Please add some information to your profile so I can place your comment in some kind of reference. I love that you write clearly and to my untrained, therefore naive, eyes your arguments seem valid. But without an understanding of where you are coming from, I do not want to necessarily accept what you say on face value.
I find this attitude an incredible strength in the hacker community, but also occasionally a real weakness. It leads to a complete dismissal of a source of information, and that, surely, can't be right - namely, the mindset and knowledge of the person making the statements. When making decisions you should use all the information available.
Yes, some information should be tagged as "hearsay" (you can't check the person's credentials) and some should be marked as "suspicious," but simply throwing it out is wrong.
When you teach or train it is critical that you know people's background so you can pitch the explanations and demonstrations at the right level. When you listen to someone, you should assess what level of confidence to place in what they say.
Work since Shannon has shown that the most efficient communication of information (as opposed to data) is achieved when the sender has an effective model of the receiver, and the receiver has an effective model of the sender.
Certainly many advances in breaking ciphers are achieved by knowing more about the source. Cryptographers know not to throw away information, even when it is suspect.
You can dismiss this, or go and research it. Does it sound interesting? Should you ignore it? Modern information theory says you shouldn't. You don't know my credentials, so you have to make that decision in a void. If I told you my credentials, would your opinion remain completely unchanged? Modern information theory says it shouldn't.
Yes, be skeptical, but use what information you have.
"User Profile for: riderofgiraffes
UserID: 383529
Name:
Email:
Registered: 1/11/07
Occupation: Mathematician
Location: UK
Total Posts: 350"
So much for that vague reputation, unless of course you've been fibbing ;) and / or someone else liked your moniker as much as you did, but I somehow doubt there are multiple riders of giraffes.
I fully agree with the above by the way, it feels just right.
I always tell my kid to distrust all sources of information, including his dad (there is a pardox in there somewhere) and to gather his own facts if the issue warrants the effort.
But such a search is uninformative for the author in question. If I had used a pseudonym you would have had no such additional information.
My point remains. With no credentials, with no idea of the author's background, you must perform independent verification. With some idea of the author's background, you have more information, and can decide whether the information is likely to be trustworthy, or at least worthy of pursuit or verification.
I am concerned that hacker culture teaches "Trust no one, verify everything." I think it is thereby unnecessarily impoverished.
I agree, or add a note about whether you're a mathematician.
I personally found this submission to be very exciting and interesting. I guess even with calculus, linear algebra and computability theory under my belt I still find number representation interesting. I don't think I'm alone. I'll use this idea later when tutoring kids in an attempt to share mathematical and programming excitement (would make for a fun script).
This submission may not be significant in advanced mathematical theory, but getting distracted for 20 minutes doing arithmetic or programming is no less important, albeit at quite a personal level.
Please add some information to your profile so I can place your comment in some kind of reference. I love that you write clearly and to my untrained, therefore naive, eyes your arguments seem valid. But without an understanding of where you are coming from, I do not want to necessarily accept what you say on face value.
I mean no insult, I just want more information.
Cordially,
Shamiq