>> One annoying thing about both the Collatz and Goldbach conjectures is that if they are unprovable, it's also impossible to prove they're unprovable (unless math is inconsistent). This has been proved!

That’s the most fun thing I’ve read all day!

It's both. The axioms are invented, the corpus of theorems is discovered. As once the axioms are chosen the provable theorems are already fixed.

But the axioms are a choice, and we can pick different ones. The common choice of axioms is utilitarian, they lead to interesting math that helps us describe the universe.

Have you read the letter? "Because you are attacking us" is on the list, yes. But then it goes on to specifically call out our freedoms. Pretty much using those words, even.

> How could any person with even a high school education ever repeat that nonsense, much less accept it as true.

I'd guess that most high schoolers can read the letter.

It's surprising that Code, by Charles Petzold, didn't make the top 50. That's one of the most approachable books out there for learning how computers really work. I see a lot of mentions of Code on HN but maybe that is skewed by the links for which I read the comments.

"here's what we should do" is not advancing science.

do the thing, get the results, and if they're significant, then author a paper.

I think there is a lot of resume oriented science, these days, because publishing lots of papers looks good on your resume. i mean, we can't let actual science get in the way of our science careers, right? we gotta publish papers telling people what we're thinking about, and how to do those things.