I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.

  • 8 Posts
  • 339 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2020

help-circle
  • If either party actually disagreed on principle, we would have heard someone criticize the war on principle and not on breaking procedural norms or not planning the war well enough. Virtually every critique I have seen from elected officials, at least before this explicitly genocidal statement here, is some form of those two. “This war was poorly planned” is only a sidenote observation from someone actually opposed to a war of aggression. It’s the most milquetoast opposition you can give to claim you were always against it when things go wrong. No way in hell am I going to accept that they were powerless to stop him when no one will even clearly lay out the actual reasons why this is wrong.

    We know that actions speak louder than words, but if we want to give anyone else in our government the benefit of the doubt we’re gonna have to figure out what comes next after words.











  • I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

    I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

    I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.






  • I always found it overwhelming to get started on big messes, so cleaning everything up immediately would get around my executive dysfunction. When I got in a relationship with someone whose approach was to be a human hurricane and then deep clean every once in a while it was a culture shock and it took years of me being a bad partner to become more responsible. I didn’t really understand the executive dysfunction so I self-loathed over it.



  • Christian@lemmy.mltoMathematics@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I was thinking to maybe connect programming with math but I don’t know how.

    Try reading about the computer science topics that basically are pure mathematics. Read about automata (very simple models for computers) or about computability theory (which asks what problems are literally impossible for computers to solve, even with unlimited time and memory). There won’t be too many numbers or equations involved in getting your feet wet with these topics.

    Let’s say you have a keyboard with only three letters: ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. That’s our “alphabet”, it has just three letters in it. Let’s plug this keyboard into a monitor that’s really broken, actually all that works is one pixel that has four possible color options. We can have our machine start at white when you press the power button to turn it on, and when you hit black it shuts down. We could still teach a kid some basic programming ideas with this limited setup - If we’re on white and press ‘X’, change the color to green. If we’re on white and press ‘Y’, change the color to blue. Maybe pressing ‘Z’ from blue will get you back to white, but pressing ‘X’ will take you to black. Maybe some other rules too. This simple machine is called a finite automaton.

    What “words” (strings) can we type in after powering on to shut the computer down? From what I’ve laid out so far, we power on to white, can press Y to go to blue and then X to go to black. “YX” is a string that works here. We could also do “YZYX” or “YZYZYX”. The set of all strings that will power down our machine from boot are called its “language”.

    An automata theory question might ask if we can write a program on this machine that has both words “XYZ” and “XYX” in its language, but not “ZZZ”.

    If you’ve tried read this and have trouble following, that’s because math is hard! (and totally not because I can’t explain for shit.) If you’ve tried to read this and don’t feel like it’s hopeless to learn, that’s probably because you’re not even seeing this as math at all. (Theoretical questions like this are absolutely math problems.) If you’ve read this and have already figured out an answer to the question I posed in the last paragraph, then your problem with learning math definitely isn’t that you’re hopelessly bad, so we’ll have to troubleshoot elsewhere.

    If you learn these subjects you’ll eventually need the groundwork from more basic mathematics, but you’ll have some motivation for why they might be needed.

    I started writing this intending to tag on a rant about how math being used as a gatekeeper in schooling poisons everyone’s idea of what math actually is and makes a ton of people wrongly feel hopeless, but this comment is long enough as it is.