61–70 of 89 posts
"because you live in a country where the primary purpose for you as a citizen is to go into debt, so you better know how to, at the very least, do financial planning"
Arguably, being able to do financial planing will keep you out of debt. At the same time the number of people who understand compound interest is shockingly low - a great boon for credit issuers hoping to exploit you.
Because you need to be able to run numbers in your head for a lot of practical tasks, and inability to do napkin math can cost you very dearly
And calculators get broken very quickly on construction sites. And you must be capable of adding and subtracting and finding the LCD and GCD of fractions to read a tape measure in US customary units.
The tape measure itself can be used to perform basic arithmetic, and will even return results in Freedom Fractions if that's how it is labeled.
Yes we should start my six year old with group theory. When we go to the farmer's market I can ask him under what transformations is an apple invariant, and then pay for it by having him solve a Rubiks cube.
- A pile without apples is a pile of apples. We call it the empty pile.
- The successor function is to add an apple to the pile. Apply the successor function to the pile of apples and you still have a pile of apples.
- A pile of apples is as large as itself
- If the left pile has as many apples as the right pile, then the right pile also has as many apples as the left pile
- If you have two piles of apples you can add them by checking if the second pile is empty. If it is empty you are done and the result is in the first pile. If not take an apple from the second pile and add it to the first pile. Then check again and repeat
And then you can teach him about the bijection between money and apples. After a little more set theory you can start constructing two piles of apples, one representing what you have one what you have to give away ...
The possibilities are endless.
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What is going on with your tape measures? Confused european over here.
Customary units are given in fractions of an inch. Eg half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth etc. So you’re dealing with simple fractions. That is why I buy tape measures that also have metric scale - to sidestep all that bullshit entirely when adding, multiplying, dividing or subtracting, yet be able to measure distances in inches too
At home in my own geeky little workshop, where I don't need to satisfy anyone else's proclivities, everything is exhaustively and exclusively metric-only. My tape measures are metric, my hand tools are metric, my drills are metric, and my fasteners are metric. Working with Freedom Fractions is absolutely forbidden in my workshop (as are all screws with Phillips, JIS, Pozidrive, or Reed-Prince heads, but that's a different rant).
And, I must say: It's better this way.
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If you run every basic calculation through a calculator, you'll make every task take 3x time it requires today, in best case. I have seen people eyeball measurements and taking notes, and bringing in perfectly manufactured goods (blinds, cupboards, etc.) in return. Esp, in construction, nothing is precise, so being able to eyeball correctly after a quick measurement with a tape and doing some basic math on the number…
I just left a comment on a different thread about detached from reality a lot of tech workers are, and then here I find a guy being like "but rugged calculators are a thing, why do you need to do math in your head?" Tell me you have never built a thing[1] in your entire life that was more complex than an IKEA bookshelf without telling me that challenge: I do hobby projects all the time and I couldn't even tell you ho…
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And calculators get broken very quickly on construction sites. And you must be capable of adding and subtracting and finding the LCD and GCD of fractions to read a tape measure in US customary units.
> and finding the LCD and GCD of fractions to read a tape measure in US customary units. Well, that's what tolerances are for. I don't need a perfectly accurate answer. Just one that's within 1/32" or more likely 1/4" to 1/8".
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What is going on with your tape measures? Confused european over here.
Customary units are given in fractions of an inch. Eg half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth etc. So you’re dealing with simple fractions. That is why I buy tape measures that also have metric scale - to sidestep all that bullshit entirely when adding, multiplying, dividing or subtracting, yet be able to measure distances in inches too
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> Mathematicians are very much in davis/hersh "what is mathematics anyway" This reminds me of getting my CS degree in the early 2000s, then slowly realizing that my comp-sci program had taught me lots of interesting things about how computers and programs work, and essentially nothing about how to write code for a living. Also reminds me of playing Dominion (the card game) with another student, me saying "Okay, I've…
I got my degree in the mid 90's and let me tell you - high school guidance counsellors in the 1980's had no clue at all what computer science was. I arrived at university expecting to be writing a lot of programs and was soon struggling with a heavy load of mathematics and proofs. Our introduction to computer programming professor made it clear that that class was the only one where we would be taught to program. Com…
My problem was that the fucking college counselors didn't know either.
When I signed up, I told the lady I wanted to be a computer programmer, and she said "You'll want computer science, then," and that wasn't true. The CS program was only interested in teaching me how to be a CS professor. A few years in I was scouring the course lists for classes on graphics, web, anything with a GUI even, and there was nothing. It was 100% command line C++, and they didn't even bother teaching us about IDEs and debuggers. Just Telnet, vi, g++.
It was like taking a pure math degree to become an architect.
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> Mathematicians are very much in davis/hersh "what is mathematics anyway" This reminds me of getting my CS degree in the early 2000s, then slowly realizing that my comp-sci program had taught me lots of interesting things about how computers and programs work, and essentially nothing about how to write code for a living. Also reminds me of playing Dominion (the card game) with another student, me saying "Okay, I've…
At the end of the day, writing code is not difficult. Understanding what it's actually doing is the hard part. Moreover, understanding how to write code that reasons about code (and higher) is when you start to need computer science, or really just axiomatic systems (math).
That sounds nice in the abstract, but in practice it's slow going trying to do web dev when your experience is nothing but command line C++.
Yes we should start my six year old with group theory. When we go to the farmer's market I can ask him under what transformations is an apple invariant, and then pay for it by having him solve a Rubiks cube.
You joke, but it's become a thing for kids to do Rubik's cube. I think it's great for algorithmic thinking. My kid has a whole bunch of classmates who spend their time cubing, going from one algo to a more advanced one, discussing with their friends.
I learned about commutators from a guy on the front row who was really good at Rubik's cubes. Concrete examples relatable to your hobbies are great.
I also tried to pay for my lunch by commutating, but the lunch lady wouldn't have it.