I have this theory that Americans suck at math because they insist on sticking with the imperial measurement system and so nothing makes mathematical sense - Americans intuitively just think in every day units qualitatively. Whereas the rest of the world uses metric, so base 10 math just comes naturally.
Source: I am a US STEM professor. Our students suck at math.
It may be that or it may be that our entire educational system has turned into shit through decades of low pay for teachers weeding out all the best people.
It’s closer to a binary system, since it’s iterative division by two. Half inch, quarter, eighth, sixteenth and so on.
People do the same thing in metric, but they just prefer to write 0.125 cm instead of 1/8 cm.
Imperial units are a bit more heavy on rational numbers instead of decimal.
The base 12 stuff comes up with things that were historically cut in halves as well as thirds.
It’s all highly composite numbers, since they’re easier to work with if you’re doing repeated division in your head. Ten is only divisible by 2 and 5 before you start to get a lot of rapidly growing decimal parts. 12 is divisible by 2,3,4,6.
If you’ve got a balance, a knife and a stone we all agree on the weight of (let’s call it a pound stone), it’s easy to measure our a half or third of a pound, and halves or thirds of any other portion I can produce.
Over time, common divisions got names and a system of units was produced that was entirely inconsistent but liked 12 and 60 because of ease of use, and powers of two because you can just keep cutting them in half.
It’s all moot since we can use a scale now instead of a balance with a rock, and we can trust measuring tapes instead of repeatedly bisecting a plank, but it at least gives context to why it prefers fractions and numbers like 12 and 8.
And base 3 sometimes (yards). When taught well, there’s a ton of value in learning to quantify the world in a variety of base systems.
Not uniquely American, but thinking in base 7 (weeks), base 12 (years, hours, feet), base 60 (minutes), base 3 (yards), base 10 (the default unless told otherwise), etc. really helps you adapt and estimate a number of other, unrelated, things.
When I was 16, I went to high school in California for half a year as an exchange student. I am from Germany and as a junior, I would have had something like my 4th or 5th year of chemistry in school, but out of necessity (or laziness) I took beginner’s chemistry.
For exercises I had been paired with two girls who used to try to make fun of me (I think; I never really figured out what their deal was), and asked me stupid questions about myself or Germany. I remember they once asked laughingly whether I like oranges because I was wearing a t-shirt with an orange print.
Well, then one day, there we go. Converting exercises. You have students from 9th to 12th grade in groups of 3-4, trying to convert imperial measurements to metrics. And then metrics to metrics. Basically, for a couple of weeks, we just converted stuff like 14 cm to mm or dm. I forgot so much about my time abroad but the most vivid memory I have is of the girls looking at each other (after a couple of days and repeated explanations) and one says “the decimal system just makes no sense” and the other one quietly and slowly nods in agreement. I ask them how it makes no sense. “Well it just makes no sense.” It’s just base 10 everything and the rest is practice, it’s not different from inches to feet. “No but you see this makes sense. There are 12 inches in a foot”, continued by a list of how many shmekels make up a whoopsiedoodle and how many dingelings fit into a hybotron.
I understand how you first have to get accustomed to new units and how conversion might need practice when you aren’t familiar with the prefixes, especially when you aren’t too experienced in the stem field. But I am still flabbergasted by the statement that having a system where everything is just base 10 and then you shift the decimal point around makes no sense. We are talking about fellow juniors here. How do you make it to age 16/17 never having heard of a decimal point or having trouble with base 10 conversion? HOW CAN YOU SAY IT MAKES NO SENSE?! It’s the simplest, most logic based system there is!
IMO metric also allows you to reason about things in your head more easily because doing base-10 calculations in your head is doable.
For example, “Each 1m section of a pipeline contains 20L of oil. The goal is to empty a 200 km section of pipe into trucks. If each truck can handle 20 tonnes of oil, how many trucks would be needed?” In metric that calculation is 20 * 1000 * 200 = 4 million L. 20 tonnes is approx 20,000 L since 1L of water is 1kg, so it’s going to be at least within an order of magnitude of that for oil. 4M / 20k = 200.
With US customary units it would be "Each 1 foot section of a pipeline contains 1.5 gallons of oil. The goal is to empty a 100 mile section of pipe into trucks. If each can handle 20 tons of oil, how many trucks will be needed? To handle that calculation you’ll have to convert feet to miles. Gallons to pounds, pounds to tons, etc. You can do it on paper, but all those weird conversions add massively to the difficulty.
Crude is approximately the same as water, about 0.8 to 0.9 g/mL. But, even if it were significantly less dense, like gasoline (0.74 g/mL) it’s still good for an order-of-magnitude calculation. Knowing that 1L has a mass of 1kg is especially useful since many of the liquids we commonly encounter are water-based.
Exactly, we also had this early on. Also with imperial measurements or some random antique ones. I remember the worst conversion exercises were in grade 5, where you had to convert a large number, say 5316, to a number if the base was 8, not 10. This felt completely useless and took a lot of time but it also wasn’t necessarily hard. And it made sense because math usually does.
During the French Revolution they tried to create metric time units, but it didn’t stick.
The one thing I think is possible within our lifetimes is getting rid of time zones. Instead of a business being open from 9:00 EDT to 17:00 EDT it could just be 13:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC. Then it’s much easier to schedule things with people in other parts of the world. China is already kind-of doing that, the entire country is on China Standard Time, even though it’s a huge country. That means that the sun is directly overhead at approx 3PM CST in the far west, and at the equinox the sun will rise at about 9am and set at about 9pm.
I mean, you can do that today. Just post your hours and schedule your meetings in UTC.
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time: the linear progression of the universe, and “where is the sun and what am I doing in the day”.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is so you don’t call them in the middle of the night when they’re asleep.
We’ll always have something that lets us lookup "is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?”.
Tineszones work well for this because I can see that Madrid is gmt+1 and I’m gmt-5, so if I’m eating lunch they’re probably not in bed, because it’s 1800 there.
As long as humans care about where the sun is in the sky for how we order our days we’ll need timezones, even if we reinvent them and give them a new name.
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time
Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is
You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.
is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?
If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is, which is why I used the sun as a stand in for “how people progress through their day as mediated by our biological day night cycles”.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
Lumping places together by rough sun position is better than every town keeping their own time.
Jumping through hoops to avoid saying that our sense of time is linked to the location of the sun in the sky is just making things more complex than it needs to be.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.
My professor for my first real engineering class had an excellent quote, “A good engineer can work in any unit system.”
There’s actually quite a lot of advantages the US could have in math education if we properly harnessed both unit systems. Becoming fluent in both and regularly doing conversions would give students a lot of real world application and simple math practice.
Or you end up doing what I do to troll my friends, and mix the styles the systems like.
“This post should be 5/16ths of a decameter” The rational numbers you find in imperial are helpful for dividing things compared to decimals, but everyone gets all weird when you do fractional meters or kilograms.
And I just understood why that’s the case. Most of the old units used highly composite numbers as factors, which have an incredibly high number of divisors. We still widely use such factors for time and angles.
A good software developer can also work with any language, but if you’re going to use Javascript to build an enterprise level software you are guaranteed to have a bad time.
You use what is best for the job and from my understanding there’s really no benefit to using imperial measures over SI, beyond the familiarity of growing up with them. If you were taught SI units from the very start you wouldn’t ever use imperial.
There are actually reasons to use imperial, but it’s all inertia. Industry has a bunch of controls and correlations and empirical equations that use imperial, so the inputs all need to be imperial too.
Of course, you could always do it in metric and then convert at the end. That’s one approach to unit systems.
Are you at a school known for its math or engineering offerings, teaching applied or theoretical students primarily? There’s quite a bit of variability between schools in US.
Then again, am I really using these Haskell libraries? I just want to use pandoc. I love Arch, but the organization of the official repos is sometimes suboptimal.
Last I checked (which was some time ago), pandoc-bin doesn’t require the haskell dependencies. I saved quite some installation time (and screen space during installation) by switching.
Someone has never done software development or worked on a build pipeline and it shows. Obviously complex software has lots of dependencies especially compiling from source.
They’re not exactly the same but they’re close. I find frying loose hashbrowns on a skillet in a pancake shape with lots of vegetable oil is a little closer to the authentic mcdonalds taste but that of course depends on which ones you use. If done correctly you can make it into a mashed disc pancake like shape that holds together so you can eat it without utensils.
The difference is these patties aren’t just raw potato. They’re filled with oil and because of this, when you air fry them, the final product is damn close to McDonalds, I honestly can’t tell the difference.
I’ve had an air fryer for years and I love the thing but you can’t honestly say it’s as good as deep frying. I’ve also had the hash browns you linked and if you deep fry them they are indistinguishable from McDick’s, but the air fryer just doesn’t make the cut.
Well, it’s certainly not to say that an air fryer is as good as deep frying in all circumstances, that’s definitely not the case.
But as far as these hash browns go - and I swear, I’m not being glib here - I literally cannot tell the difference between these things air fried and McDs. Like I have specifically gone and gotten McDs just to test the theory and I just can’t say that I find them any better at all.
Not to mention, even if there was a perceptible difference in flavor or texture or any of it - air frying is definitely marginally healthier, so in my book: a win for air frying.
But if you just plain disagree, I don’t mean to call you a liar. It’s just how I feel about it.
Have you by any chance commented something like this before? Somebody did, and I tried it, and the results were delicious! Thank you for spreading the word.
I don’t think they’re indistinguishable from the McDonald’s version, but they’re extremely close! I like to have them with some of those frozen sausage biscuits (Tennessee Pride are by far my favorite ones, and the closest to McDonald’s’ I’ve found) and some orange juice; it hits the spot and satisfies that craving for what used to be a nice and cheap little drive-through breakfast treat.
I have a very difficult time finding foods that I can access and afford, easily make despite my disabilities, can stomach and keep down with my weird health issues, and actually enjoy - and you helped me find something that fits the ticket AND also helps satisfy that specific craving that I’ve been missing quite a bit. Thank you so very much!! I sincerely appreciate it! 💖
Accurate. LaTeX is great, it makes you feel like you have superpowers compared to “office suite”-style software. But every once in a while you just run into some bullshit that feels like it’s stuck in 1985 and it completely breaks your flow. I remember wanting to make a longtable where text in the “date” column would be rotated by 90 degrees to leave more horizontal room for the other columns. It took me two rotateboxes, a phantom, a vspace, a hspace and 40 minutes of my life to get the alignment right. Would probably have taken a duckduckgo search and three clicks in Libreoffice.
Never heard of it before, but might give it a try at some point. From the website, it seems like something halfway in between LaTeX and Markdown? Sounds exactly like what I need at times, tbh.
My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.
I still have no idea how to exit the build process. It tells I need to type H or end but it also just lies. I find the easiest way is to invoke Ctrl-Z and then kill the background process, and the younglings children
Yeah, what the hell is up with that? I always just echo | pdflatex to make it shut up and exit on error. Maybe one day I’ll learn how to actually use that interactive compilation thing, but not today lol.
So there are many different commands that compile LaTeX, right? pdflatex, pdftex, latexmk, etc. But they all do that thing where they ask for your input as soon as they encounter an error, right? Well, if you just pipe an empty echo command to them, it notices that stdin has reached end-of-file, and gives up trying to ask the user for input, and just exits on first error. So instead of pdflatex mydocument.tex, you can do echo | pdflatex mydocument.tex and it won’t ask you for input if it sees an error, it’ll just exit. There’s probably a “proper” way to achieve the same behaviour, but I can’t be arsed to read the docs.
Speaking of stupid TeX hacks, at one point I had a script called latex_compile_and_install_packages_until_it_works.sh. It’s essentially a loop that repeatedly tries to compile a document, searches the output of the compiler for anything that looks like a missing package error, and pipes it to sudo tlmgr install. The “fuck it” of package management, arbitrary code execution exploit included!
Haha that’s brilliant! I have a similar script for Conda, where it tries to install R packages by first looking in bioconductor and then trying the rejects through conda-forge, and then the rejects from that are compiled from source or just outright rejected.
I would have thought you would have needed a (while :; do echo; done) | pdflatex or a yes “end” | pdflatex, i.e. something that repeatedly generates output. It’s actually quite elegant that pdflatex checks if stdin is already EOF
tries to install R packages by first looking in bioconductor and then trying the rejects through conda-forge, and then the rejects from that are compiled from source
Funnily enough I had a similar problem but I wanted text instead of a date. In the end I used a solution similar to yours and adjusted each cell entry manually for hours. Feels like there should be a lot simpler solution for this problem in LaTeX. Glad I don’t need to use it anymore…
u/[email protected] suggested Typst as an alternative to TeX. I gave it a try, and I’m loving it so far. It even has built-in support for the rotated text thing typst.app/docs/reference/model/table . I’ve only used it for notes/homework so far, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it fares for more serious typesetting tasks.
Nah, apparently it’s completely valid to end IPv6 addresses with a 0. And I haven’t done much research, but it seems IPv6 really doesn’t have network addresses the way IPv4 does.
kinda hate how they don’t provide dns with dnssec but no malware blocking (i prefer my dns to always just resolve stuff regardless if it’s “malware” or not)
also their default dns does has ECS disabled (they have an alternative one tho)
Twice the latency for DNS results? Care to give concrete examples? DNS is usually very fast. Twice as long as very fast is still pretty quick, in my opinion.
Muffin encryption here to save us from the corpos! They can’t hurt us if they can’t access their muffins! And are getting attacked by an army of trans sharks!
Okay, I’ll stop playing with your name and instance name now! skitters away goofily
Edit: People are downvoting me because they are bad people and like to watch babies cry or something like that. That is 100% the factual reason they are doing this.
Yeah, I’d rather have a soulless government branch that actually fucks me over than a soulless corporation that fucks me over. At least the former tends to pay more and have better job security.
Not in my experience. Idk how it works in the US but as a consultant I worked in public companies around the world and dude, those are the worst. They will need 2/3 people to do the job of 1 because they don’t work like private companies and don’t usually fire people as fast if they don’t have an acceptable performance. A lot of people doing nothing and 1/2 guys keeping everything running. Mind you, with public money
This reminds me of when I was in high school, we found out how to get access to the command prompt on the school computers, so naturally the very first thing my friend does: “net send * PENIS”
There was an announcement for him to go to the principals about 5 minutes after that and he lost computer privileges for a while.
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