[Edu-sig] The fate of raw_input() in Python 3000

[kirby urner]

On 9/16/06, Arthur <ajsiegel at optonline.net> wrote:
> kirby urner wrote:
>
> >
> > OK, I'll lurk for awhile
>
> Aaah....
>
> thank you Mr. Urner.
>

Well, that was kinda boring.  Guess everyone "has a life" outside of
edu-sig.  Surprise surprise.

I almost broke down and but a fancy (blue) TI calculator for my
daughter yesterday (while she was getting her teeth cleaned).

But I ended up buying her Season V of Smallville instead (for $49.99),
and came home nursing fantasies of making Python "the new kid on the
block" in America's heartland.

My latest strategy:  keep harping on those Fractals.  TIs can't do
fractals except as lexical investigations (same as we do with
generators), but in Python we have PIL.

The big prejudice in math departments is still:  if you don't do it in
your head, it's not the hard stuff, and so they persist in
underfunding the mathcasting industry.

This all goes back to Bourbaki and the pendulum swing away from
anything visual.  Instead, it's all supposed to be algebraic
formalisms, with nothing to "see" (it's no accident that "dark" and
"cryptic" are in the same ballpark).

Mandelbrot, also French, is well aware of his historic catalyzing
function, in helping the pendulum come back the other way.  And by
extension, he's helping the computer scientists (fractals first showed
up on CRTs at IBM), proving to parents and students alike that you
just *can't do* contemporary 21st century math, if you skimp on the
hardware (the software is of course free).

Kirby

Related posts:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/focal-points.html
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=5153234&tstart=0