Chinese Math Students Vs English Math Students

Rappers, pushers, and basketball stars make a lot of money. Unfortunately, people aren't good at odds and it's not limited to one group (eg. lotteries).

John Larkin would think that academic rigor might inhibit creativity. It's his excuse for not being able to apply it.

In reality,being able to appreciate when something unexpected and unpredictable has happened does depend on having well-trained expectations and a habit of predicting what ought to have happened.

A lot of stuff came from China and some from India, mostly being carried to Europe via the Arabs.

Ref:

A very informative book, with many references to Joseph Needham, the basic source for such questions: .

See "The Man Who Loved China" . It all started with his acquiring a Chinese mistress.

The better question to ask is why was it British gunboats up the Yangtze River, rather than Chinese gunboats up the Thames River?

Joe Gwinn

That's an interesting question. By the early 1500s, the Chinese were certainly ready to discover the world and they were already all over the Indian Ocean. It appears that some new emperor forbade further long-distance seafaring trade and exploration at around that time. I haven't yet understood the reason.

Jeroen Belleman

Not much from China lately. It's a very different place from what it was millenia ago. Mao sure didn't help.

Sounds like a loonie.

I understand they are advancing the state of Thorium based nuclear energy. That will be pretty kick ass if it pans out the way it is expected. Then we will all be buying our reactors from China.

I may just be a good story, but I've heard the theory that progress in the west overtook China because the Chinese didn't have clear glass so they couldn't make eyeglasses thus lost out on another 10-15 years of work from the old and wise

-Lasse

A plausible theory. I did a quickie on Google and it actually came up in a wiki. actually there were quite a few more hits than just wiki which is som etimes inaccurate but really they don't just make shit up.

Thinking about the development of mankind, different areas were different, what of the people who were late figuring out the wheel, fire, stone knives even ?

The Chinese did have science, but it is like anywhere else. Like wwhne they say sailors were afraid of falling off the edge of the Earth if they went too far. That has been bullshit for a long long time. Only the truly unedu cated thought that, and education was not universal back then. (hmm, maybe we are devolving to that state) but think about the years of Galileo, Koper nikus, or back to Ptolemy. Even he knew the Earth was not flat and had he n ot political/religious connections Kopernikus would have had quite a better life. Was he the one who was already blind by the time he got published ?

I heard the Chinese invented rockets. This would mean they had a head start understanding trajectory and all that. This was a long time ago and while Euclid or whoever was figuring out the Earth's parameters, they were into f orce and 32 feet per second per second.

Degeneration of the body is generally caused by malnutrition. the fact that we need reading glasses indicates that we are lacking in some nutrient. Th is probably was not as severe with a smaller world population but could hap pen if the population density gets high enough, in any time period.

All this anthropological shit can really strain the brain because we do lac k quite a few facts and half of the ones we have are derived, not empirical . And I do believe mistakes have been made but noone can really point them out. None of us were there.

"I see the middle kingdom between Heaven and Earth Like the Chinese call the country of their birth" - "Mystic Rhythms", Rush ( Neil Peart ).

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a wiki. actually there were quite a few more hits than just wiki which is s ometimes inaccurate but really they don't just make shit up.

, what of the people who were late figuring out the wheel, fire, stone kniv es even ?

y say sailors were afraid of falling off the edge of the Earth if they wen t too far. That has been bullshit for a long long time. Only the truly uned ucated thought that, and education was not universal back then. (hmm, maybe we are devolving to that state) but think about the years of Galileo, Kope rnikus, or back to Ptolemy. Even he knew the Earth was not flat and had he not political/religious connections Kopernikus would have had quite a bette r life. Was he the one who was already blind by the time he got published ?

Kopernikus had a fine - if politically interesting - life

He wasn't all that enthusiastic about publishing his astronomical musings, and apparently saw an early copy of the printed version just before he died .

rt understanding trajectory and all that. This was a long time ago and whil e Euclid or whoever was figuring out the Earth's parameters, they were into force and 32 feet per second per second.

at we need reading glasses indicates that we are lacking in some nutrient. This probably was not as severe with a smaller world population but could h appen if the population density gets high enough, in any time period.

Wrong. We need reading glasses when the lens of the eye get stiff enough th at the focusing muscles can't distort the lens enough to let the eye focus at normal reading distances. Nutrients don't seem to come into it. Sex does - women need reading glasses/bifocals about five years younger than men - on average.

ack quite a few facts and half of the ones we have are derived, not empiric al. And I do believe mistakes have been made but no-one can really point th em out. None of us were there.

And you don't seem to have access to many of the facts that are available.

Curious. The British Civil Service is modelled on the Mandarin system.

They didn't really appreciate how difficult it is to get to be literate in Chinese and failed to understand that the Chinese selection system, which i s essentially designed to select anybody who is adequately literate, though this is buried in lots of high-minded Confucian twaddle about the "superio r man", and went for facility with Latin and Greek as their touchstones of quality.

British Mandarins were happy to send gun-boats up the Yangtze.

More plausible. China is a lot bigger than the UK.

That argument is a bit old. There is more than enough plutonium for all the bombs some times over. We don't need to make more.

Do you really thing Iran won't use it to threaten a first strike? If you have a weapon you will use is as you feel you need to.

I believe the enrichment issue. It was pointed out that there are nuclear operators who would be Thorium agnostic (why do they care if their next reactor is Thorium based or not?), there are fuel enrichment companies who are *very* opposed to Thorium because it threatens their business model and there *would* be plant builders who should like Thorium because it would create more demand for new plants than are now on the books (in theory at least). But even the plant builders will lose money in the short term as uranium plants are not built as thorium designs work their way through lab to production. So there is no one with a strong financial gain to promote thorium reactors.

Communism was a 70-year aberration in a capitalist (but not democratic) history reaching back millennia. Don't underestimate China.

He was that, but a very interesting and accomplished one, and he wrote the (large!) book on Chinese technology from the millennia, much of which eventually diffused to Europe. The book "The Man Who Loved China" is a good introduction.

Joe Gwinn

This seems orders of magnitude too small and simple to explain something that large.

Nor do I believe that the Chinese could not make clear glass if they wanted to.

Joe Gwinn

Interesting timing. I'm about halfway through David Landes' "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor", and he gives a lot of weight to China's strong central control which generally saw "change" as A Bad Thing. Stability to the point of stagnancy. Likewise for Muslim countries, where political and religious control were intertwined.

What Europe had going in its favor was centuries of confusion and squabbling, with no clear winner most of the time.

Frank McKenney

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Bastiat asked the same question. When you dig a bit deeper, this kind of au thor seems to think it's fine if the money you have earned is being taken t o pay the army, the police and the legal system to make it easier for you t o hang onto the rest of the money you have earned, but gets restive if it's being used to help you - and other people - make money out of a healthier, better trained and better educated working class.

By presenting the case as if any taxation was "greed", Bastiat and Sowell o ver-simplify the discussion to the point of idiocy.

But there are right-wing nitwits around who think that they are wonderful.

When they elect their rulers, and their press is free, the abberation will be over.

Exactly. Complex chaotic systems are unpredictable, so central planning is almost always wrong. The biological model of distributed mutation and selection works a lot better than political control.

You don't understand chaos. It is not that chaos is unpredictable. The details may not be predictable, but there are aspects, usually the important ones, that *are* predictable. Hence the term "strange attractor". We may not know the dates of each storm, but we can estimate the number and severity of coming storms in the hurricane season.

The Butterfly Effect never said a specific storm would be created by a butterfly flapping it's wings, it simply says the very small change in initial conditions results in a large change in results. That says nothing about the *trends* in results. Here's a link.... with pictures!