Discoholic đȘ©
Peter Solarz
One Nice Bug Per Day
Aqua Utopiaïœæ”·ăźćșă§èšæ¶ă玥ă
NASA
pixel skylines
Noah Kahan
hello vonnie
h
wallacepolsom
blake kathryn
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
tumblr dot com
â
d e v o n
untitled
art blog(derogatory)
#extradirty
oozey mess
No title available
seen from Taiwan
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Poland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Jordan
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@nyarlethotepscat
there are lots of dogs that are people weight but theyre quadrupedal so they seem smaller than people. imagine if there was a dog-size domesticated bipedal animal. guy-sized creature
so youâre saying ... we should domesticate kangarooos?
the (so called) golden ratio Ï has this property that it is the "most irrational" number, in the sense that its sequence of best rational approximants diminishes slowest of all real numbers (tied with the golden ratio + integers)
this is to say that like, ok, we're considering for some number α rationals p/q such that |α-p/q| is small relative to the denominator q; i.e. we're trying to find p and q co-prime minimizing |αq-p|, right
you can consider the sequence of better and better approximants |αqâ-pâ| > |αqâ - pâ| > |αqâ - pâ| > ... that starts with like qâ = 1 and pâ = floor(α), and it turns out that the α for which this sequence diminishes the slowest is Ï
so, since musical notes are consonant when the ratio of their frequencies is close to a rational number, i have this strong suspicion that notes whose ratio of frequencies is Ï are the most dissonant possible
so in addition to being kind of ugly when used as a ratio for a rectangle, it's also probably like the most dissonant note possible
pretty in the context of a pentagon though
Someone created a musical scale based on the golden ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/833_cents_scale this is an excellent practical joke IMO -- draw in all the hippy types who like the golden ratio because its pretty and surprise them with Literally The Most Dissonant Scale/Interval
also yes people have written music with this
e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZyAm-D3nlk
the (so called) golden ratio Ï has this property that it is the "most irrational" number, in the sense that its sequence of best rational approximants diminishes slowest of all real numbers (tied with the golden ratio + integers)
this is to say that like, ok, we're considering for some number α rationals p/q such that |α-p/q| is small relative to the denominator q; i.e. we're trying to find p and q co-prime minimizing |αq-p|, right
you can consider the sequence of better and better approximants |αqâ-pâ| > |αqâ - pâ| > |αqâ - pâ| > ... that starts with like qâ = 1 and pâ = floor(α), and it turns out that the α for which this sequence diminishes the slowest is Ï
so, since musical notes are consonant when the ratio of their frequencies is close to a rational number, i have this strong suspicion that notes whose ratio of frequencies is Ï are the most dissonant possible
so in addition to being kind of ugly when used as a ratio for a rectangle, it's also probably like the most dissonant note possible
pretty in the context of a pentagon though
Someone created a musical scale based on the golden ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/833_cents_scale this is an excellent practical joke IMO -- draw in all the hippy types who like the golden ratio because its pretty and surprise them with Literally The Most Dissonant Scale/Interval
They like to cherry pick
the constitution doesnât require the âseparationâ of church and state. What would that even look like? Are churchgoers not allowed to work for the government? The actual text of the constitution includes the establishment cause, which means that the government cannot compel you to join a certain religion, which is not what these people are calling for.
Also, in my experience nowadays the most vehement supports of gun ownership are libertarians who also detest organized religion, in which case this post is not much of a zinger.
I probably shouldnât even bother when this reply is in obvious bad faith, but:
They stacked the Court to overturn Roe because theyâve decided itâs a tenet of Christianity (please note that they did not even pretend to care what any other religious community might think) that life begins at conception.
Thatâs not only what not separating church and state âwould even look like,â itâs what it DOES look like.
i tend to bristle when I encounter a take like that in the OP that attempts a clever gotcha while making no attempt to understand the people it is arguing against. it is hard to argue in good faith when it isnât even clear what the OP is actually claiming. however, the tweet contains a factual error: âseparation of church and stateâ is a slogan by thomas jefferson that does not actually appear in the constitution, perhaps (although I am not an expert in this area) because it is so hard to interpret as a legal statute. what does appear in the constitution is the establishment clause, and if you are going to accuse second-amendment types of being hypocrites, it is important to understand exactly what the constitution says and doesnât say.
to get to your example, i understand that overturning roe is considered a victory for christians in america, and by extension a loss for people who support the right to abortion. but while the alignment of evangelical christianity and pro-life activism is powerful, it is purely incidental to the legal issues at hand. I donât see how more robust notion of the separation of church and state would have changed the outcome of this court case.
the fact is that there are many, many americansânot necessarily a majority, but our legal system is not predicated on simple majoritiesâwho think that abortion is murder, and when a president says that he will appoint pro-life supreme court justices, these people are inclined to vote for him.
the fact that many of the people in this picture are evangelical christians is sociologically interesting, but it is not legally relevant. if you made a law saying that supreme court justices are not allowed to be members of a church, trump would have just found appointees who are pro-life and not church members. the pool of candidates is large, after all.
(obligatory note that I am here to argue on the meta level because I find these conversations interesting, and my object-level beliefs about abortion and gun control are probably in line with the OPâs)
Look, my guy, if you want to defend Christian dominionism because you like debating unpopular things, thatâs cool and you do you, but I donât have to let you do it in replies to me. Iâm cutting this conversation off now and blocking you.
I do my best to engage with people who disagree with me, but if youâre going to pop up and well actually like this itâs just going to irritate me over and over.
Please make your own post about this and argue to your heartâs content and leave me out of it.
(If you actually mean you literally want to know why some people strongly believe the US founders intended separation of church and state I urge you to research it. Itâs a really fascinating topic. Whether or not any of it convinces you, youâre sure to come across the arguments that convinced me.
But Iâm not a textbook, and I think Christian dominionists overlap to a disturbing but predictable extent with fascists, so, again, do that on your own blog, please.)
I come from a state that notably tried to make Theodemocracy a thing, so our state constitution is a little more exacting, and to me it mostly gets to the core of the idea of separation of church and state:
âThe State shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of public trust or for any vote at any election; nor shall any person be incompetent as a witness or juror on account of religious belief or the absence thereof. There shall be no union of Church and State, nor shall any church dominate the State or interfere with its functions. No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for the support of any ecclesiastical establishment.â
How well Utahâs legislation follows this is definitely worthy of scrutiny, but the idea that a church should not dominate a government, interfere with its functioning, and government resources should not go to religious causes is a pretty good start.
Thatâs great. Maybe the rest of us should add it, since some people apparently need it spelled out to that degree, and since some people are currently and very unfortunately making whole political careers out of trying to shoehorn theocracy back in any way they can.
... ok on a meta level it seems weird to distinguish religious moral beliefs from other kinds of moral beliefs given that religion isnât really a natural category and e.g âis a fetus a personâ sort of has to bear on your views on abortion somehoe on an object level I tend to get kind of irritated with the meta level âwell, these peopleâs behavior/voting makes perfect sense when you consider that they believe $DUMBSHIT, why donât you have some empathyâ thing. itâs good to have accurate beliefs about why other people do what they do but at the end of the day they shouldnât believe $DUMBSHIT
âchaserâ as a term of endearment
shirt that has ally crossed out and chaser written under it
âchaserâ needs to go through the same reclamation as âsimpâ did
Iâm starting to notice a disturbing trend among todayâs adults of claims to outstanding mental health on what turn out on inspection to be pretty tenuous and caveated grounds (absence of recurring vivid waking hallucinations, production of novel speech past defined developmental age thresholds and under conditions of heightened social stimulation). This seems to be driven partly by distorted messages from the media as to what mental health entails, and partly out of a perception that these dubious claims will serve to improve or maintain their social standing (âcloutâ) among peers and authority figures.
As a (professionally verified) mentally well individual myself, I find the prospect of being classed with these âsaneâ adults alarming and dishonest. Other observers sometimes give in to the temptation to cheaply dismiss these currents as harmless experimentation in lifestyle and self-image, but this indulgent analysis overlooks the real and pressing concern that they will both degrade the social meaning of clinical terms like âhealthyâ or âdevelopmentally normalâ and promote overuse of finite resources intended in their current incarnations only for consumption by the demonstrably and consistently psychologically well-adjusted (employment, housing, child custody, etc). It is our job to push back against these widespread misconceptions and discourage a culture in which men and women can grow old entertaining and projecting fanciful, damaging psychiatric self-non-diagnoses as formative influences on civic institutions and the public square.
Everyone acknowledges that âtest-taking skillâ is a thing, but people mainly talk about it in the context of trying to minimize that as a factor on aptitude tests. What I think we should also do is have test-taking competitions where they design tests to minimize the applicability of practical aptitude but maximize the relevance of test-taking skill, like multiple choice questions about things nobody could be expected to know, really complicated scoring mechanisms, timeframes that arenât long enough to complete the whole test, and so on
iirc there are studies that purport to show iq increases from adhd meds and my opinion is âi know the âperformance on iq tests is just test-taking skillâ line is overdone but literally what you did here is give people a drug that improved test-taking skill in a population selected for being bad at tests, and you then proceeded to be surprised that it did that, press X to doubtâ
Youâve gotta get aella on the polycule size case
The problem is most people in a polycule don't know the size! So you can't just do a poll. You'd have to like. Do some fucking investigative journalism. Like, you ask someone for the contact info for all their partners, get the contact info of each of THOSE people, and so on. But I imagine lots of ppl would not be willing to share that info. Because they hate science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model
well, the important question in modelling polycule size is determing the correct approximation, but nobody knows what the right model is cuz we dont have any data! like, whats the average degree, whats the *distribution* of degrees. how many edges are "redundant" (i.e. dont expand the size of the polycule), etc etc.
yeah probably this is better than trying to contact friends of friends of friends although like thereâs a term missing here of âhow many poly people are there in the worldâ i guess you also have to define what an edge is which is quite nontrivial
Youâve gotta get aella on the polycule size case
The problem is most people in a polycule don't know the size! So you can't just do a poll. You'd have to like. Do some fucking investigative journalism. Like, you ask someone for the contact info for all their partners, get the contact info of each of THOSE people, and so on. But I imagine lots of ppl would not be willing to share that info. Because they hate science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model
Love him
[ID: an illustrated poem, titled âOde to Spot by Dataâ.Â
The title is written in a large thick font with yellow trim. To the left of the title is a small illustration of Spot himself, a brown striped cat with a light beige chest. Spot is wearing a fishbowl-style space helmet.Â
Below this, the text of the poem reads:
âFelis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, an endothermic quadruped carnivorous by nature; your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, a singular development of cat communications that obviates your basic hedonistic predilection for rhythming stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents; you would not be so agile if you lacked it counterbalance, and when not being utilized to aid in locomotion, it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O Spot, the complex levels of behaviour you display connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array, and though you are not sentient and do not comprehend, I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.â
Centered below the text of the poem is a small yellow heart. Below that is an illustration of Data in a yellow starfleet uniform, holding his cat, Spot, and making eye contact.
to the tune of âmodern major generalâ
sleepyposting masterpost
they missed the best one!
So that person defending âmen are trashâ in one of the reblog chains is a trans woman (which i kinda expected, her username had catgirl in it)
This is a thing I notice a lot, trans women putting men down. Like TERFs do it and I get that, theyâre separatists who donât want to be âcontaminatedâ by being in the presence of the impure.
But trans women? That just seems weird. I would have thought that if everyone assumed all my life I was an x, it would kind of force me to interact with xâes and therefore see that they vary in trashness. Even if I was also very frustrated since Iâm not an x myself.
But no.
Is it the dysphoria (âI donât want to be connected with THAT in any wayâ), or something else?
No zealot like a convert.
Yeah. But itâs politically gauche to think of trans people as converts these days. The narrative now is âwas never their asab,â which makes it less easy to explain.
i tend to be very worried about trans women who do this kind of thing. âwow it sure seems like you have a very healthy relationship to your past selfâ
Yeah! I feel weird when people get really intense about deadnaming and I think itâs for a similar reason. Like I can get why someone doing it to bother you is hurtful, and I can get why even if you donât hate your old name it may make things awkward or even unsafe for someone to slip up in public. But the rage confuses me. I can imagine maybe changing my name if I take t, but I answered to a feminine name for 42 years now. I cannot imagine suddenly hating it so much that Iâd think anyone using it is hateful.
Like the person who disliked being heâd and wanted to teach stupid people girls can look like boys was me! Thatâs not *magically not me* now that I feel non-binary fits better.
Thereâs a lot of stuff like that that makes me worry Iâm not âreallyâ trans âenough.â I donât hate my current life. I just wonder if looking in mirrors would feel a little less hit or miss if I altered my body somewhat and think a deep voice sounds nifty. I donât hate my given name; i hate the assumption that if someone with a name like it cuts their hair or stops wearing dresses (or grows a beard), theyâre depriving the world of âprettiness.â
Like⊠itâs very one narrative fits all, and Iâm pretty sure none of us are actually⊠like that.
(i definitely do have the thing of like âi do not like being thought of as a boyâ but like this is entirely distinct deciding you sucked as a person before you transition i imagine if i had a name that was less androgynous it might bother me more) im pretty âpeople have a lot of different experiences and woot transhumanismâ about being trans enough in general ofc
So that person defending âmen are trashâ in one of the reblog chains is a trans woman (which i kinda expected, her username had catgirl in it)
This is a thing I notice a lot, trans women putting men down. Like TERFs do it and I get that, theyâre separatists who donât want to be âcontaminatedâ by being in the presence of the impure.
But trans women? That just seems weird. I would have thought that if everyone assumed all my life I was an x, it would kind of force me to interact with xâes and therefore see that they vary in trashness. Even if I was also very frustrated since Iâm not an x myself.
But no.
Is it the dysphoria (âI donât want to be connected with THAT in any wayâ), or something else?
No zealot like a convert.
Yeah. But itâs politically gauche to think of trans people as converts these days. The narrative now is âwas never their asab,â which makes it less easy to explain.
i tend to be very worried about trans women who do this kind of thing. âwow it sure seems like you have a very healthy relationship to your past selfâ
link to the relevant section on Wikipedia
Man I hope they cancel standardized testing, any education professional can tell you itâs a bunch of useless horseshit that does nothing except make students and teachers miserable while utterly failing to accurately gauge understanding.
âwhy yall gotta make everything about race?â
because everything is about race. you just upset cause weâre talking about it.Â
Notice how in these stories, it is never addressed how Eugenics Wizards are able to detect what race you are by how you fill out little bubbles about algebra. Even if a dude knew everything there is to know about algebra, a Eugenics Wizard can - through only multiple choice algebra questions - correctly identify that he is exactly the wrong strain of Sino-Tibetan and force him to fail the test.
Of course this leaves the Eugenics Wizardsâ positioning of Asians without explanation, seeing as the Eugenics Wizards in these stories are white. Who knows what unfathomable purpose they work their racist magics towards?
1. It doesnât need to âdetect raceâ, it just needs to consistently favor parental income in a society that engages in centuries of economic discrimination along heavily racial lines. 2. Itâs not like it even correlates to college performance. High School GPA is a much more reliable predictor of college performance than standardized test scores, but that doesnât favor parental income nearly the same degree. 3. Hereâs a well done explanation for how âmodel minoritiesâ are weaponized to support racial hierarchies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg1X1KkVxN4 People bringing up Asian test scores are of course trying to suggest the reason behind test score groupings by race is underlying statistical racial intelligence. This is easily debunkable however as one only need look at Irish-American test scores over the course of the 20th Century to see performance inverse-correlates to economic marginalization, and is not due to underlying genetic factors.
No.
Money just doesnât have that much of an effect on child academic outcomes once you have an opportunity (like a lottery) to separate it from confounding factors.
Just give up, put more money into programs similar to Perry Preschool or Head Start to get the secondary improvements (which we at least have some evidence for), and stop following dumb ideologies that break if someone adds more than two races to your model, requiring you to coin terms like âwhite-adjacentâ and âmodel minority.â
You can have more GPA-based admissions if and only if you demonstrate credibly that you will not hold the rest of us liable for any downstream secondary consequences.
Otherwise there is no reason we should give you anything. During the last 50 years most social engineering efforts have failed, and those that succeeded had only modest success. Your efforts will probably fail, and thereâs no reason I should accept any sort of blame, penalty, or liability when they do.Â
Given that the abstract of that study states that itâs conclusions are relevant to countries with robust social safety nets, can it be generalized to the US?
This is just going to go in circles.
Because very little fucking helps in the United States either, and the question of general social causes is undermined by even that much. It turns out human beings are not infinitely socially malleable!
High school GPAs are relative to the high school, and subject to grade inflation, in a way standardized tests are not. This allows people like @glamourweaver to juice the high school stats (perhaps this will be called âGrading Justiceâ?) by race to admit less qualified applicants, which if not consciously the plan, will later be decided to be the correct course of action, because âmorally, they deserve to have higher grades.â
What will happen if those less qualified applicants get through?
Self-Identified âProgressivesâ will proceed to call college curricula âracistâ and say they need to be dumbed down.
And then, once these less qualified applicants reach the workforce, they will continue to be less qualified, and the secondary consequences of this will also be blamed on âracismâ.
There is no fucking end to it. This is the pattern of behavior since around 2012.
I am not issuing credit anymore. I need payment up front in binding instruments that I am not going to hear about this crap anymore.
No political credit without payment. No political loans without payment. Nothing. I put a lot of trust in Democrats 2008-2016 and they threw it all back in my face.
The terms of the deal have changed. First, we establish that itâs not acceptable to discriminate against me (or people right next to me), that itâs not acceptable to write up false histories blaming me (or people right next to me) for everything that has gone wrong since the 15th century, that itâs not acceptable to blame me for the predictable failures of your social engineering programs, et cetera. Then, and only then, we can talk about changes.
âSocial programs + standardized testingâ has a future, since some social programs have a modest positive effect. Whatever glamourweaver is going on about here does not.
That⊠Doesnât really answer either of my questions.
Now, of course, as someone struggling with serious disability and difficulty acquiring âcompetenceâ in your sense, neither side of the debate here is really about helping me or âpeople adjacent to meâ which informs my perspective here, but also:
That doesnât actually answer the question I asked.
Also, and no offense, but why should anybody talk to you or take your demands seriously, given that you canât, yourself, actually hold up the standards youâre asking from others:
âFirst, we establish that itâs not acceptable to discriminate against me (or people right next to me), that itâs not acceptable to write up false histories blaming me (or people right next to me) for everything that has gone wrong since the 15th century, that itâs not acceptable to blame me for the predictable failures of your social engineering programs, et cetera. Then, and only then, we can talk about changes.â
As an advocate for the SAT, suppose I demand the same from you?
How would you satisfy that demand?
After all, some advocates of SAT are racists, and openly so. Prove to me that nobody on your side will ever do any of the things you listed for people who donât look like you, and maybe then we can talk about whether to keep the SAT, but until then arenât your demands a bit one-sided?
I wish to comment as an outside observer âsure, the SAT is probably less bullshit and less selecting on wealth than many other metrics but this is also very much culture war bullshit that mostly exists because the us has a high school system unlike pretty much every other countryâ
thinking about "why europe". i feel like the more i learn about history, the more it seems that while eurasia was genuinely ahead of the americas and sub saharan africa in terms of like, "development" i guess, europe doesnt really stand out among yknow, levant, india, china, the whole crew. its not *below* them ofc, rome was insanely powerful, but it doesnt stand out. and the divergence happens pretty late, i guess the earliest you could place it is... MAYBE the 15th century? but i feel like actually placing it that far back is pushing it, and its more like 16th or 17th. idk. its confusing, and weird, but seems important. altho i guess its sort of unanswerable sophistry, its not like we can rerun the experiment. but curiosity springs eternal!
@lightbit said:
i was taught the answer was industrialization? societies had developed similar tech previously but i thought it was the particularly carnivorous british way of industrializing that made colonialism possible, but now that ive written that out its awfully britain-centric huh
industrialization is way too late! by the time industrialization got going, europe had already conquered massive portions of the americas. the scramble for africa was certainly powered by industrialization, but thats way way later
There's a fairly substantial debate in economic history about the exact timing of the divergence between Northwest Europe and the other most-developed parts of Eurasia. The âlaterâ argument (under the heading of âthe California Schoolâ) contended that the Yangtze valley was as developed as NW Europe into the 18th century, but I think the arguments for an earlier divergence are generally stronger and seem to have won out.
This is a good general paper on that, which explains the academic back-and-forth, the candidate regions, the nature of the evidence-base, and so on. (For what itâs worth, Robert Allenâs pretty much the best in the business, imo.) Basic conclusion is:
In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers [generally accounted to be a pretty good proxy for economic development] in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in north-western Europe.
I think it helps to remember that European colonialism in the Americas, in Eurasia, and in Africa are very different animals, with Eurasia much more contested and indeterminate than the other two.
In terms of military modernisation, the major discontinuities are machine tools and technical drawing. It was the lack of those that scuppered fairly well-considered Chinese attempts to reverse-engineer British technology in the early 19th century. Itâs very, very difficult to make e.g. a steam engine good enough to put in a paddle-driven warship without those, because that technology requires tolerances far, far smaller than anything youâd expect given experience of preindustrial engineering projects, and having the general idea of what to do doesnât cut it when every millimeter counts. (Source for this last bit is mainly Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age, which takes a fairly granular, encounter-by-encounter, approach to it -- the only way to do it properly, imo.)
(So, in a way, it was representational art that Made the West Great! Guys with Greek statue AVIs validated at last.)
I really am tempted to say âthe printing pressâ here like -iirc even for arabic itâs really cost prohibitive to make a printing press economical, heaven forbid chinese -Iâve seen estimates of the number of books in Medieval Europe to be in the thousands/tens of thousands, which seems to have gone up to the millions shortly after the press was invented? - Iâm not sure how much access to preexisting literature was necessary to invent things, i can believe pretty important? certainly for more abstract/basic science
I really should have a peek at the preexisting literature though
Calvinâs snowmen are breathtaking achievements and I will accept no disputes
If he had drawn nothing else but Calvinâs snowmen for ten solid years, I would have been in Heaven.
We get snow like once a year but on that day, we recognize the great Creator by making unholy figures in his honor.
see the thing that confuses me is surely calvin's snowmen are already saved or damned at the moment of their creation
One time in grade 11 I got every answer correct on a math test and the teacher failed it because I didnât use the method we learned in class and itâs been nearly ten years and Iâm still angry. Iâm going to raise my children to fuck the system
Like the first question I remember perfectly cause it was like âthe square has a length of 14â. The circle has a diameter of 14". Which has the greater area? Prove your answer"
And obviously they wanted us to calculate the area of each and then use the data to prove the answer
But I was like. âObviously the square has a greater area, because the circle could fit inside it and the corners would be emptyâ and I proved it by drawing a scale image like
And it didnât even explicitly SAY to calculate it, so??? Fuck you???? Iâm right?????
My kids are going to sing Rage Against The Machine at recess.
Iâve had two math teachers who would have not given the points, and two who would have given the points because that is a correct way of solving the problem and it would have been on them for not asking to calculate the area with the formula. Actually those two would have been delighted. The other two Iâm not sure.
this isnât really a mathematical proof though? there are a lot of seemingly obvious things in math that are not true, and your approach gives intuition but not any actual argument for why the circle has smaller area than the square. admittedly this is a high school class so you shouldnât need to go into the nitty gritty of proving it, but proof by picture isnât correct in general.
Every single square, circle, sphere, cube, and equilateral triangle you draw is to scale. In this scenario, using a ruler and compass, a drawing absolutely is mathematical proof. I will die on this hill.
is it to scale even if you draw them a little crooked? not being disingenuous im actually really intrigued by this
I did the above drawing on my phone, so it looks like hot trash, but yes, every true square, circle, cube, sphere, or equilateral triangle you draw is a scale replica of any other.
A cube that fits in your hand is a perfect scale replica of a cube that can crush your house. Because itâs a cube. A cube has the same measurement on all lines. Big cube, small cube, whatever.
Because of this, drawing a circle with a diameter of one inch drawn inside a square one inch wide is an accurate, perfect diagram of a a circle with a diameter of 21,685.3298 feet drawn inside a square 21,685.3298 feet wide.
I was right, and Iâm still right, and if the teacher wanted a specific answer, they should have asked a specific question.
God, being a kid sucked ass
You can die on whatever hill you want, and it doesnât make what youâre asserting wrong;Â but it doesnât make your teacher wrong for failing you either. Your teacher was in the right for not giving you any points, because even in the chaotic hell that is standardized testing in public school system, tests are not about answering the question as stated literally correctly, even if youâre taking a childlike approach to literalism, they are about proving that you can broadly apply mathematical methodology to a broad set of problems.
Just as obvious to you that the square is larger the circle of the same given diameter, it should also be obviously that the test was asking you to use mathematical, calculative logic to solve for the area in a way that you could apply to other problems.
Your answer doesnât prove that you knew how to solve for either the area of the square, or the area of the circle. You havenât proved any mathematical skill at all; all youâve proved is your spatial reasoning, which is not what is being tried.
Assuming your memory of the test is literal, you havenât even proved which has the âGreater Areaâ, because you havenât proved either of them has any Area at all; all youâve gone is âshrug, this oneâs bigger. I donât know the area and Iâm not bothered to tryâ.
I understand what youâre going for, but this really isnât an example of a teacher being overly picky or literal, itâs a teacher that is trying to make sure you actually learn the subject matter and is more concerned with ensuring that you actually have the reasoning to solve problems in real life than you are with being âtechnically correct.â
Yeah, I donât know if people really understand that public school teachers are required to teach standards. We donât just give assignments and tests for no reason, if weâre doing our job. Most of the things we assign are trying to teach toward a standard and assessments specifically are assessing to see if you have met the standard after being taught. A test is testing you on the content that you learned. My guess is you did multiple problems like this before you saw this in a test. You learned the mathematical concepts and formulas to use. By the time you saw this question, you should be thinking of the steps you learned to do the problem. If not, it shows that you didnât learn the content.
Can this type of really linear assessment of math be criticized? Sure. Nowadays itâs more common to teach math in a less linear and a more open-ended way where, at the beginning of a unit, youâd be given a question like this and encouraged to solve it in whatever way you could, up to and including this kind of answer. Open-ended problems like this can help a student explore and understand a math concept far more deeply and more intuitivelyâand can deepen their powers of reasoning. However, at a certain point, you do need to learn mathematical concepts and formulas, such as area and solving for area. If the test is assessing you on those concepts and you donât demonstrate those concepts, then a teacher should not pass you because you arenât demonstrating mastery of the content.
Also, part of math, I hate to say this, is understanding what a question is asking for - like literally translating word problems into math problems. The fact you didnât do that shows a lack of mastery of math content. Terms like âareaâ and âfind the areaâ are supposed to be translated into equations.
Again, nowadays there are more unique approaches to assessment - such as allowing students to demonstrate knowledge in less traditional ways. But at the end of the day if a student does not demonstrate that they know what area is or how to solve for it, that would be pretty irresponsible of a teacher to pass a student.
I think Iâm on team
- students can prove things any way they goddam please, if thereâs a cheesy solution like this itâs on the person who designed the test.
in general I think banning this sort of thing discourages intuition/ an understanding of whats actually being asked and overencourages a mindless algorithmic approach.
- understanding that proving A >B does not require you to compute the values of A or B shows a genuine level of mathematical insight, learning to read the mind of whoever set the test might reflect a useful skill but has nothing to do with how math actually works. - taking things literally and being precise about what you want to be shown has a lot to do with how math actually works
- drawing a picture is not a proof; Iâm not sure whether the techniques to prove it rigorously would be taught at this grade level though and Iâd be inclined to be lenient
