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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Dalvoron@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzApplications
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    2 months ago

    I have seen 1 called a trivial factor, but I have never seen it excluded entirely from a factor list: perhaps it’s a cultural thing like how 0 is/isn’t a natural number depending on where you are from.

    On further research it seems like my earlier critique about requiring exactly two prime factors is a little off in any case, as it would exclude e.g. 4 (which only has one prime factor). It seems like semi primes must be a product of exactly two prime numbers so I think any definition based on number of factors is doomed to over- or under- define these semi primes as they could have either three or four factors.







  • Oh I’ll admit I’m wrong either way, but yes I do not like my authority to be challenged. It makes the class significantly harder to manage when students feel like it’s OK to dunk on me at any opportunity and provides a bad environment for learning. My preference would be respect, but I will settle for being treated with respect. If a student won’t offer it to me with their questions, then I won’t offer it to them with my response. But I will always admit they are correct (if they are).

    Authority that cannot be challenged is authority that cannot be respected. Authority must continually earn the respect of its constituents, or it will lose its power over them.

    I sort of agree with this. In a classroom, you can challenge me, my knowledge, my abilities. I like to think I earn the respect of my students with all of these, as well as my compassion, my fairness, my humour.

    The reality is that I am an authority however. I wrote the assignments and the exam and I mark them too, and I do it all in accordance with the state-mandated curriculum. If they “know” something because they read about it elsewhere, I should be treated as a equally valid source of information because I am. I know the curriculum inside and out. They dont “need me to admit that I was incorrect, and move forward with the correct information”, they need me to tell them why the thing they “know” is not the thing I’m teaching them. I offer that I was incorrect out of humility, not necessity.






  • I teach maths and one of the analogies is use is watching a film of someone walking forwards and backwards. If you play the film forwards (multiplying by positive), you can see the person walking forwards and backwards as normal. If you play the film backwards (multiplying by negative) you see the opposite. So multiplying by negative reverses whatever was happening before. Hard to put into words but the visuals (hopefully) seem to explain it well enough.



  • My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.




  • There is an addendum to his plan that might have made it make sense. If he had said something like “I’m giving the universe the chance to make better decisions”, suddenly having half as many people means (probably a little more than) half resource consumption, half the carbon emission, and more time to figure out and implement solutions to these problems. I’m not sure how the housing crisis would pan out, I expect it would get worse. It also makes more sense that he destroys the stones after “I gave the universe its chance, now the ball is in its court”.

    This also solves the doubling resource problem. His motives are to pressure people to change their ways. Giving them more stuff might cut hunger, but you’ll just have that hunger again in 50 years and we’d probably increase carbon output to boot, and destroy more environment to get these doubled resources.

    I don’t know enough about the stones to say whether “infinite resources” or whatever cheat code would have worked, but they certainly could have dropped a line that it wasn’t possible, or that it would cause more problems than it solved (how does chemistry even work in this universe? If nothing ever gets used in reactions then the chemistry that makes our bodies work is borked)

    But anyway, as the Russos did not put this line in, the premise was flawed