While reading the "Attic Nights" by the Roman author Gellius (ca 160 CE),
and came across a passage that he wrote about the study of logic, but
that seems to fit the study of "J" quite nicely:
"... and I need only add by way of advice, that the study and knowledge
of this science in its rudiments does indeed, as a rule, seem forbidding
and contemptible, as well as disagreeable and useless. But when you have
made some progress, then finally its advantages will become clear to you,
and a kind of insatiable desire for acquiring it will arise; so much so,
that if you do not set bounds to it, there will be great danger lest, as
many others have done, you should reach a second childhood amid those
mazes and meanders of logic, as if among the rocks of the Sirens."
As I was putting this on my J webpage, when I realized that there is no
reference to my page on the "J User community" pages of the jsoftware site.
Under "Demographics" there is an invitation to "add yourself to the ...
community of J users", but it's not obvious how to do that. Could I get
a link to my page at
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~jph/J_page.html
added somewhere? I know the subset of those interested in both J and in
astrophysics may be vanishingly small, but who knows, someone may find
something of interest there.
J. Patrick Harrington
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