Well it's not a Wikipedia page, but good try. Further, Xkcd is fantastic in general but we cannot expect every single one of them to appeal to everyone, even angry commenters on Lemmy
I have some sort of learning disability when it comes to math. I barely passed math classes in high school. I had one required math class in college, took the "anyone can pass this class" one and still got a C.
So basically, once math is involved, it's all magic to me.
I wonder if I have this. Edit: no I don't think I do.
One of the symptoms of ADHD, as I understand it, is difficulties with symbol decoding (I think that is what it is called). I think it may be related to poor working memory. Say you want to decode a substitution cypher. With ADHD you have to keep referring back to the decoding chart more often than those without. (I took a test on this as part of my diagnosis and I sucked at it).
I think maybe that affects understanding equations with all the symbols and Greek letters and such?
That may be my problem. My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and although I've never gotten an official diagnosis, her symptoms are pretty similar to my experiences, so it's entirely possible I have ADHD and this is an ADHD thing.
ADHD is very heritable, almost as much as height. So it is pretty likely, indeed.
PS: I can grasp math concepts if explained in certain ways. I had to take a below grade level math class in middle school and needed a tutor for algebra. I blame the teachers lol. I somehow managed to get through all the math in my engineering degree (wtf was I thinking?).
Later on in life I struggled to understand Kalman filters until an online course explained it in a really accessible way, and related it to another class that was well taught on Bayesian statistics. It all clicked. But if I stare at typical math textbooks, it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. It just doesn't sink in.
I felt the same way until I had to take a statistics class for a second bachelors I'm working on as a middle aged person. The class was "statistics for non STEM majors" and the extremely chill, aging surfer dude prof approached it like we were all easily spooked horses and math was a snake.
He didn't even tell us when we took our midterm, he told us it was a quiz that he was offering lots of extra tutoring sessions for. He didn't tell us until weeks later when someone asked when the midterm would be. He really went out of his way to explain down to the roots of each equation about how and why it works.
By the end of it I didn't feel like I was missing the part of my brain that can do math anymore.
A lot of math involves just moving things around until the problem is easier. It's just a bunch of tricks that work for relatively simple reasons. But you just memorize them to make it easier.
Statistics is more like magic than other kinds of math. Like when you have more than 30 random unbiased selections from a population you can start guessing at the composition of the whole, no matter how large it is. The explanations require someone who really knows what's going on.
Then you have modern LLMs that use statistics to produce the next word in a sentence. They can be so complex the designers don't really know why they do what they do. It's just trial and error testing the outcomes.
Biology bs required 5 units of physics, physics was 3+1 for the lab. I haaaaate physics, love my chemistry, I'm pretty bad at higher math, physics just tries to be as tricky as possible while hiding behind the shroud of "this is how it works in life". They made a "physics for biologists"class which was as much practical application of physics as they could put into a 1 unit 1 night per week course. I learned more, better, talking point physics in that class than any other.
Finals week was an optional "sasquatch" lecture that was open to anyone we wanted to bring, it was attended by more people than were actually in the class.
We learned how drag coefficients worked, how a great white child swim from California to Japan in 1 bite of food, how a blue whale and a bacteria both use the same amount of energy to move a distance. How terminal velocity means you can't drop a mouse to it's death. The optics of eyes.. greatest physics course ever.
They skip leap years every now and then. And then skip the skip. Etc. The rotation of the earth around the sun and the spin of the earth on its axis simply don't line up into a nice number.
Oh okay. Yeah I only have that rule of "every 4 years" in my head. I did some other programming exercise way back where we had some other rule, but I was thinking that it would end up being the same.
The boring answer is that in physics a year is just defined as the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun, they don't care about calendars and leap years
After that, he says that energetic stellar-sized microwaves could also be the cause, though this is unlikely since microwaves typically are not stellar-sized and they do not float in space [citation needed].
I don't know why but that [citation needed] caught me so off guard and made me laugh far too much
I'm fairly sure microwaves float in space. I don't think there are completely different laws of physics, just for microwaves. A microwave in a bistro however...
If you want to get pedantic, as far as photons are concerned, photons don't exist. At C time dilation hits infinity, while length contraction approaches zero. Therefore photons travel zero distance and experience zero time. Therefore, from a photon's perspective, they don't exist!
The combination of the infinite improbability drive leaking, and the SEP (somebody else's problem) field is amazing. It provides an in-universe explanation for the various weird and unlikely things that happen.
Nice. There's lots of areas I've lived where the locals drop specific consonants from the names of places. So anyone who actually pronounces the place name "correctly" is immediately recognized as new to town.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you. Have you ever seen a Shoggoth? They're horrific and just because they're protoplasmic beings doesn't mean their mispronunciation of English should be celebrated.
Like the other reply said, it's all over the place in Australia. You can easily tell a tourist—especially an American tourist—because they'll say "can-bair-a" instead of "can-bruh".
It's not unusual in the UK, too. Worcester is Wost-er, Magdalen(e) is mawd-lin, and Leicester is lester.
OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.
Worcester is famous even outside the UK because of Worcestershire sauce (pronounced "woster-shuh" sauce), the condiment named after the region. And because the name is on the bottle, it's easy for people to remember.
We have a Bradenton nearby which gets shortened to branton (pronounced like brain-nton). Gotta have the long A or else you'll accidently send someone half an hour away to Brandon.
Oh that’s just great. Two similar place names like that, and they also happen to be relatively close to each other. I can see how that could cause some confusion.
Similarly, Kuhmo and Kuhmoinen (both in Finland) are about 446 km apart, but you can easily avoid the confusion as long as you know roughly which part of the country you’re talking about.
There’s also Helsingborg (town in Sweden) and Helsinfors (swedish name for the capital of Finland). What could go wrong.
Ice bergs. They are kinda round (less so with larger ones) and they are freshwater so entirely edible. According to the graph the object would taste "ok" which is a perfectly adequate description of drinking water.
Tomato soup in a bread bowl, with cheese. Not quiche, the filling isn't egg-based.
It's delicious. And since the Italians call just about any round bread with toppings pizza (e.g. Bartolomeo Scappi's pizza was cake with powdered sugar & saffron toppings) it's pizza. As is New England clam chowder in a bread bowl!
Not at all, they are probably talking about horrible Dayton Style pizza. For when you want pizza but it needs to be thin, unsatisfying, greasy, and difficult to eat.
Hard to believe but they do. Note the blackened edges to make it even worse. It isn't a nice char like you get with Neapolitan, or even the seared cheese you get with a good Detroit or Pan, it's just burnt.
There are many American pizzas that are great, Chicago deep dish, NY, Detroit, on and on, Dayton style is not one of them.
People who eat Dayton-style pizza are like the city of Dayton itself—smelly inside and bereft of true purpose. Those of us in the US who haven't been so psychically damaged wouldn't eat that shit.
(I'm only just learning about the disgusting gutter pizza. I don't like Dayton because my last company was slowly destroyed over several years by a company that was headquartered in Dayton. I associate the city with the asshole who was CEO. Fuck you, Chris! I've heard Dayton is, at worst, not great, so take my comment as the joke it is.)
The only correct way to cut (not too gigantic) round pizza is into six parts so you get equilateral triangles (well, modulo a curved section) which is ideal for holding.
Home-made pizza rarely if ever is round, though, in which you probably don't want to go for squares but eyeball some appropriately-sized rectangles.
Thanks. I could not for the life of me understand the last panel because I kept misreading it as "frustratingly looking up at the clouds..." and the bit that followed just didn't make sense lol.
Just got back from niagra and while it was still amazing to witness and we got glimpses of the totality for about 7 seconds, still disappointed I didn't get a better view. Xkcd connected with me so much as I literally started looking up weather, room rates, etc for Sydney in 2028 last night.
My original plans were to travel to Niagara Falls. That seemed like the coolest place there would be totality at.
I am so glad I (due to circumstances I neither thought nor hoped would happen) am typing this message from Mexico City Airport instead while waiting for boarding to start for my flight back to Europe. It was perfectly sunny where I watched it.
Glad you got a good view! Now that I've experienced it with limited view but a really cool darkness, I'm ready to prep for a trip I hope gives a much better view in a few years!
It reminds me of baseball game stats ... "he's hitting 500 on Tuesday nights against the Yankees during a full moon and his twin brother has just finished a large cheese pizza"
As a middle ground kind of guy, I would like to pre-emptively state that a lot of us don't actually think the answer is always the middle ground between two stances. It's just that we're more likely to propose a middle ground solution because we evaluate the plausibility of both stances in a more balanced way (as opposed to existing-stance-holders who are prone to bias towards their own stance.) When the two seem roughly equal in plausibility (which happens fairly often, otherwise the argument would be more one-sided,) that's an indication to evaluate the middle ground as well.
Middle ground folks are often caricaturized as wanting to find the middle ground between an objectively sensible point A and a radically wrong point B, when the spectrum of opinions is sort of like [ - - - - - A - | - - - - - - B ]. In that caricature, we're looking for a middle ground at point C [ - - - - - A - | - - C - - - B ], when in actuality we're evaluating (and not automatically accepting) something two or three steps closer to A. In some such cases, A might already be the most sensible middle ground.
I'm not scared of conflict, I'm averse to needless conflict. I may get involved in a conflict for the purpose of breaking it up, or I may initiate a conflict for a good cause such as combating hatred and averting future conflicts - if I feel it'd be productive.
Middle implies middle. If you are leaning towards a side, then you're side-leaning. You can't have your cake and eat it too, centrist, that's what everyone makes fun of ya'll for.
Somewhere in the middle means it doesn't have to be dead center - it just has be between the two extremes and not exactly one of the extremes. To put it in numbers, somewhere in the middle between 0 and 1 is not just 0.5. It can also be 0.4. Or 0.7. Or 0.00000000001.
It's an abstraction of a caricature I've seen. Point A was civil rights, point B was the KKK, and the middle ground guy was like "what if we only kill half of Black people?"
If i have a very plain boring hamburger. Bun cheese patty bun, are the cheese and patty in the middle? Middle doesnt always mean center, center doesnt always mean exactly in the center between 2 points either because thats why the term dead center exists
This is also true. I like to evaluate solutions outside the presented dichotomy in general, and that often means outside the line between them, but I didn't want to complicate my initial explanation that much.
I'm actually not as neutral as I may seem. There are quite a few cases where I hold more extreme opinions, but as a general trend, I average somewhere around the middle.
Ok, but let's realize that you're not necessarily the one who's defining the spectrum of options; or put another way, there's not an objective spectrum of options.
For instance, in the case of Israel and Gaza, you could define the leftmost bracket as "give Israel to the Palestinians" or "the second-state solution" or just "a cease-fire," and likewise the rightmost bracket could be "let Israel keep the war going but let civilians out through Egypt" through "Israeli settlement of Gaza" all the way up to "glass Gaza." Depending on who's talking, and how extreme each person is in the discussion, the most humane solution might not be in the middle at all.
I'm not seeing a conflict here. The point I'm making is that the middle ground is not necessarily in the middle of any two given opinions, because the spectrum is wider than that. And also that the middle is not necessarily the best, just worth evaluating.
It's not a conflict. What I'm trying to say is that what people hear when you say you want to "evaluate the middle option" is entirely dependent upon the options presented in the argument, which is why the caricature is so common.
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