Re: Any DVD writing alternatives besides cdrecord-dvdpro?

From: Peter T. Breuer (ptb_at_lab.it.uc3m.es)
Date: 01/18/05 

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 13:35:21 +0100

sam1967@hetnet.nl <sam1967@hetnet.nl> wrote:
> Peter T. Breuer wrote:
> > Only stupid people need "teaching" -
>
> Im sure he taught himself to read and write and do maths.

For your information, yes I did. Of course I did! Everyone learns by
teaching themself! How else do you think it is done?

> Not likely. What a wanker.

I can show you the "reading cup" from my 5-year old kindergarten class,
if you like. As to math - when I went for interview at my public school
at age 7 the math interviewer happily told my parents that I would go
through university and beyond. I remember him asking me "2 * x + 3 =
9", what is x? I reasoned that if one multiplied by two and added 3 to
get nine, then one should subtract three and divide by two to get x. I
told him so.

That was "learning". Nobody told me how to do it. It just required
somebody to ask the right question for me to take the tools I already
had and use them. In so doing I acquired another tool.

I think he then asked me some questions with two variables in, and I
either managed to do those because I could reason by magnitudes,
supposing either one or the other variable was a negative or positive
integer, and seeing if that reduced the possibilities to a set that I
could check mentally, or else I already had seen the formula for the
determinant of a matrix in one of my father's old texts, and applied
it. I don't know about that - as I recall matrices, the full theory was
"taught" at age 16 (bases, etc.), but I suppose they may well have been
worked with as tools in school since about age 10. But I think it very
likely that I would have been able to reduce the number of variables by
looking for positive integer solutions first. It would have been like
doing a crossword puzzle. I certainly could take square roots at that
time, because I remember that as another one of the interviewer's
questions - I told him that no it had not been taught, but that I could
do it. I liked to find out things and I had asked my father and he had
shown me the greek method of completing the square - like doing long
division but with squaring and doubling the difference instead of
multiplying and subtracting.

I also remember my father showing me the greek demonstration (is it the
greek one? Yes, I remember the greek text diagram ..) of pythagoras
theorem at about that time. One just rearranges the triangles into two
different squares. Very visual. Afterwards I tried thinking how one
could do it with pyramids and cubes!

Peter

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