Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment What should really be of interest here (Score 1) 40

What should be of interest to slashdotters isn't the irony of someone associated with cryptography losing their private key, but that there exists an open source system to securely allow voting and also to absolutely verify that the vote was counted. All while still maintaining anonymity. Barring the issue of losing private keys on the part of those administering the vote, this sort of system is very interesting, and really could be used to promote voter engagement and democracy. I had heard of it before, but kind of forgot about it.

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 250

Thus 5x3 becomes 5x5x5 or 3x3x3x3x3 instead of "STFU and memorize your times tables."

I'm fine with the repeated addition. My objection is the OR in your statement. Apparently not. The question was 5x3 and the kid wrote 5+5+5=15 and got marked wrong with no explanation because the teacher wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15. So I guess that you would have had a 50% chance of being marked wrong on a 2nd grade arithmatic worksheet as well, as absurd as that is. Correct answer notwithstanding.

BTW, that's not at all new. We covered multiplication that way in the 3rd grade back in 1975. Memorizing the table was just to make it quicker. I quickly "discovered" the commutative property while looking at the multiplication table and cut my memorization load in half. The part that confused the father was why is 5x3 = 5+5+5=15 "wrong".

As for 37+55, we decomposed that in the '70s as well, but I soon decided the easier decomposition was 37+55= 87+5 = 90+2=92. So I would say that meme was just someone wanting to complain. Of course the "old way" ends up in 30+50+10+2 anyway.

Shut up and memorize was not in practice during the education of the parents of today's students.

Comment Re:Good use. (Score 1) 74

Not anything. Especially when dealing with nuclear. There are some parts that once degraded cannot be safely replaced. For example, the containment unit. And others where making a new one makes more economic sense than replacing even when technically possible. What state this plant is in I have no idea, and am not qualified to have an opinion on. I just hope experts are making the decision based on economics and power requirements and not politics.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 302

Math is hard.

If a substantial percentage of the population is vaccinated, the likelihood of being exposed to measles is very low, so the 3% who might contract it if exposed have a good chance of not being exposed. This also doesn't account for whether the severity of the infection will be different for those 3% if they have been vaccinated.

Comment How cute. (Score 2) 23

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 250

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

Comment Re: Case in point (Score 1) 209

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

Comment Re:Imagine if the COVID vaccine cultists (Score 3, Insightful) 302

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Slashdot Top Deals

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.

Working...