51–57 of 57 posts
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so it's like Brangelina
More like acronyms, I'd say. For example, "HTTP" = hyper-text transfer protocol. It's funny that the word 사자성어 (meaning: 4-character idiom) is itself a 4-character idiom. East Asians like 4-character groups so much, they even read numbers in groups of 4 digits. For example, 1,234,567,890 would be read 12 억 3456 만 7890.
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More like acronyms, I'd say. For example, "HTTP" = hyper-text transfer protocol. It's funny that the word 사자성어 (meaning: 4-character idiom) is itself a 4-character idiom. East Asians like 4-character groups so much, they even read numbers in groups of 4 digits. For example, 1,234,567,890 would be read 12 억 3456 만 7890.
I doubt they like it. 4 is considered unlucky in East Asia. Elevators always read 1->2->3->5->... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia
To me, this is less about the fact a single woman had to memorise a written driving test by failing it 949 times, and more about the mismatch between the test itself and the populace. Surely she is fairly indicative of a rural inhabitant? Why is the test so inaccessible, and how many others are there like her?
I see three possibilities. If these words are as normal in Korean as they are in English, then she failed to learn them because (possibility 1) she was so sheltered she actually had no exposure to basic knowledge required of any competent driver or (possibility 2) she has an intellectual disability that prevents her from learning new words and concepts without a lot of help. In these two cases, you can't blame the test.
Possibility three is that the words for used on the test are government legalese that is never used in real life, and she did not understand that learning what they meant was a better strategy than trying to memorize entire sentences from the driving manual. In this case the test is partly at fault, but an intellectual disability would probably still be involved. (Though perhaps you could also blame educational traditions that stress rote learning and glorify hard work as a sufficient solution for any problem.)
I guess all three of these scenarios require her to have some kind of intellectual disability, because even in the first scenario, a normal person could learn everything she needed from the test-prep books. Also, I doubt anyone would celebrate her persistence if it was a story of a person with normal intelligence who threw away so much time and money retaking a test she should have known she wasn't prepared to take again. It would be perverse or at best eccentric, not inspiring.
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Pretty much been my experience playing. It's more about memorizing lists of words without really bothering to know what they mean and figuring out which words to use when and how to place them to maximize your point total on each play.
I mean no offense by this but.. is English your mother tongue? I used to play Scrabble a ton and adopted a more verbal, etymological style that, I'd assumed, would be more common amongst native English speakers (but maybe not!)
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It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64). Chess960 is the most popular variant of Chess, having 960 possible board layouts. There is the famous CSS framework, 960 Grid System. And it happens to be in the family of common display dimension, being twice the height of standard definition, 480, like the new iPhone and iPod, as well as half the width of an HD television (1080), 1920.
> It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64). Well, if that counts as "round" then I have to remind you that any integer can be written as a unique sum of various powers of two (or ten, or eight, or ...). That said, being able to quickly convert an arbitrary number into that form has proven useful more than a few times. But I admit that I never realized that playing a very old, free game called "Bina…
To me, this is an extremely sad story about the way we treat knowledge and learning. How absurd is it to cheer for someone that memorizes questions and answers without having contextual knowledge about the actual meaning behind those questions? It's not dedication, it's thick-headed stubbornness. The lady has been at it for about five years now. If she did it the right way, she could have learned to learn , then lear…
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> It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64). Well, if that counts as "round" then I have to remind you that any integer can be written as a unique sum of various powers of two (or ten, or eight, or ...). That said, being able to quickly convert an arbitrary number into that form has proven useful more than a few times. But I admit that I never realized that playing a very old, free game called "Bina…
Yeah but it MUCH rarer that an integer can be written in consecutive powers of 2.
For fun, see if you can write a bijection between the integers and the "consecutive ones". Hint: realize that a "consecutive power of 2" number can be split into two numbers: a number of consecutive ones greater than zero followed by a number of consecutive zeroes (you can have zero of these), then think about diagonalization.
That said, I suppose you could define some sort of "density" of numbers with consecutive ones in a fixed-size range. Say that you want to know how many of them are between 0 and 2^x (i.e. how many such numbers are x bits long). Well, you get sum(1..x-1) different consecutive numbers (for 2^8, there are 7 ways to have a pair of ones, 6 ways to have 3 consecutive ones, as you can see by imagining sliding the pair or triplet: 11100000, 01110000, 00111000, ... 00000111) and there are 2^x possibilities total.
Add x-1 + x-2 + ... + 2 + 1 to itself backwards and you get: (x-1 + 1) + (x-2 + 2) + ... where there are x-1 terms in the series, which allows us to rewrite it as x * (x-1). This is double the original sum (because we added it to itself), so divide it by two and we've shown that sum(1..x-1) == (x^2 - x)/2. Now, divide that by 2^x and simplify to get D(x) = (x^2 - x)/2^(x+1) for the fraction of x-bit numbers that are consecutive powers of two.
It doesn't take much analysis to see that it is decreasing when x grows after increasing initially:
Density of consecutive ones in 1-bit numbers = 0 Density of consecutive ones in 2-bit numbers = 0.25 Density of consecutive ones in 3-bit numbers = 0.375 Density of consecutive ones in 4-bit numbers = 0.375 Density of consecutive ones in 5-bit numbers = 0.3125 Density of consecutive ones in 6-bit numbers = 0.234375 Density of consecutive ones in 7-bit numbers = 0.1640625 Density of consecutive ones in 8-bit numbers = 0.109375
In short, "much rarer" depends on how big a number we're dealing with and the measure won't work for infinitely large numbers, because there are a countably infinite number of consecutive-power numbers, so they can be put into 1-to-1 correspondence with the integers, even though our D(x) decreases.
TL;DR: Math is crazy and relies on precise definitions. Be wary of intuition.