https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun

>In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any part and quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Uncountable nouns are distinguished from count nouns.

So "math" is the proper shortening of the mass noun "mathematics". What other mass nouns do you shorten by abbreviate by keeping the "s" ending?

We do not say "phys" for physics or "econs" for economics, so keeping the "s" in "maths" breaks the rule.

And yes, I will die on this singular hill: it's all one math, not a bunch of "maths". Math is one interconnected cathedral with music flowing through it, not a drawer full of unrelated trinkets. The British habit of calling it "maths" is oddly reductionist -- it makes it sound like you've got separate jars labeled "algebra", "geometry", and "spicy numbers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYqovHffGE8

Have you ever had to sit through ESR yapping at you relentlessly about TMNN in the 1980's? I have, and so have many of my friends from that era. It was all he would talk about at the time. He was notorious for his obsession with proselytizing about TMNN and trying to personally attack and tear down RMS's life's work. (Not to mention ESR's rank bouquet and Pepé Le Pew approach to women.)

Pepe Le Pew - We shall flee to Capri!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnbNTv_D3A

ESR's Creepy Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.html

And nobody wanted to work with ESR because he was an insufferable narcissist who didn't want to share his code with anyone, who wanted all the glory and bragging rights himself.

All he did was brag and brag like Trump bloviating about how smart he is, dissing all the competing software that was actually free and other people worked on and shared, without ever sharing his own code, or letting "many eyes" review it, over two full years, until he gave up on his TMNN project and never touched or spoke of it again.

There is literally a 365 line 3,135 word 19,560 character file in the TMNN source code called "doc/BRAGSHEET":

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/doc/BRAGS...

ESR's TMNN code wasn't a cathedral, a bazaar, or a mystery house -- it was a shanty town riddled with bugs and security holes far beyond the reach of "many eyes". I analyzed it with Claude: ~774 unsafe string call sites, 42 mktemp races, 61 shell-shaped holes, gets() normalized in a shared header. Review the code yourself if you don't believe me.

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main/src

Imagine him cornering you at a science fiction convention and having to sit through him reciting that BRAGSHEET file to you again and again. It was his entire personality and discussion topic for two years (besides how much he hated RMS).

ESR's obsession is all about RMS personally, not just the EFF in general. His own TMNN license and my own personal first hand experience proves it. Have you ever discussed it with RMS himself, or even anyone else involved in the Free Software Foundation, or seen both of them interact in person? I have. I still communicate with RMS occasionally -- the last time he emailed me was a couple weeks ago.

I'm speaking from first hand knowledge and direct personal experience over decades. I'm not speculating and hallucinating and trying to carry ESR's water like you are, without knowing either of them personally.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main

Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE

Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.new...

ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.

Slime Mold Identification & Appreciation (amazing photography)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1510123272580859

https://norvig.com/21-days.html

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Peter Norvig

Why is everyone in such a rush?

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.

[...]

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.

[...]

Nobody else at Tesla made Nazi salutes, and publicly bullied, abused, and humiliated their own daughter, and perpetrated DOGE's destruction and corruption. Tesla ("they") had nothing to do with any of that, but suffered from Elon doing it.

Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.

Trump On Ghislaine Maxwell: "I Just Wish Her Well" | NBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC2jsRrzCrs

Nina Hagen - Smack Jack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIDnN34ZZaE

>Smack Ist Dreck, Stop It Oder Verreck!