I didn't know all the male-leaning words tbh, but it's not hard to have an educated guess that "neodymium" is probably a chemical element, thermister is probably something in physics related to thermodynamics, that a teraflop is computer-related (at first I thought, terabyte + floppy disk?), etc.
Didn't know azimuth, aileron, or strafe but they're all cool, and I'm glad I learned.
I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.
I only learned about servos a couple years back in a maker-space YouTube channel.
> I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.
Before the '80s, practically nobody outside Japan knew what the Yakuza was. Business development over that decade popularized its existence, so (American) writers picked it up, but after the cyberpunk wave (which abused it), it has largely fallen from favour as a narrative device outside Japan. Ironically, this mirrors somewhat the power the Yakuza can actually wield nowadays: after the Lost Decade of Japanese stagflation, and the rise of Eastern-European gangs (the real bosses of the globalized criminal network, at least in terms of raw "wetwork"), the Yakuza was significantly diminished.
I think you need to read more carefully. For example, he explicitly anticipates and puts aside some questions you ask:
"In this paper, we will not be concerned with postmodernist critiques of the idea of objective truth nor with skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge. I shall assume some broad commonsensical understanding according to which there are truths and we humans sometimes manage to know some of these truths."
Even is we suppose what you're saying is correct — the goal isn't really to change how we use mathematics, but to understand what math is in a deeper explanatory sense. If that's not a project that interests you, that's totally fine.
Could you give me an example of meaningful insight of what math is that relies on such ontological discussions? Since my issue is not with ontological debates as such but rather ontological questions formulated in a manner which is impossible to meaningfully answer. I think we can learn great things about mathematics (and world) by looking how people do math, or how people speak about math, but asking what math is seems to me to be a way of framing that instead of providing insights is dividing people into camps based on aesthetic preferences.
We often investigate things without knowing what value, if any, doing so will produce. It seems odd to require a business plan up front here. People do have them, entire metaphysical projects rest on this question and they can definitely tell you why it matters to them, but I question whether they should have to.
I mean philosophy, metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics have over 2k years of history and the only example of the influence that I know it had was that ancient Greeks didn't want to use 0 in accordance with the rule that being is and non-being is not, similarly with Pythagoreans hiding the existence of irrational numbers. If you know of some examples which had positive effect then I would really like to know about them and this is not a sarcasm or anything. I just fail to see the importance of the debate.
No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations.
> If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way?
You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.
I'm unsure if you've read this novel, but the translation "was to remember" actually works well here, and was probably a deliberate choice. The cycles of time are a major theme in the story.
Skip this one. An article written by someone who doesn't understand math, logic, or philosophy, and thinks stamping his foot and saying "general relativity" is the height of explanatory sophistication.
