Just to be clear incase the other replies haven’t made it so, you are definitely, definitely completely wrong about this and continuing to think this way will cause you to misunderstand the world you live in and make mistaken decisions. I have lived in several European countries and they all have a sect of loud delicate people pretending they are victims and persecuted for wanting to be patriots.

Exactly the sort of darling that that my college tutor would have said needed to be killed. “Yes, I know you’re very proud of it…”

A couple well-placed em-dashes and at least it doesn’t read like the author is trying to rap.

Why would they say that it needs to be killed? To what end?

The phrase "kill your darlings" circulates in fiction writing schools. The reasoning is that a "darling" turn of phrase which the author really likes is likely something that they are irrationally obsessed over and that distorts the editing process around itself, to the detriment of overall quality.

Like a lot of writing advice this is really subjective.

I feel like this comes up with me in programming too! Like if I write some really beautiful function as part of solving a problem, I will be a lot sadder if it doesn't make it in, sometimes to my detriment. Similar energy to "cattle not pets".

Probably the most important lesson my C mentor ever told me: "Never be afraid to delete code, no matter how nice you think it is." It still hasn't fully landed with me, and I can relate to what you wrote. But I am trying to.

As well as "Build one to throw away. You will anyway."

I think it boils down to "nobody likes a showoff", really.

Again, subjective. Some people like it and it can be a valid literary art form in itself. It's only in purely utilitarian text like technical writing where it doesn't belong.

I see what you mean (it doesn't quite work for me either), but it works for some people, so eh. I guess the sibling is right, it's subjective.

Eh, how often do you get to drop a new zeugma? I'll allow it.

You don’t have to imagine it, it happened in a series of Mars mission failures at the end of the 90s that were designed under the ‘faster better cheaper’ paradigm and lead to congressional reviews, the nasa administrator losing his job, and a return to slower and expensiver.

Nothing nonchalant about it. There was a stringent qualification process.

The time between boosters first being reused in Falcons and this mission is the same as the time between JFK's 'we choose to go to the moon' speech and the actual moon landings.

I remember an undergraduate homework question that was just asking you to calculate the fourier transform of a gaussian of mean 0 and variance a. You get out a gaussian of mean 0 and variance 1/a.

I missed the significance of this, until we went over the homework with the TA and pointed out the implications of this result, heisenberg, etc.

It was very enjoyable that something I had previously taken as a sort of spooky truth of the quantum universe (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) was actually just a pretty mechanically apparent consequence of some basic algebra on an EE homework.

I shall choose to remember him in his prime.

57

sorry, that's not a prime because 3*19

It's a joke.

"Although fifty-seven is not prime, it is jokingly known as the Grothendieck prime after a legend according to which the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck supposedly gave it as an example of a particular prime number." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics

it's surrounded by 53 and 59 which is a twin with 61 then 67

but the fun part is how the same happens to these four numbers -30

so 23, 29 twin with 31 then 37

my problem is that I don't know why this would be important

The guys who did well at my uni (a very good one) in my experience really were consistent in putting the work in. It's not that they had to really struggle with the material and homework problems, but they consistently did a good shift every day, and seemed to quite enjoy doing past exam questions when exam season approached, and all the rest. There was of course the odd mathmo savant who could see the matrix, but they were the exception. This was a good university that you've heard of, it had the best of the best aswell as well as the people like me. There were correspondingly people who I thought were brilliant and had serious flare, and have gone on to have excellent careers, but they didn't really Do The Work and their exams results reflected that. Thankfully, it doesn't really matter in the long run provided you survive it all psychologically.

That’s why you don’t have to explicitly add it as a qualifier at every instance in which it’s implied in your work of non fiction for a general audience.

I think if you aren't deeply concerned with the axiom of choice in your work about infinity for a general audience, then the entire affair is rather farcical. Most of the "weird" stuff about infinity derives from the axiom, after all. A book about infinity, for the lay person in particular, must be in large part a book about the axiom of choice.

Just ask on their IRC channel. The bar is set very low.