This category macro will, I suspect, make no sense to any of you, but amused me tremendously - particularly the accompanying 'I can has cocheezburger?' comment.
I watched the Andrei Tarkovsky film version of Solaris a few weeks ago, and ever since then I've been meaning to make a "I'm in ur space station manifestin ur repressed memories" macro. Never got round to it though, which perhaps says something. Do you ever read lolscience?
I read some Jorge Luis Borges (all will be assimilated) the other day. Behind the coin I found one of your old .plan files.
I said "you know how mathematicians like to describe ways in which different things behave similarly? Category theory is for mathematicians who like to describe ways in which ways-in-which-different-things-behave-similarly are similar to completely different ways-in-which-different-things-behave-similarly".
She looked blank.
I said "you know what mathematicians are like? Imagine a mathematician with OCD". I think she got it that time.
Both of those are pretty good descriptions of category theory, actually. Another common description (which regularly turns up in the literature) is 'generalised abstract nonsense'.
(I have this image in my head of Mr Creosote from The Meaning of Life, with John Cleese saying "Just one more level of abstraction, m'sieur?" and then his head explodes.)
Bwahahaha. LOLCategories. Yes, it did have to happen. How utterly disturbingly, wonderfully geeky.
I'm now having an impulse to dig out my Part III literature review on the Naturality Theorem of Category Theory and see if I can come up with a macro annotation for each diagram. I think this would be a Bad impulse to follow.
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I read some Jorge Luis Borges (all will be assimilated) the other day. Behind the coin I found one of your old .plan files.
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I said "you know how mathematicians like to describe ways in which different things behave similarly? Category theory is for mathematicians who like to describe ways in which ways-in-which-different-things-behave-similarly are similar to completely different ways-in-which-different-things-behave-similarly".
She looked blank.
I said "you know what mathematicians are like? Imagine a mathematician with OCD". I think she got it that time.
Reply
Both of those are pretty good descriptions of category theory, actually. Another common description (which regularly turns up in the literature) is 'generalised abstract nonsense'.
(I have this image in my head of Mr Creosote from The Meaning of Life, with John Cleese saying "Just one more level of abstraction, m'sieur?" and then his head explodes.)
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I'm now having an impulse to dig out my Part III literature review on the Naturality Theorem of Category Theory and see if I can come up with a macro annotation for each diagram. I think this would be a Bad impulse to follow.
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