GEB: An EGB overview (Part II)

This post is a follow-up to the first part.

However, before proceeding with the usual format as in the previous post, I will make a small comment.

I was very amazed by the first part of the book, so before starting the second part I viewed the book’s references. One book caught my attention: “What is the Name of this Book?”. So I ordered it and I read it. I found the book’s author’s style to be very similar to GEB’s style: puns, self-references, discussions about meaning, and paradoxes. So if you follow GEB’s references, you can almost see how GEB’s author’s style came to be.

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Writing your second program with Budge-TP (complexity and abstraction)

In a previous blog post, we showed and implemented a formal system that was able to represent numbers and the addition operator.

In this blog post, we will show an implementation of a subset formal system of Peano’s axioms that will also be able to represent numbers and the addition operator.

Finally, we will compare both systems.

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Writing your first program with Budge-TP

Budge-TP (bʌdʒ, b’dzh) is a theorem prover (really, just another programming language) that allows you to express formal systems (really, just programs).

In this post, I will show you how to write a simple program in Budge-TP.

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Teaching my kids programming & math

For these exercises, all you need is some creativity and pen & paper.

The crucial bit is to come up with some exercises in order to get their attention. Find what they enjoy playing with, and gamify it. If they like pets, make commands to e.g. feed a pet. If they want toy soldiers games, make commands for e.g. moving and attacking.

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A simple fact about politics

Disclaimer: I am not a politics expert (whatever that may mean) nor have I read any books about politics. My background is in software engineering and maths.

Every party wants to be the ruling party

A political party is formed with the intent of it to be a ruling party.
A political party spends resources on marketing.
Therefore every political party wants to be ruling.

Every politician must lie sometimes

Assume a politician of a party A always tells the truth.
Assume there’s an opposing party B.
Since every political party wants to be ruling, opposing party B can abuse the truth.
Since every political party wants to be ruling, Party A doesn’t want the truth to be manipulated and lose points.
Therefore it is not the case that a politician of party A always tells the truth, that is, a politician of party A must lie sometimes. Without loss of generality, every politician must lie sometimes.

Lying can be a simple fact about GDP, or even worse when combined with the fact that every party wants to be ruling: manipulate the population into believing that the other party is the ultimate evil.