Blogtrek

Forbidden subjects?

I installed IIS on my computer today to see how web pages that I am developing with ASP or Front Page will work when installed. One problem is that I am using Windows XP and IIS 5.1, and the site I want to go to uses Windows NT 4.0 and IIS 4.0. Therefore, I could expect some problems, since the two are out of sync. This is a problem of our times. We keep upgrading and upgrading all the time, and then you find you have to learn everything all over again because they've changed everything. That holds especially true now with all this .NET stuff going around.

I prepared a talk on mathematics and religion and found while researching for this that mathematicians that go in for religion-related subjects, such as infinity, have a tendency towards mental illness, as though they were entering forbidden territory. Certainly studying such mathematics will take you out of the real world, and cause problems because of that, but then I found mathematicians that managed to handle it OK without mental illness.