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2 yr. ago

  • I never understood how people couldn’t understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.

    There's no "whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it", the US is the only country using it, and only up to high school. At least I'm not seeing any papers coming out of the US relying on it so at some point they're dropping it and do what everyone else is doing: Write equations such that you don't need a left-to-right rule to disambiguate things. Also, using multiplication by juxtaposition (2x + 4x2).

  • It’s ambiguous which one of these is correct. Hence the best method we have for “correct” is left to right.

    The solution accepted anywhere but in the US school system range from "Bloody use parenthesis, then" over "Why is there more than one division in this formula why didn't you re-arrange everything to be less confusing" to "50 Hertz, in base units, are 50s-1".

    More practically speaking: Ultimately, you'll want to do algebra with these things. If you rely on "left to right" type of precedence rules re-arranging formulas becomes way harder because now you have to contend with that kind of implicit constraint. It makes everything harder for no reason whatsoever so no actual mathematician, or other people using maths in earnest, use that kind of notation.

  • I haven't seen can six packs in the wild in Germany for ages, the few cans that are for sale come in trays of 24. Results do show pictures of "wrap everything in plastic" (Coca-Cola) as well as cardboard solutions like the Spanish one, the first hit that's a commercial supply looks just like carton six-pack packaging for bottles.

    Thing is cans are kind of iffy in Germany because of the 25ct deposit, it's not so much the deposit that's the issue (the same goes for very popular PET bottles) but that cans crinkle and once they do they might be right-out impossible to scan and get your money back. Also PET is fine for about everything but beer, and for beer there's glass bottles. If you ever see beer in PET in Germany give it a wide berth it tastes as good as its price-point indicates. You're better off with wine or sangria in a tetra pack.

  • Originally, school was for the nobility and (fledgling) bourgeois, so they could run their spreadsheets, wage wars, and impress people with trivia, everyone else's education came from family tradition, neighbours (farmers talking farming stuff), or an education in the trades. Want to study geometry? At some point, the best option was to become a mason. And they would swear you to secrecy.

    Universal education is a brainchild of Martin Luther, he wanted everyone to be able to read so that all could read the Bible.

  • They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel

    You might have missed in your study of law and the news that what passed is not a law, but merely a resolution. It's the equivalent of a press release.

    extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

    So it wasn't extra-judicial.

    I'd be much more inclined to listen to you if you didn't make such glaring mistakes.

  • Nothing. And that's why people don't write equations like that: You either see

     
        
         4
    6 + ---
         2
    
    
      

    or

     
        
     6 + 4
    -------
       2
    
      

    If you wrote 6 + 4 / 2 in a paper you'd get reviewers complaining that it's ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write (6+4) / 2 or 6 + (4/2) or 6 + ⁴⁄₂ or even ½(6 + 4) Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.

  • Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.

    You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is a * h / 2, you're supposed to understand why it's the case. You're supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it's stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you've understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment's notice.

    All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they're ordered, they're arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn't, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.

    Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that's the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can't apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn't learn maths from a teacher who can't prove a * h / 2, or thinks it's unimportant whether you can prove it.

  • Learning the actual algebraic laws, instead of an order of operations to mechanically replicate. PEMDAS might get you through a standardised test but does not convey any understanding, it's like knowing that you need to press a button to call the elevator but not understand what elevators are for.

    Though "lazy teachers" might actually be a bit too charitable a take given the literacy rates of US college graduates mastering in English. US maths teachers very well might not understand basic maths themselves, thinking it's all about a set of mechanical operations.

  • Why? Because a bunch of dead Greeks say so!

    The Greeks certainly didn't come up with PEMDAS. US teachers too lazy to teach kids actual maths did. And that's before taking into account that the Greeks didn't come up with Algebra.

  • To a (modern) compatibilist, free will is the capacity to respond to the same stimulus with different reactions, i.e. it’s equivalent to the cybernetic concept of degrees of freedom. As such, answer:

    “You can poke a ball-point pen and it’s going to do the same thing, over and over again: Extend and retract the lead. It is predictable because its internal complexity is below the threshold of chaos.” Then proceed to repeatedly poke them in the arm to see how many different reactions they have to that. Mentally prepare for a tickle fight.

  • Your ld.so contains:

    Entry point address: 0x1d780

    EDIT: ...with which I meant, modulo brainfart: My libc.so.6 contains a proper entry address, while other libraries are pointing at 0x0 and coredump when executed. libc.so is a linker script, presumably because GNU compulsively overcomplicates everything.

    ...I guess that's enough for the kernel. It might be a linux-only thing, maybe even unintended and well linux doesn't break userspace.

    Speaking of, I was playing it a bit fast and loose: _start is merely the default symbol name for the entry label, I'm sure nasm and/or ld have ways to set it to something different.