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.
Simplifying the most recent scroll bar feels like a huge step backwards to me. It really is the epitome of modern tech needlessly boiling down to its basic visual aspects to emulate a “clean” environment for the users.
“Are they using the scroll wheel/directly scrolling with the touchpad, or using the scroll bar?”
They were, of course, using the scroll bar. I am now somehow responsible for design choices made at the level of the browser, because browsers have decided that the scroll bar should be nigh impossible to use. Yippee.
UIs get worse all the time, very frustrating. Who needs contrast, right? I have good eyes and know exactly where to look. My mother? Holy shit no chance.
Not necessarily for visibility but when i work I NEED FUCKING BORDERS FOR MY FUCKING BRAIN TO KEEP FUCKING STRUCTURE AND NOT EVERYTHING FADING OUT INTO …yeah thanks i lost the thread again
At least on the bright side, people are becoming much more aware of accessibility. I’d argue that old sites were accessible mainly on accident due to most being restricted to fairly straightforward CSS and HTML. The advent of Javascript was a dark time…
I don’t think it was a pure accident as some non-accessible designs would still be possible with those limitations. IIRC scroll bars were taken from the OS back then, so if the OS didn’t have accessible design, it wouldn’t be a thing for the websites either.
It’s really depressing how often I have to turn off CSS entirely just to view a webpage. I could of course always go into the inspector and turn off the bad CSS, but Gecko-based browsers fortunately have “View -> Page Style -> No Style” which is must easier and faster.
And seriously, whoever invented the font-weight CSS property can burn in hell. Ditto for whoever decided that we should only be allowed to read light grey text on slightly lighter grey background.
Its the epitome of technology that as it improves some things become obsolete.
Pretty much every mouse has a scroll wheel on them now. I very seldom click on a scroll bar now. So the design has changed with that consideration in mind.
There is still a need to indicate progress when scrolling even with a mouse wheel. So scroll bars are designed with that in mind. And there is still occasion that you may want to use it to brag the bar to a specific part of a page. But this is fairly rare, because how do you know what part of a page you want to go to before you’ve seen it?
Currently on my Firefox there is indeed no scrollbar displayed. If I use my mouse wheel a thin version appears to indicate progress while scrolling. If I move my mouse to the edge of the screen a wider version appears which is easier to interface with on the rare occasion I want to do that. This is an optimal interface given the hardware I have available.
On a phone or table the scrollbar will not be interacted with my clicking on it. It only appears to indicate progress.
The old scrollbar design is obsolete. Doesn’t make any sense on touchscreens and is a waste of screen space on desktops since people have scroll wheels now.
Obsolete doesn’t mean it no longer works, a horse and carriage still functions after all. Obsolete simply means there’s more optimal options available because of improvements in technology. The scrollbar on Firefox right now is more optimal because of newer technology. The scrollbars pictured are obsolete no matter how much nostalgia you might feel for them.
My friend, obsolescence as a concept can apply to a functional necessity. Obsolescence doesn’t apply to a design choice like a texture on a window element.
If your entire point is that scroll bars aren’t necessary anymore, fine. If you’re going to type up a long winded response as to why scroll bars shouldn’t have the little lines on them anymore, you’re just being pedantic.
I’ve explained to you the decision making process that’s used when changing UI elements. If you’re so dedicated to being a curmudgeon to learn about why technology changes, that’s your decision.
What I’m telling you is that it’s literally a visual element. I already said, it could be optional. Professing it as some sort of inevitably of ui change is just as stubborn.
Frankly, you’re coming off quite hostile about what is literally a texture. Equating this whole line of reasoning to “this is why technology changes” feels like grandstanding to justify defending an obscure ui decision for no other reason than you just prefer it.
Which by itself is fine. You’re allowed to prefer modern design ui. It starts getting ridiculous when you decide to tell other people why their preferences are wrong.
Frankly, you’re coming off quite hostile about what is literally a texture.
So it’s acceptable for you to call me a pedant, but I’m crossing the line when I say you’re being a curmudgeon? Ok.
What I’m telling you is that it’s literally a visual element. I already said, it could be optional.
It could be, but maintaining multiple designs isn’t free. To keep them all involves additional QA and bugfixes for every release and designing an interface to allow a selecting different designs. There’s a cost to this, and why bother? As you say it’s literally a texture, not a big deal. What’s your justification for a development team to put time and effort to maintain some old designs that are no longer optimal?
And this is a microcosm of all interactions with technology. Some people simply don’t like change, even when there’s good reason for the changes. Every technological improvement no matter how big or small comes with reactions similar to yours. It’s best not to impede technological improvements to please curmudgeons, because there’s no pleasing them. You can decide to be angry over every minor improvement in technology, but that’s just deciding to be angry for petty reasons. It’s best to try to understand technological changes rather than always being angry over them.
I mean you’re still upset over a change in the look of scrollbar, even after the reasons for the changes were explained. There are much bigger changes in technology coming, not sure how you’re going to handle it if a scrollbar change bothers you.
This conversation is really stupid. You win, the march of technology advances endlessly and changes will be made.
The beginning of this thread was a small vent that didn’t mean anything on a meme. Way to completely overblow your response there, captain verbose.
So it’s acceptable for you to call me a pedant
And lastly, yes.
Pedantic is an insulting word used to describe someone who annoys others by correcting small errors, caring too much about minor details, or emphasizing their own expertise especially in some narrow or boring subject matter.
You are being the literal dictionary definition of pedantic. If I had known you were going to write several paragraphs over how a visual preference is irrelevant because of technological advances, I wouldn’t have engaged you.
On that note, I’m done engaging you. You beat me, I’ll eventually shrivel and die preferring something you don’t agree with. I hope this incredibly unnecessary conversation gives you satisfaction, and thanks again for wasting my time to tell me that my preference doesn’t matter.
A woman in eastern China had the shock of her life when she found out that her son was marrying her long-lost daughter. The reunion occurred right at the would-be spouses’ wedding in Suzhou, Jiangsu province on March 31, according to Sohu News. The shocking discovery was made after the woman noticed a birthmark on the bride’s hand, which looked strikingly similar to that of her long-lost child. Determined to uncover the truth, the woman mustered the courage to ask the bride’s parents whether she was adopted. After explaining her story and the identical birthmark, the bride’s parents eventually confirmed that their child had been adopted. Details were quickly ironed out and the bride confirmed that she was, indeed, the woman’s long-lost biological daughter. It turns out she went missing as a child and was picked up by her adoptive parents on the roadside some 20 years ago. The wedding could have been called off at this point, but the woman also revealed that her son — her now-daughter’s groom — was also adopted. The wedding proceeded as planned, but the shocking twist is one detour their guests will never forget. In photos that went viral on Chinese social media, the bride can be seen breaking down and hugging her long-lost mother tightly. It’s unknown how exactly the daughter went missing, but some are raising the possibility of human traffickers being the culprit. It’s also unclear whether the woman’s adopted son — now her son-in-law — will be searching for his own parents.
It’s called a fucking zipper and the only time Americans plan for the future is when they find out their lane is ending so they merge as early as possible like savages.
In a civilized society maybe, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why city traffic assholes think sticking bumper to bumper and preventing mergers benefits them at all.
Electricity likes the path of least resistance to ground. If you are only touching with one hand, most likely the current well run down that side of your body to ground more or less. If both hands are touching it makes it more likely for the current to cross your heart which greatly increases the risk of death
It obviously isn’t. You can see it sparking in the video as it energized the wire. If it was to ground those minor sparks would have been massive arcing and that wire would melt.
You’re not wrong lmfao. But it’s exactly like “I don’t need a helmet, I simply won’t get hit”.
Im not convinced with this much juice it would have made a difference, and if you’re committed to doing it this way you ARE probably better off doing whatever helps you avoid the worst, not mitigating it, BUT there are a LOT of stories of people who have been saved by best practices.
Every line of Osha (or whatever it is in your country) is written in blood.
This is why in electrical trade you’re taught to use your right hand, with your right foot below your shoulder, and left leg out (when doing anything sketchy).
If you do get shocked then the current will travel down the right-side of your body, and out through your right leg.
That’s not to say throw caution to the wind, but some people need to do risky things (that’s why sparkies get paid a lot).
For example, a guy I used to work with had to repair a switchboard at the hospital, which supplied power to the theatre rooms. Time sensitive matter as I’m sure you can imagine.
This guy was a pro, and was wise to take the safety precaution. When it came time to power back on the switchboard, not only did he right-hand/right-foot, he shielded his body and face with the switchboards door panel.
Something inside blew up, and he got his hand burned quite badly. Fortunate for him to be at a hospital. In this case he didn’t need the right-hand/right-foot technique, but if things happened differently, it could have saved his life.
Grabbing with both hands you make it extremely easy for electricity to go through your heart. Electricians are usually thought not to use both hands for anything if possible, since if cable is powered chances of serious injury are slimmer. Also twist at the end was to increase tension on the wire.
“If two men or two women can form a household based on an equal separation of responsibilities and reliance on one another, how am I gonna convince my wife God wants her to do the dishes while I drink beer and yell?”
When you have a single income as an employee with no dependants or spouse, your taxes are dead simple. It’s when you have more things to consider that taxes get complex. If you own a small business on the side, have some kids, own a house, a wife, maybe you came into some money from an estate, also you did some contract work on 1099… That’s just normal people types of complex tax stuff. If your business does well, you can expect the adage “more money, more problems” to rear its ugly head.
This had me checking, fortunately SBF is currently in jail and almost certainly headed for prison. Also want to drop a reminder that McAfee publicly announced shortly before his death that he had no intention of suicide and expected assassination attempts after his incarceration.
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