I stopped reading early, when the article said that in the 1970s one big relational database did everything.
In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't even exist yet in commercial form.
My first prediction as an analyst from 1982 onwards was that "index-based" DBMS would take over from linked-list DBMS and flat files. (That was meant to cover both inverted-list and relational systems; I expected inverted-list DBMS to outperform relational ones for longer than they did.)
Mathematical fiction is tough, because of the problems with "mathematical counterfactuals". Why not go with mathematical poetry instead? There are nice sections of same in the Clifton Fadiman anthologies. The first of these is also from The Space Child's Mother Goose. (All from memory, so please pardon any errors.)
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Three jolly sailors from Blandon-on-Tyne
Went to sea in a bottle by Klein
They found the view exceedingly dull
For the sea was entirely contained in the hull.
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There was a young lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned the previous night.
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There once was a fencer named Fisk
Whose movements were agile and brisk
So quick was his action
The Lorentz contraction
Diminished his sword to a disk.
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(There's also a bawdy version of that somewhere, referring to a different "sword".)
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical.
Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.
There's a simple constructive proof using high-school level thinking. ... Two different reals have different decimal expansions. Go out far enough that they differ. Since this is about intuition, let's just assume the larger one is positive and irrational, and thus has an infinitely long expansion. Since the truncation has a finitely long decimal expansion, it's rational. And it's between the two original reals. Q.E.D. ... A full proof for all cases can be built similarly.
It doesn't break my brain that there's a rational between any two reals; it breaks my brain that this doesn't imply equivalent sizes between the reals and the rationals.
My first step would be to note that 13,857 is divisible by 7 if and only if 1385 is. But yes, my second step would be a lot like yours, in my case subtracting from 1400.
A standard problem with dev tools is that they're obsolete before they're ever mature.
What is mean is that by the time NewTool that fills a gap doing X really well catches up with the YZ that older tools have long experience handling, EvenNewerTool handles E better than NewTool does.
I don't have any knowledge of the specifics here, but at first guess I doubt something security-focused would be an exception to that rule.
Yeah, see almost every "configuration management" tool aside from Ansible that promptly got made irrelevant for the majority of users once containerization hit the scene.
In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't even exist yet in commercial form.
My first prediction as an analyst from 1982 onwards was that "index-based" DBMS would take over from linked-list DBMS and flat files. (That was meant to cover both inverted-list and relational systems; I expected inverted-list DBMS to outperform relational ones for longer than they did.)
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