Tag: Real world math
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Not alone!
Clothing disobeys physics. It sticks when it should slide, slides when it should stick, drops when it should stay up, stays up when gravity should pull it down. When I try to arrange sheets and blankets at night, they turn into a topologically impossible Mobius strip or Klein bottle. I’m not alone! This frustration is…
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Y no Trig?
Occasionally I wonder why math is so scantily represented in street names. Integers are everywhere, and some addresses have 1/2 or rarely 1/4 and 3/4. (Those quarters seem to be a specialty of Los Angeles bungalow courts.) There are only a few decimal street names applied to county roads. For instance, T.5 Road is halfway…
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Y not Decistars?
Seen at Substack, the OnlyFans for readers: Goodreads finally has half stars! About time! They also added quarter stars. I am curious, do you like to rate in halves and quarters? Web people are ferociously metric. If you dare to mention inches or pounds, you’ll be consigned to Primitive Murkan Hell, a horrible neanderthal cave…
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Carrots as teachers
Carrots trigger productive thoughts. Bugs Bunny was right. Earlier I noticed that carrots in a bowl in the fridge were frosty though the ambient temp in the fridge was 38. The same thing happens to surfaces like roofs when the outside ambient is around 40. This forced me to recognize that ambient, like all statistics,…
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Excel dreams the impossible dream
Microsoft proudly announces that Excel can now accept a group of values or things in one cell. For instance you might want to show an item and its price, or a name and address. Congrats! You’ve accomplished the dream of every paper and ink bookkeeper! Those 1812 bookkeepers for the Lewis and Clark crew only…
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IRCs not quite dead.
I thought IRCs were phased out in 2013 but apparently the PO delayed the deadline until the end of this year. This Reddit item shows a ticket for 525 one-cent coupons and 7 “Jimmy Carter” stamps at 82 cents each. (The Carter stamps are new, not related to IRCs.) Some of the USPS employees at…
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There must be a better way
Maps based on census data use counties as the dividing lines. This religious belief map is typical. Counties are ENTIRELY DIFFERENT UNITS west and east of the Dry Line. East of the line, counties are small and about the same size, so they’re practical units for illustrating poverty or religion or voting. You can see…
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Ranch and range reprint
Something reminded me of the word ranch. Decided to look up the etymology, since it doesn’t sound like other terms for land. It comes from the French military se ranger, meaning to pitch camp or set up a location, related to arrange. Range, of course, has dozens of meanings in math, biology and surveying. The…
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Plutonism vs Platonism
20 years ago the platonists kicked Pluto out of the planetary pantheon. They’re still defending the ruinous decision, still oblivious to the need for trust and communication. = = = = = START ASSHOLE: For people who absorbed that version of the solar system as children, the 2006 decision required replacing something that had been…
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Alligator / 0
The AI demons keep preaching about TheSingularityTM. They’re inverting the meaning to attract satanic investors. In math a singularity is a point on a graph where you can’t figure an answer. The result is heading toward infinity, or toward 0/0, or some other value that can’t be calculated or handled or conceived. When a real…
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Simple measuring tool
The current fad of AI quibbling strongly resembles Walker Percy’s smartphone apocalypse in ‘Love in the Ruins’, the perfect dystopia for our times, written in 1971. The devil invents a little hand-carried imaginator that can see into everyone’s head. He distributes a bunch of them for free, then watches the accusations turn into a war.…
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Rights and the Moore method
Last month I lambasted the Moore Method of math teaching, after seeing that my old calc teacher was famous for advocating it. The Moore Method was just a stricter version of normal American math teaching. It focused SOLELY on axioms and theorems while fiercely rejecting any hint of real world applications. Today somebody is praising…
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Can’t be Prime Day!
Somebody was saying that today is Prime Day, and recommending that people should celebrate Anti-Prime Day instead. First thought: Huh? Today isn’t Prime Day. There aren’t any Prime Days this year. The last Prime Day was 11/29/23. Today would be a generic Anti-Prime Day, but not the best. The best recent Anti-Prime Day was 9/16/25.…
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Creating vs destroying value
Rehashed and condensed from 2023. = = = = = While feebly attempting to “think” about REAL VALUE vs FAKE VALUE in banking, I noticed a basic fact. So far I can’t find any mention of this basic fact in online discussions of the subject, but the word combinations are probably not hitting the right…
