. [1]


What this thread has reminded me of is an ongoing conversation I have
with a friend of mine, who refuses to countenance the square root of
minus one, because he doesn't think it means anything. I explain to
him how useful it can be to admit complex numbers for various
real-world situations, but because there exists an algorithm to
generate mandelbrots which doesn't ever do sqrt(n) for n<0, he thinks
this proves that complex numbers are entirely unnecessary and
therefore best avoided.

It doesn't matter how much you explain that "real" numbers are
imaginary too, or that the square root of 4 apples is also meaningless
in a physical sense. He has a sort of emotional investment in the
uselessness of complex numbers that completely blinkers him. The
difference is, I doubt that this particular friend will ever have
reason to do anything that will be made easier by using complex
numbers, so I don't suppose his opinion will ever change. But I'm
hoping that it's just a matter of time for Johnny.

(Maybe when he has occasion to create a document-based app it will
become clearer? Although bags I not the one to tell him that
NSDocumentController is not designed to mediate between his view and
his NSDocument ;] )

Hamish