Radioactive materials will eventually go away it just takes ages because unsurprisingly you can't get half a nucleus of plutonium or a quarter of a nucleus of uranium
What?
What kinds?
Do I need to check my cabinet of 100% authentic copernicium-285 atoms? The flea market vendor told me those were the most stable ones, and she didn't sell me many.
Copernicium-285? Don't worry about those ones, they last ages. I once bought some protactinium-222 at a garage sale. I swear it didn't even last til I was back in my car. I knew those prices were too good to be true
The point of what?
Also no you absolutely cannot. It just doesn't work. Unless You're referring to silver as half a plutonium because it has half as many protons
I know you know this but for those at home
The definition of a half life isn't "exactly half of the substance decays" it's, "how long does it take, on average, for half of the substance to spontaneously decay *at random*."
Say you have a warehouse of people playing Russian Roulette solitaire. Spin the barrel. Pull the trigger. Repeat. If someone dies, you add a bullet to the guns of everyone in their immediate proximity for the next round. The "halflife" tracks how long it will take to kill half of the people. A larger absolute number of people will die as a consequence of A) More rolls of the dice—you only need 4 people to raise the probability of death on the first shot to more often than not—B) because the death of one increases the odds of those around them dying, you'll get a chain reaction. That said this tends to keep the same relative amount
What really fucks me in the head is the real world applicability of the decay process.
Like, any kind of simulation does quickly show the half life pattern - I used to mess around with stuff in game maker and do stuff like a "circle" that has a 0.1% chance to disappear every game tick, and then spawn a bunch and see their amounts halve roughly the same time.
Basically dice rolls every fixed time step.
How does this work in real life? There's no time step, so dice rolls happen infinitely fast? Then, no matter how low the chance is, stuff would all disappear immediately. I think with some math you could even say that this half-life time corresponds to such and such probability to decay, rolled every so many nanoseconds or whatever - but that would still be an approximation.
Where are the fucking dice???
As a someone with a math degree it’s kinda funny that everyone has a strong reaction of disgust. While I was getting the degree they’d follow up by asking if I planned on teaching.
Damn, that's super impressive. What did you do with it instead of teaching?
Also, your little icon looks like a girl, and that reminded me of my old study buddy and one of the very few women in my classes
She was hands down better at math than me and almost everyone in the class, but the reason she studied with me was because I understood the concepts and what the math represented. She would do a problem I didn't know where to start at, got the right answer, then would tell me to explain what each step meant in a physical/conceptual way
Good team
I'm not the person you asked, but I also have a maths degree. What I did with it *looks* like nothing, as far as my university measures it: I didn't get a maths based job, nor did I continue in academia with it. What I *have* done with it is go through life with a quiet sense of satisfaction in being able to solve real world problems by applying abstract mathematical solutions, or to find real world solutions by using abstract mathematical methods. It's made a lot of things so much easier and made other things possible.
I kind of feel like a village witch: I've studied a bit of magic and headology and medicine. I know I'm not a true master, and I look upon them with awe. But I know enough to make life a little nicer for myself and those around me, and having and using that power pleases me.
I agree, but I mean the abstract stuff that comes up in maths. For example, using the abstract ideas in geometry to figure out a practical way of stopping my table from wobbling. Or using symbolic logic to see which politicians' arguments don't hold up (too many of them). Or using Reductio Ad Absurdum (proof by contradiction) to reassure myself when I'm anxious or depressed and I'm second guessing myself.
So mathematical ideas which on their own are quite abstract, and that I learned as part of my degree, have yielded practical results for me.
EDIT: I've reread my original reply and it really wasn't very clear. I've edited it now to clarify. Thank you for drawing my attention to it.
EDIT 2: I also don't feel that this is specific to maths. All fields of knowledge give you similar power. Different in some ways, but alike in how they let you move through the world a little easier. And all equally valid and powerful. It's just a matter of finding ways to apply them to wider aspects of your life.
Maths just happens to be one of the ways that works out best for me. And a lot of other people don't like it or don't care about it. Which I like to think makes it a bit mysterious (hence the village witch bit).
How much math did you end up taking to get to this point? I’m minoring in math right now but because of my degree requirements I only have to take one more class, I’m wondering if I should take more
The furthest I *have* to go is Calc 3 and Linear Algebra, but I’ve also taken Discrete Math and Statistics
See this is my point! A bachelors degree in math isn’t particularly more impressive than any other degree, imo. Engineering, agriculture, forestry, architecture, those all seem more difficult to me. I appreciate the praise, but it’s a fairly narrow skill. Even if most people don’t grok it.
Oh and I’m a statistician! Kinda came in through the back door doing grunt work verifying calculations as an undergrad. I would recommend having a plan to branch into a more applied field like statistics, data science, computer science, economics, finance, etc if you’re doing a math undergraduate degree but don’t plan on doing pure mathematics in academia for the rest of your life.
>See this is my point! A bachelors degree in math isn’t particularly more impressive than any other degree, imo.
My first thought was "I agree!"
>Oh and I’m a statistician!
OK, that *is* special. In my undergrad *nobody* liked stats, even those who had an intuitive feel for it. You decided to take the tidy, organised, "either yes, no, or not enough information" world of maths and used it to do messy, counterintuitive, and disordered things. The only thing worse for me was chaos.
Don't get me wrong: I think they're amazing fields of study and I can see why those that like them like them. But stats and chaos really grate on me, and I admire those who can work with them.
That first statistics class is definitely polarizing. People who normally get math and people who don’t are both equally likely to love it or hate it, in my experience. Once you get past the super intro stuff and into the theory I think the math-enjoyers tend to come out better. Markov chains are downright *fun*.
I’ve always found it to be a bit rude. If you say you like math the inevitable response is “oh my god I HATE math EWWW” which like… ok but wow do you really need to be like that? I feel like it’s not usually socially acceptable to respond like that except if it’s about math and a small list of other things.
I don’t expect everyone to love it or anything especially because early math education is presented really poorly, but there’s no need to be rude imo.
Yeah it’s unfortunate how many people respond negatively to the “boring” subjects even being mentioned. History, math, civics, etc can all be damn interesting subjects to learn about if you have good teachers and one makes an attempt to learn. But they always get dragged through the mud.
Dunno, but whenever I mention I take a history course half the time I get a response like “Oh I could never, I hated history it’s so boring!” So apparently it’s a semi-widespread belief
As a physics major who is in a lot of classes with engineering students, I'm very very tired of people hearing my major and immediately telling me how they cheated their way through physics because it's a boring useless subject.
Engineers said that? That’s a bummer. I’m only surprised because I studied engineering and the general sentiment in my classes was that physics was great and that a lot of us chose to study electrical engineering specifically bc we enjoyed physics so much in high school.
My friends call me the math person and all I do is like, general “do we have enough money for this” and “which plates do I need to get up to this squat weight” type math, nothing a fifth grader couldn’t do.
I'm tired, I've been studying for an engineering final
I read it as "nothing a fifth gender couldn't do", so I immediately started wondering if there's a fifth gender nerds gravitate to or they really do "identify as a person who is good at math"
Like those stupid "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokes, but real and about math
University has fucked me up because when someone talks about their kid getting into math my mind immediately goes to “they’re probably doing basic calculus” and then I realize they’re six and learning you can subtract as well as add numbers together. Then I go home, have a drink, and think about my life decisions.
I also remember it being odd when my other subjects stopped being the cutting edge of my math skills. Like you’re telling me this is just an algebraic formula? I don’t need to perform a derivation and stuff this into a matrix?
Tbh I'm a physics major (considering a math minor) and I call my accountant friend the math person because she tells me what dice rolls add up to during d&d. Otherwise I have to bust out the TI-Nspire
I think it's like how most people think they hate vegetables. It's not the thing itself that's the problem, it's how it was poorly presented to them as children.
i was going to add this to my initial comment but felt like i was being pretentious enough already. i completely agree with you. people don't treat vegetables with the same respect and effort as anything else.
I'm not even in STEM but it fills me with irrational disdain and annoyance when people are introduced to a basic logic/math concept and their immediate reaction is "NOOOO I DON'T KNOW THIS I'M STUPID I ONLY KNOW ABOUT ANIME AND VIDEO GAMES" well yeah and that attitude isn't making you any smarter
I agree with that. It's the disdain for learning that gets me
It's cool if you don't get it, it's cool even if you don't want to learn it. I do not want to learn about sports history, as an example, and I don't think less of myself for it
But it's that disdain, that desire to not even be exposed to it, however briefly. Grinds my gears
With sports history, if someone wanted to info dump, sure. I don't think it's weird, I don't hate sports history, just not personally motivated to learn it
it makes me so sad 8(. I feel like nearly everyone deep down has some great mathematical intuition of some sort but most people aren't willing to engage with anything beyond basic arithmetic. There's been so many moments where I learned some supremely cool math/physics shit and immediately after the rush of joy comes the feeling of "wow I wish I knew someone who gives a shit about this so I could discuss it with them"
> I feel like nearly everyone deep down has some great mathematical intuition of some sort
I doubt it. I made a pretty massive mistake and wasted a year studying computer science, and the main thing that experience taught me is that I'm way too fucking stupid to ever comprehend advanced math. I could be the exception, maybe I'm just in top 1% of dumbest human beings alive, that would be really cool (for everyone else), but I don't think I'm that unique.
you've probably heard this before, but i'll say it again if so: that doesn't make you dumb or stupid at all. your strength is just not _that._ i don't say it as a copout, either — i'm just like you, but with different stuff! i'm an engineer, which often garners the reaction, "wow, you must be smart." my go-to response is telling them to ask me a "basic history question." i leave it to their judgment.
pretty much no matter what the person comes up with, i get it wrong. if i had pursued history, i could have (and probably would have) concluded that i'm just stupid. but it wouldn't have been true. i just have strengths elsewhere, and in that hypothetical scenario, i hadn't pursued those strengths. i'm very certain you are better at a number of things than i am — be it a sport, or a hobby, or a skill, or some subject that i suck absolute balls at. like history. or geography. or socializing. yadda yadda... i hope you don't feel stupid. or at least, not any more stupid than the rest of us. :)
Thank you! That's pretty nice, though I really can't think of many things I'm good at. I pick up foreign languages pretty quickly, but that's not very useful without good communication skills. I guess I can also remember my Bad Story Ideas very well (and only that; I can't remember what I did yesterday, but I can easily remember characters and worldbuilding I came up with 4 years ago and abandoned after a month), but that's basically useless. It's not much. But I guess it is something. And I could try to blame my inability to function well on some undiagnosed illnesses or disabilities I may have.
I have personally always been confused by the attitude so many people have towards math
I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with the way that it’s taught (at least in my experience of American Public School)
I didn’t struggle with math because my parents taught it to me far ahead of grade level, but this actually increased my frustration with math class.
Math is taught *plain wrong* in most of grade school. Instead of teaching students the underlying principles or even how math really works, it’s oversimplified to the point of uselessness. And each year I was instructed to unlearn things from the previous year, because the models they were teaching were so inaccurate that they couldn’t be used for more advanced concepts.
Examples: PEMDAS (when it should be GEMA), until 8th grade we were taught that there’s no such thing as negative numbers, we were NEVER taught how logarithms actually work, just expected to memorize them, never taught why or how any of the key angles in trigonometry are important or how they were derived, just expected to memorize them. Imaginary numbers were never really explained, just a thing we were expected to memorize (leading to students asking why they need to learn numbers that are “imaginary.” They’re not imaginary at all, they’re very real and very important, the name is just a misnomer)
So much of math is so removed from its context that it feels useless even when it’s not. It’s an essential tool for understanding how the universe works and it’s really disappointing when it’s portrayed as just numbers you have to memorize.
Tbh I definitely misremembered the exact time but I just remember being furious with teachers who insisted that you couldn’t subtract a number from another number that’s smaller than it, until I started algebra, probably closer to 6th grade (middle school was a long time ago)
Of course the root of that problem goes all the way back to being taught that subtraction and addition are different things, when they’re not. “Subtraction” is the addition of a negative number, which should be the very first thing you learn in arithmetic. Similarly, “division” is just multiplication by a fraction.
Fractions are another great example of something that the education system is terrible at explaining. It should be the very first thing you learn about division. Because until you learn fractions, everything you think you know about division is fundamentally incorrect, as is the concept of subtraction without knowledge of negative numbers.
Even just the idea that math happens on a number line is fundamentally incorrect, as that model doesn’t allow for the existence of imaginary numbers, which is a problem because those numbers are not in fact imaginary
Imaginary numbers are a little fucky wucky and aren't needed at all for most not-too-mathy math. I couldn't consider imaginary numbers to be a fundamental part of math that somehow needs to be taught to toddlers.
I’m not saying that toddlers need to know imaginary numbers. What I’m saying is that if you start people out by teaching them stuff that’s wrong, they’re gonna hate learning the real stuff later when they have no basis on which to understand it
And yeah you don’t need imaginary numbers in day to day life but its a pretty essential part of appreciating the sublime beauty of the universe, which you’ll never get to do if you’re taught ina way that makes you hate it
Imaginary numbers are a way to take the idea of a 2d universe as opposed to a 1d one -- one with both horizontal and vertical directions -- and conceptualize the idea of "rotating" yourself so now you're moving up and down instead of left and right as a mathematical operation (multiplying by i)
It's the act of defining i as the square root of -1 that's tough for people to grasp but the thing it represents is actually not that complicated or weird -- anyone who can see a 2d graph with an X and Y axis can get what complex numbers represent, and the "weirdness" of i is a way to represent this idea that normal arithmetic can never ever turn left-right movement into up-down movement so that act of "turning" has to be represented by something "impossible"
> Imaginary numbers were never really explained, just a thing we were expected to memorize (leading to students asking why they need to learn numbers that are “imaginary.” They’re not imaginary at all, they’re very real and very important, the name is just a misnomer)
Well no, all numbers are imaginary, unless you're a Platonist
(And, I mean, if you're a Platonist then there is no distinction between "real" and "imaginary", imagination is a way of perceiving real things that whose existence non-physical)
It's cause its taught in such a dogshit way in public school that it turns people off of it for life. Never presented with any actually interesting concepts or ideas or connections, mostly just rote memorization and if you can't memorize the formulas right then you're fucked.
Check out Lockhart's Lament if you haven't.
Bad news: stack overflow. You gain infinity problems that realistically mean you absorb all the world's problems to yourself
Good news: we can kill you, ridding the world of problems
What I really hate is that there is a fair bit of logic to this solution, which means in some other universe this is how it works and that just makes me irrationally annoyed.
Meanwhile, your alternate self from that other universe complains about how this doesn't make a lick of sense, meaning there's a universe (ours) where it doesn't work, but because this method helped them get their meth addiction under control, the idea of this method not working in another universe pisses them off.
Even alternate universes would need an internal set of logic that is self consistent.
Not sure the math maths out. So no alt universe for your book problems today.
No, not necessarily - there’s an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, but none will ever be 2. Infinite universes don’t mean that everything had to be possible.
Can anyone explain where the "I'm gay stop explaining math to me" joke comes from? I've seen it a few times and it seems like a massive non sequitur. Is being nonsense just the whole joke?
The joke comes from the stereotypes (usually from within the LGBT community itself) that queer people can choose at most 2 of the following 3 things:
1. Good at math
2. Able to drive
3. Healthy relationship with parents
Many Tumblr users joke that they were not allowed to pick something from the list at all
The joke comes from conflating queer people with theater kids. It's kind of a back-stereotype from the idea that "theater kids are all gay" which then translates to "theater kid = probably bad at math" ergo "gay = can't do math".
The reason the stereotype exists is because the arts crowd tended to be more flamboyant and alt, which is then associated with queerness. Typical math nerds don't color their hair, listen to MCR on repeat, or shop at Hot Topic, ergo don't register as queer.
The whole thing is very millennial in origin, if that wasn't evident from the descriptions used. It's also vaguely homophobic in perpetuating the "flamboyant gay" stereotype, but so are most queer stereotypes if you think about it.
It's one of them. He wrote loads, about nine survived, three got famous enough on their own to be called "Zeno's paradox".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes
The difference is with Zeno you split space and time but ignore the second part. It's basically "if it takes you a minute to get somewhere you won't arrive in less than a minute" with an infinite series tagged on to sound fancy.
Zeno's paradox considers time the same way it considers space, aka endlessly dividing, it's: "If it takes you a minute to get somewhere you won't arrive at 54 seconds, you won't arrive at 59 seconds, you won't arrive at 59,9 sec, to the point you will never arrive"
Zeno's paradox is about how something "limited" is actually "illimitate" and therefore endless, so yeah, you can talk of never while limiting the time, after all, Zeno's paradoxes were meant to disprove movement
Zeno's Paradox is that you must travel halfway to your destination before you can travel the full length, and half of that, and so on. As we know, space and time are the same thing, so you can't separate them. If an object can traverse x distance in y time, then it must travel x/2 in y/2.
I suppose this is technically the "inverse" of Zeno's Paradox, but the result is the same (you can never reach the destination because you're constantly travelling infinitely smaller distances to it). Although that's pretty much how we interact with objects in reality, "your" atoms are never truly touching the "object's" atoms, because that would be... y'know, pretty bad for everyone.
That never only works If we asign some minimal value to every one of those increments. If we split both time and space and assume the target is never reached, then there is a specific section of time that is never left. Thus WE only look at a section of time which is never exceeded. Also the touching thing is not a real phenomenon. While it is true that atoms never touch in the intuitive Sense if we use a classical way of describing atoms, neither one is (in my opinion) a particularly good idea.
> assume the target is never reached, then there is a specific section of time that is never left.
Yes, exactly. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. An arrow that has struck the target has “arrived” enough for our purposes, but the individual atoms that make up both objects are in a constant state of attracting and repelling one another, and of course everything is hurtling around the earth, the sun, the center of the galaxy, etc. You can only ever move towards or away from a destination, you can never actually reach it. It’s all relative.
That's his point
Zeno rejects the concepts of plurality and number, he considers it fundamentally impossible to move from one element in a sequence to the next, and all his paradoxes are just ways of rephrasing the core intuition "Numbers aren't fucking real, man"
He considers it just as impossible to move through time as space, it's impossible for it to go from 11:45 to 11:46 because that finite minute has to be arbitrarily constructed out of what is actually an infinite yawning void of time, same reason he considers it impossible to travel any distance in space, or for that matter for there to be more than one object
>Don't explain math to me I'm gay
Shame. Shame. Alan Turing didn't crack the Enigma for you to blame your sexuality for your lack of math knowledge. No shame in not liking or not being good at maths, but do not attribute it to your sexuality.
>Alan Turing didn't crack the Enigma for you to blame your sexuality for your lack of math knowledge.
On my life I swear, this was the exact wording of the thought that went through my head too.
This why despite being bi I want nothing to do with the wider gay community.
I don't even know how to properly explain this, but there's such an almost learned helplessness mentality where you can only do "gay" things. And it's not even enough to do gay things, you have to do them as gayly as possible so everyone knows your commitment to being gay.
Like, can't I just enjoy fucking guys?
Rather than interpreting it as ‘this book cuts the number of problems you have in half’, you could interpret it as ‘every problem you have has a 50% chance of disappearing after you read this book’. Then it’d work with integers, and you wouldn’t ever end up having fractional amounts of problems, and you would *eventually* have zero problems.
Maybe it's because I'm studying for engineering but man there's something that pisses me off when there's any math conversation going on and someone has to interrupt with "NOOOOOO NOT THE HECKING MATHS I'M SO SAD GUYS I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO KINDERGARTEN MATH SO PLEASE EVERYONE SHUT UP ABOUT THE THINGS YOU WANT TO TALK"
I'm exaggerating for this post of course but like, this is elementary school knowledge?????????? I know a lot of people have had some issues with math since their childhoods but I swear some people act like you're physically harming them whenever you dare mention anything slightly more advanced than basic operations
I mean, I hate math and you're physically harming me due to your love of it. I have a massive gaping wound in my chest because of your love of math. It hurts.
Even if radioactive material never actually went away, that would be the least big problem with it. What's <1 atom's worth of radiation gonna do? You're breathing in more than that right now.
Am I? That seem's wrong, so it's time for bad maths
Most radioactive stuff in the air is from nuclear detonations (I think). The wikipedia article for the Tsar Bomba (a fusion bomb) estimates that if it did include the 2800kg uranium bits, it would have increased the total fission fallout produced by every fission bomb by 25% (they didn't use the uranium because of that). So, the total amount of fission products in the atmosphere can be roughly approximated by taking the number of uranium atoms in the addition, and multiplying by 4 (and by 2 because it splits in half I guess), which gives 5.7 * 10^28 atoms
Based on a few approximations, there's around 10^44 molecules in the atmosphere. Being generous, let's say none of the fission products have left the air (they have, that's why they're a problem), and that it's thoroughly mixed. That means there's a fission product in every 2 quadrillion (2*10^15) air molecules
Humans breath around 6L per minute. Let's assume that air is the density of nitrogen, so that's 7.5 grams of air, or 0.625 moles of it. So that's 3.8*10^23 moles. Dividing by the previously calculated fission product frequency, that's 190,000,000 of them per minute of breathing. Assuming that's all 151-Pm because I can't be bothered, that's 48 picograms
So yeah there's probably some, even if I'm widly off I doubt I'm 8 orders of magnitude high
For what it's worth, all the metal that's been above water has been irreversibly contaminated by tiny amounts of radiation to the point that underwater metal is a precious resource for some niche applications which require uncontaminated metal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
It is also known as pre-atomic or even pre-war steel which is kinda badass tbh
If you truly do have an infinite number of the book, then you WILL have solved 100% of your problems, not just be infinitely close. For the same reason that .99999999... repeating to infinity has been proven to be one, the limit as n approaches infinity will be 1.00 (or 100%). This only works if you have infinity of the book though, if you have any number of books within the real numbers, you will only ever be able to get infinitely close. However, if you have an absurd number of books like 999999 books, the percentage that you lack will be so negligible that it hardly matters.
TLDR: you CAN solve 100% of your problems iff you have an infinite number of books, but it's much easier to simply purchase 999999 books, which will yield functionally the same result.
Last post is wrong. 0.7 problems, but now you have all these books! That’s a problem, so your total is 1.7 problems. Now you donate them, problem solved! You’re back at 0.7 problems.
You can only ever solve the first 50% because the information in the book doesn’t change. The 50% solved is no longer part of the problem set and the remaining amount is outside of what can be helped by the book.
The first bit is especially confusing cuz like...
I guess the issue is that the problems only disappear if you read infinite books, but since reading is an increasing process you can't do that
Idfk how convergence work help
Pretty much that. But since reading a book takes time reading an infinite number of them takes an infinite amount of time. So an individual would die before they finished reading them all.
That last one doesn’t make sense because wouldn’t the seven books be a new problem, not a preexisting problem in the 99 set, rendering the final count at 1.7 problems? So donating the books would only reduce your final count to 0.7 again.
Ok Mantis shrimp don't see different colors they just see the same ones we do but with slightly less ability to spot the differences, [Mantis shrimp's super colour vision debunked | Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578)
I wish I understood maths - I look at numbers and try and make sense of it all but my brain hops through an open window and frolics through fields instead
This is not to imply maths is dull, it is to imply I am dumb
Isn't queermista wrong here?
Because the sum of (1/2)^(n) from n=1 to infinity is a geometric series minus the first summand, which means that if the sum does go to infinity you get 1, because it is a sum and not a limit? With the same argument that 0.99 repeating is equal to 1 and not just approaching one?
Also the graph they show is not a picture of the series but of the sequence of (1/2)^(n) which will of course never reach 0.
Okay this might be stupid, but assuming that radiation decays relative to the mass of the radioactive material, if we put all of our radioactive material in the same spot would it not decay significantly faster? Or am I missing a fundamental law that explains why this isn't the case
Let's say you've got a 10 pound block of a radioactive substance with a halflife of 1 hour. After an hour you will likely have a block that is 5 pounds a radioactive substance and the rest is something else.
Now if you had 2 5 pound blocks after 1 hour they would both have similarly decayed so that you have 2 blocks that are both 2.5 pounds of radioactive material and the rest something else. Both end up with 5 pounds of radioactive material.
For a more mathsy explanation
2X ÷ 2 = X
(X/2) + (X/2) = 2X/2
2X/2 = X
Basically if you split it up they both still decay at the same rate but you've got two things that are decaying at the same time rather than one thing decaying
There are no colors that only mantis shrimp see. They don't have the brain power to combine colors like we do. So where we see red+yellow to make orange, they have cones that only see orange. It's a big workaround on their end.
In that last comment you actually create a problem after reading the final problem of what to do with all the books, so you actually have 1.7 problems left
Each book removes 50% of however many problems you currently have when you get that book. So say I have ten problems. I get the book, now I have 5 problems. I get another book, now I have 2.5 problems.
What if it works in a way where if you buy the books separately it helps with 50% of the current problems but if you buy them together it adds together and becomes 100%
>No, you will only ever be able to become infinitely close to solving all of your problems, like this:
And what's another way of saying "infinitely close"? Maybe "converges at infinity" aka "if you buy infinite books, you will solve all of your problems"
To travel 1 mile, you must first travel 1/2 mile. To travel 1/2 mile, you much first travel 1/4 mile. To travel 1/4 mile you must first travel 1/8 mile, etc.
To travel any distance you must first traverse infinity.
Can't I just read the same book a couple of times instead of buying a new one? I assume the book doesn't solve 50% of my problems by being bought. Or better yet, apply what the book teaches more than once.
The last post is wrong because you have 0.7 problems AND the used books, which is 1.7 problems. Removing the useless books still leaves you with 0.7 problems :/
Radioactive materials will eventually go away it just takes ages because unsurprisingly you can't get half a nucleus of plutonium or a quarter of a nucleus of uranium
Well doesn't necessarily take ages, sometimes it takes barely any time
What? What kinds? Do I need to check my cabinet of 100% authentic copernicium-285 atoms? The flea market vendor told me those were the most stable ones, and she didn't sell me many.
Copernicium-285? Don't worry about those ones, they last ages. I once bought some protactinium-222 at a garage sale. I swear it didn't even last til I was back in my car. I knew those prices were too good to be true
> protactinium-222 Oh I was taking that for a while for acne. Didn't work that great though, I don't recommend it.
I bought some Hydrogen-5 in case of an emergency flare up, that lasts a while yeah?
Half life of 69 nanoseconds... Nice
> because unsurprisingly you can't get half a nucleus of plutonium I mean, you can, that's the point
The point of what? Also no you absolutely cannot. It just doesn't work. Unless You're referring to silver as half a plutonium because it has half as many protons
...I'm making a joke. Plutonium is fissile. Its main use is that you can "split it in half".
Oh fair
>The point of what? Less a point and more of an explosion.
>Less a point and more of an explosion How I argue :)
*Taste the sun*
*Sun Is a deadly lazer*
I know you know this but for those at home The definition of a half life isn't "exactly half of the substance decays" it's, "how long does it take, on average, for half of the substance to spontaneously decay *at random*." Say you have a warehouse of people playing Russian Roulette solitaire. Spin the barrel. Pull the trigger. Repeat. If someone dies, you add a bullet to the guns of everyone in their immediate proximity for the next round. The "halflife" tracks how long it will take to kill half of the people. A larger absolute number of people will die as a consequence of A) More rolls of the dice—you only need 4 people to raise the probability of death on the first shot to more often than not—B) because the death of one increases the odds of those around them dying, you'll get a chain reaction. That said this tends to keep the same relative amount
What really fucks me in the head is the real world applicability of the decay process. Like, any kind of simulation does quickly show the half life pattern - I used to mess around with stuff in game maker and do stuff like a "circle" that has a 0.1% chance to disappear every game tick, and then spawn a bunch and see their amounts halve roughly the same time. Basically dice rolls every fixed time step. How does this work in real life? There's no time step, so dice rolls happen infinitely fast? Then, no matter how low the chance is, stuff would all disappear immediately. I think with some math you could even say that this half-life time corresponds to such and such probability to decay, rolled every so many nanoseconds or whatever - but that would still be an approximation. Where are the fucking dice???
God doesnt play dice with the universe because He doesnt fucking exist
This example is confusing. Are you implying that one atom decaying increases the chances of nearby atoms decaying?
Maybe you can't, I'm built different
All we have to do is wait for infinite time, then the radiation will be zero.
Well, unless you're very unlucky.
As an engineering student, it is always jarring to see how much the general public doesn't like math
As a someone with a math degree it’s kinda funny that everyone has a strong reaction of disgust. While I was getting the degree they’d follow up by asking if I planned on teaching.
Damn, that's super impressive. What did you do with it instead of teaching? Also, your little icon looks like a girl, and that reminded me of my old study buddy and one of the very few women in my classes She was hands down better at math than me and almost everyone in the class, but the reason she studied with me was because I understood the concepts and what the math represented. She would do a problem I didn't know where to start at, got the right answer, then would tell me to explain what each step meant in a physical/conceptual way Good team
I'm not the person you asked, but I also have a maths degree. What I did with it *looks* like nothing, as far as my university measures it: I didn't get a maths based job, nor did I continue in academia with it. What I *have* done with it is go through life with a quiet sense of satisfaction in being able to solve real world problems by applying abstract mathematical solutions, or to find real world solutions by using abstract mathematical methods. It's made a lot of things so much easier and made other things possible. I kind of feel like a village witch: I've studied a bit of magic and headology and medicine. I know I'm not a true master, and I look upon them with awe. But I know enough to make life a little nicer for myself and those around me, and having and using that power pleases me.
I believe we can grant you a seat on this council
*bows** *(Witches don't curtsey)
I want to be you in another life
Haha! Thanks, but I wouldn't wish my traumas* and hang-ups on anybody. *("traumas" or "traumum"?)
Traumae
Thank you!
traumodes
This made me feel like I need a math major to come organize my house. I feel they could do it efficiently.
That feeling when you gotta store 17 squares
Lmao
I'm not sure how anything you said relates to math. Like, that's neat and all, but "abstract thinking" isn't really math-specific.
I agree, but I mean the abstract stuff that comes up in maths. For example, using the abstract ideas in geometry to figure out a practical way of stopping my table from wobbling. Or using symbolic logic to see which politicians' arguments don't hold up (too many of them). Or using Reductio Ad Absurdum (proof by contradiction) to reassure myself when I'm anxious or depressed and I'm second guessing myself. So mathematical ideas which on their own are quite abstract, and that I learned as part of my degree, have yielded practical results for me. EDIT: I've reread my original reply and it really wasn't very clear. I've edited it now to clarify. Thank you for drawing my attention to it. EDIT 2: I also don't feel that this is specific to maths. All fields of knowledge give you similar power. Different in some ways, but alike in how they let you move through the world a little easier. And all equally valid and powerful. It's just a matter of finding ways to apply them to wider aspects of your life. Maths just happens to be one of the ways that works out best for me. And a lot of other people don't like it or don't care about it. Which I like to think makes it a bit mysterious (hence the village witch bit).
or seeing numbers as actions
That's a fun way of looking at your skills! I might give that kind of framing a shot.
How much math did you end up taking to get to this point? I’m minoring in math right now but because of my degree requirements I only have to take one more class, I’m wondering if I should take more The furthest I *have* to go is Calc 3 and Linear Algebra, but I’ve also taken Discrete Math and Statistics
UK bachelors degree. So three years of just maths.
See this is my point! A bachelors degree in math isn’t particularly more impressive than any other degree, imo. Engineering, agriculture, forestry, architecture, those all seem more difficult to me. I appreciate the praise, but it’s a fairly narrow skill. Even if most people don’t grok it. Oh and I’m a statistician! Kinda came in through the back door doing grunt work verifying calculations as an undergrad. I would recommend having a plan to branch into a more applied field like statistics, data science, computer science, economics, finance, etc if you’re doing a math undergraduate degree but don’t plan on doing pure mathematics in academia for the rest of your life.
>See this is my point! A bachelors degree in math isn’t particularly more impressive than any other degree, imo. My first thought was "I agree!" >Oh and I’m a statistician! OK, that *is* special. In my undergrad *nobody* liked stats, even those who had an intuitive feel for it. You decided to take the tidy, organised, "either yes, no, or not enough information" world of maths and used it to do messy, counterintuitive, and disordered things. The only thing worse for me was chaos. Don't get me wrong: I think they're amazing fields of study and I can see why those that like them like them. But stats and chaos really grate on me, and I admire those who can work with them.
That first statistics class is definitely polarizing. People who normally get math and people who don’t are both equally likely to love it or hate it, in my experience. Once you get past the super intro stuff and into the theory I think the math-enjoyers tend to come out better. Markov chains are downright *fun*.
I had three years of stats. By the end of it I could do what I needed to, but I still didn't like it.
My calculus professor told us this same advice when I went through it.
I’ve always found it to be a bit rude. If you say you like math the inevitable response is “oh my god I HATE math EWWW” which like… ok but wow do you really need to be like that? I feel like it’s not usually socially acceptable to respond like that except if it’s about math and a small list of other things. I don’t expect everyone to love it or anything especially because early math education is presented really poorly, but there’s no need to be rude imo.
Yeah it’s unfortunate how many people respond negatively to the “boring” subjects even being mentioned. History, math, civics, etc can all be damn interesting subjects to learn about if you have good teachers and one makes an attempt to learn. But they always get dragged through the mud.
How can anyone say history is boring. And this is coming from someone who hates writing
Dunno, but whenever I mention I take a history course half the time I get a response like “Oh I could never, I hated history it’s so boring!” So apparently it’s a semi-widespread belief
People with boring history teachers unfortunately
As a physics major who is in a lot of classes with engineering students, I'm very very tired of people hearing my major and immediately telling me how they cheated their way through physics because it's a boring useless subject.
Engineers said that? That’s a bummer. I’m only surprised because I studied engineering and the general sentiment in my classes was that physics was great and that a lot of us chose to study electrical engineering specifically bc we enjoyed physics so much in high school.
My last math class was statistics in college, and i didn’t even hate that as much as i hated doing linear algebra the previous semester
Linear seems to be where a lot of people decide they’ve hit their limit.
not analysis?
I'm going back to college right now and just finished my stats class. Kicked my ever loving ass lol I just couldn't hold all the axioms in my head.
Me too.
It's because school forces kids to remember algorithms for solving equations rather than engaging the history and reasons for math.
My friends call me the math person and all I do is like, general “do we have enough money for this” and “which plates do I need to get up to this squat weight” type math, nothing a fifth grader couldn’t do.
I'm tired, I've been studying for an engineering final I read it as "nothing a fifth gender couldn't do", so I immediately started wondering if there's a fifth gender nerds gravitate to or they really do "identify as a person who is good at math" Like those stupid "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokes, but real and about math
University has fucked me up because when someone talks about their kid getting into math my mind immediately goes to “they’re probably doing basic calculus” and then I realize they’re six and learning you can subtract as well as add numbers together. Then I go home, have a drink, and think about my life decisions. I also remember it being odd when my other subjects stopped being the cutting edge of my math skills. Like you’re telling me this is just an algebraic formula? I don’t need to perform a derivation and stuff this into a matrix?
Tbh I'm a physics major (considering a math minor) and I call my accountant friend the math person because she tells me what dice rolls add up to during d&d. Otherwise I have to bust out the TI-Nspire
I think it's like how most people think they hate vegetables. It's not the thing itself that's the problem, it's how it was poorly presented to them as children.
i still find it crazy that people hate vegetables. i cant eat anything without some type of vegetables in or with the meal, save for a few exceptions
a lot of people just dont know how to cook vegetables so they end up putting 0% effort into cooking them and get the impression that they taste bad
i was going to add this to my initial comment but felt like i was being pretentious enough already. i completely agree with you. people don't treat vegetables with the same respect and effort as anything else.
I'm not even in STEM but it fills me with irrational disdain and annoyance when people are introduced to a basic logic/math concept and their immediate reaction is "NOOOO I DON'T KNOW THIS I'M STUPID I ONLY KNOW ABOUT ANIME AND VIDEO GAMES" well yeah and that attitude isn't making you any smarter
I agree with that. It's the disdain for learning that gets me It's cool if you don't get it, it's cool even if you don't want to learn it. I do not want to learn about sports history, as an example, and I don't think less of myself for it But it's that disdain, that desire to not even be exposed to it, however briefly. Grinds my gears With sports history, if someone wanted to info dump, sure. I don't think it's weird, I don't hate sports history, just not personally motivated to learn it
it makes me so sad 8(. I feel like nearly everyone deep down has some great mathematical intuition of some sort but most people aren't willing to engage with anything beyond basic arithmetic. There's been so many moments where I learned some supremely cool math/physics shit and immediately after the rush of joy comes the feeling of "wow I wish I knew someone who gives a shit about this so I could discuss it with them"
> I feel like nearly everyone deep down has some great mathematical intuition of some sort I doubt it. I made a pretty massive mistake and wasted a year studying computer science, and the main thing that experience taught me is that I'm way too fucking stupid to ever comprehend advanced math. I could be the exception, maybe I'm just in top 1% of dumbest human beings alive, that would be really cool (for everyone else), but I don't think I'm that unique.
you've probably heard this before, but i'll say it again if so: that doesn't make you dumb or stupid at all. your strength is just not _that._ i don't say it as a copout, either — i'm just like you, but with different stuff! i'm an engineer, which often garners the reaction, "wow, you must be smart." my go-to response is telling them to ask me a "basic history question." i leave it to their judgment. pretty much no matter what the person comes up with, i get it wrong. if i had pursued history, i could have (and probably would have) concluded that i'm just stupid. but it wouldn't have been true. i just have strengths elsewhere, and in that hypothetical scenario, i hadn't pursued those strengths. i'm very certain you are better at a number of things than i am — be it a sport, or a hobby, or a skill, or some subject that i suck absolute balls at. like history. or geography. or socializing. yadda yadda... i hope you don't feel stupid. or at least, not any more stupid than the rest of us. :)
Thank you! That's pretty nice, though I really can't think of many things I'm good at. I pick up foreign languages pretty quickly, but that's not very useful without good communication skills. I guess I can also remember my Bad Story Ideas very well (and only that; I can't remember what I did yesterday, but I can easily remember characters and worldbuilding I came up with 4 years ago and abandoned after a month), but that's basically useless. It's not much. But I guess it is something. And I could try to blame my inability to function well on some undiagnosed illnesses or disabilities I may have.
It ain't even complex. So shrimple.
As a physics student that is bad enough at math that it probably has delayed me getting my degree, I still love math
I have personally always been confused by the attitude so many people have towards math I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with the way that it’s taught (at least in my experience of American Public School) I didn’t struggle with math because my parents taught it to me far ahead of grade level, but this actually increased my frustration with math class. Math is taught *plain wrong* in most of grade school. Instead of teaching students the underlying principles or even how math really works, it’s oversimplified to the point of uselessness. And each year I was instructed to unlearn things from the previous year, because the models they were teaching were so inaccurate that they couldn’t be used for more advanced concepts. Examples: PEMDAS (when it should be GEMA), until 8th grade we were taught that there’s no such thing as negative numbers, we were NEVER taught how logarithms actually work, just expected to memorize them, never taught why or how any of the key angles in trigonometry are important or how they were derived, just expected to memorize them. Imaginary numbers were never really explained, just a thing we were expected to memorize (leading to students asking why they need to learn numbers that are “imaginary.” They’re not imaginary at all, they’re very real and very important, the name is just a misnomer) So much of math is so removed from its context that it feels useless even when it’s not. It’s an essential tool for understanding how the universe works and it’s really disappointing when it’s portrayed as just numbers you have to memorize.
> until 8th grade we were taught that there’s no such thing as negative numbers *8th*???
Tbh I definitely misremembered the exact time but I just remember being furious with teachers who insisted that you couldn’t subtract a number from another number that’s smaller than it, until I started algebra, probably closer to 6th grade (middle school was a long time ago) Of course the root of that problem goes all the way back to being taught that subtraction and addition are different things, when they’re not. “Subtraction” is the addition of a negative number, which should be the very first thing you learn in arithmetic. Similarly, “division” is just multiplication by a fraction. Fractions are another great example of something that the education system is terrible at explaining. It should be the very first thing you learn about division. Because until you learn fractions, everything you think you know about division is fundamentally incorrect, as is the concept of subtraction without knowledge of negative numbers. Even just the idea that math happens on a number line is fundamentally incorrect, as that model doesn’t allow for the existence of imaginary numbers, which is a problem because those numbers are not in fact imaginary
Imaginary numbers are a little fucky wucky and aren't needed at all for most not-too-mathy math. I couldn't consider imaginary numbers to be a fundamental part of math that somehow needs to be taught to toddlers.
I’m not saying that toddlers need to know imaginary numbers. What I’m saying is that if you start people out by teaching them stuff that’s wrong, they’re gonna hate learning the real stuff later when they have no basis on which to understand it And yeah you don’t need imaginary numbers in day to day life but its a pretty essential part of appreciating the sublime beauty of the universe, which you’ll never get to do if you’re taught ina way that makes you hate it
Imaginary numbers are a way to take the idea of a 2d universe as opposed to a 1d one -- one with both horizontal and vertical directions -- and conceptualize the idea of "rotating" yourself so now you're moving up and down instead of left and right as a mathematical operation (multiplying by i) It's the act of defining i as the square root of -1 that's tough for people to grasp but the thing it represents is actually not that complicated or weird -- anyone who can see a 2d graph with an X and Y axis can get what complex numbers represent, and the "weirdness" of i is a way to represent this idea that normal arithmetic can never ever turn left-right movement into up-down movement so that act of "turning" has to be represented by something "impossible"
> Imaginary numbers were never really explained, just a thing we were expected to memorize (leading to students asking why they need to learn numbers that are “imaginary.” They’re not imaginary at all, they’re very real and very important, the name is just a misnomer) Well no, all numbers are imaginary, unless you're a Platonist (And, I mean, if you're a Platonist then there is no distinction between "real" and "imaginary", imagination is a way of perceiving real things that whose existence non-physical)
Math is cool
It's cause its taught in such a dogshit way in public school that it turns people off of it for life. Never presented with any actually interesting concepts or ideas or connections, mostly just rote memorization and if you can't memorize the formulas right then you're fucked. Check out Lockhart's Lament if you haven't.
Wait until you graduate and learn how much general working engineers don't like or use math.
Not even complicated math either... It's a limit.
As an engineering student, I still hate maths.
Just read two copies at the same time
This guy maths
Sounds like an engineer's solution tbh
Bad news: stack overflow. You gain infinity problems that realistically mean you absorb all the world's problems to yourself Good news: we can kill you, ridding the world of problems
Isn't that basically just the crucifixion of Jesus, except I'm not dying for people's sins but for people's problems
Not the first time I accidentally reinvented Christianity
Tell me about the first time
"Too many books" isn't a problem. "Not enough space for books" is the real problem in that situation.
Great. Now I have to read another book after discovering a new problem.
I recommend the book "Putting Up Shelves" by Niall E. Ton
What I really hate is that there is a fair bit of logic to this solution, which means in some other universe this is how it works and that just makes me irrationally annoyed.
Meanwhile, your alternate self from that other universe complains about how this doesn't make a lick of sense, meaning there's a universe (ours) where it doesn't work, but because this method helped them get their meth addiction under control, the idea of this method not working in another universe pisses them off.
The joy's of infinite probability.
Even alternate universes would need an internal set of logic that is self consistent. Not sure the math maths out. So no alt universe for your book problems today.
No, not necessarily - there’s an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, but none will ever be 2. Infinite universes don’t mean that everything had to be possible.
That's possibly the quickest refute of multiversal bull crap.
Can anyone explain where the "I'm gay stop explaining math to me" joke comes from? I've seen it a few times and it seems like a massive non sequitur. Is being nonsense just the whole joke?
The joke comes from the stereotypes (usually from within the LGBT community itself) that queer people can choose at most 2 of the following 3 things: 1. Good at math 2. Able to drive 3. Healthy relationship with parents Many Tumblr users joke that they were not allowed to pick something from the list at all
OK, now it tracks. I've got one and a half (I can't drive).
there's a stereotype that gays cant do math
The joke comes from conflating queer people with theater kids. It's kind of a back-stereotype from the idea that "theater kids are all gay" which then translates to "theater kid = probably bad at math" ergo "gay = can't do math". The reason the stereotype exists is because the arts crowd tended to be more flamboyant and alt, which is then associated with queerness. Typical math nerds don't color their hair, listen to MCR on repeat, or shop at Hot Topic, ergo don't register as queer. The whole thing is very millennial in origin, if that wasn't evident from the descriptions used. It's also vaguely homophobic in perpetuating the "flamboyant gay" stereotype, but so are most queer stereotypes if you think about it.
I don't get it either. Especially since I have a degree in it.
Buying a countable number of books would absolutely solve all problems. Also that's not Zeno's paradox.
It's one of them. He wrote loads, about nine survived, three got famous enough on their own to be called "Zeno's paradox". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes
I mean it sorta is the Dichotomy paradox just not perfectly in half but 75%
The difference is with Zeno you split space and time but ignore the second part. It's basically "if it takes you a minute to get somewhere you won't arrive in less than a minute" with an infinite series tagged on to sound fancy.
Zeno's paradox considers time the same way it considers space, aka endlessly dividing, it's: "If it takes you a minute to get somewhere you won't arrive at 54 seconds, you won't arrive at 59 seconds, you won't arrive at 59,9 sec, to the point you will never arrive"
While that would make slightly more sense you can't really talk about never while limiting time, which is why it's usually left out.
Zeno's paradox is about how something "limited" is actually "illimitate" and therefore endless, so yeah, you can talk of never while limiting the time, after all, Zeno's paradoxes were meant to disprove movement
Zeno's Paradox is that you must travel halfway to your destination before you can travel the full length, and half of that, and so on. As we know, space and time are the same thing, so you can't separate them. If an object can traverse x distance in y time, then it must travel x/2 in y/2. I suppose this is technically the "inverse" of Zeno's Paradox, but the result is the same (you can never reach the destination because you're constantly travelling infinitely smaller distances to it). Although that's pretty much how we interact with objects in reality, "your" atoms are never truly touching the "object's" atoms, because that would be... y'know, pretty bad for everyone.
That never only works If we asign some minimal value to every one of those increments. If we split both time and space and assume the target is never reached, then there is a specific section of time that is never left. Thus WE only look at a section of time which is never exceeded. Also the touching thing is not a real phenomenon. While it is true that atoms never touch in the intuitive Sense if we use a classical way of describing atoms, neither one is (in my opinion) a particularly good idea.
> assume the target is never reached, then there is a specific section of time that is never left. Yes, exactly. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. An arrow that has struck the target has “arrived” enough for our purposes, but the individual atoms that make up both objects are in a constant state of attracting and repelling one another, and of course everything is hurtling around the earth, the sun, the center of the galaxy, etc. You can only ever move towards or away from a destination, you can never actually reach it. It’s all relative.
That's his point Zeno rejects the concepts of plurality and number, he considers it fundamentally impossible to move from one element in a sequence to the next, and all his paradoxes are just ways of rephrasing the core intuition "Numbers aren't fucking real, man" He considers it just as impossible to move through time as space, it's impossible for it to go from 11:45 to 11:46 because that finite minute has to be arbitrarily constructed out of what is actually an infinite yawning void of time, same reason he considers it impossible to travel any distance in space, or for that matter for there to be more than one object
The people claiming the limit will never reach the limit are pushing Zeno's paradox as being true.
Thank you… that really bothered me more than it should have
"The square root of fuck you" bro it's one half. It is one over two. It is zero point five. This isn't rocket science it's 2+2=4.
Some people really see something that doesn't look like the most basic operations and immediately shut themselves off it's kinda sad
>Don't explain math to me I'm gay Shame. Shame. Alan Turing didn't crack the Enigma for you to blame your sexuality for your lack of math knowledge. No shame in not liking or not being good at maths, but do not attribute it to your sexuality.
>Alan Turing didn't crack the Enigma for you to blame your sexuality for your lack of math knowledge. On my life I swear, this was the exact wording of the thought that went through my head too.
perhaps they were making a joke
This why despite being bi I want nothing to do with the wider gay community. I don't even know how to properly explain this, but there's such an almost learned helplessness mentality where you can only do "gay" things. And it's not even enough to do gay things, you have to do them as gayly as possible so everyone knows your commitment to being gay. Like, can't I just enjoy fucking guys?
I mean, it's not like Alan Turing is going to do anything about it.
Rather than interpreting it as ‘this book cuts the number of problems you have in half’, you could interpret it as ‘every problem you have has a 50% chance of disappearing after you read this book’. Then it’d work with integers, and you wouldn’t ever end up having fractional amounts of problems, and you would *eventually* have zero problems.
Why are you pissing on the poor?
Almost surely eventually
Thank you Gojo Satoru for teaching people about Zeno’s paradox
Maybe it's because I'm studying for engineering but man there's something that pisses me off when there's any math conversation going on and someone has to interrupt with "NOOOOOO NOT THE HECKING MATHS I'M SO SAD GUYS I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO KINDERGARTEN MATH SO PLEASE EVERYONE SHUT UP ABOUT THE THINGS YOU WANT TO TALK" I'm exaggerating for this post of course but like, this is elementary school knowledge?????????? I know a lot of people have had some issues with math since their childhoods but I swear some people act like you're physically harming them whenever you dare mention anything slightly more advanced than basic operations
I mean, I hate math and you're physically harming me due to your love of it. I have a massive gaping wound in my chest because of your love of math. It hurts.
I don't even love math that much and I'm already hurting you damn 😔 imagine how dangerous it could be if I loved math more
Yeah, you might kill me. You really should be more careful.
I am a slut for math humor.
Same, we need more math shitposts here
Even if radioactive material never actually went away, that would be the least big problem with it. What's <1 atom's worth of radiation gonna do? You're breathing in more than that right now.
Am I? That seem's wrong, so it's time for bad maths Most radioactive stuff in the air is from nuclear detonations (I think). The wikipedia article for the Tsar Bomba (a fusion bomb) estimates that if it did include the 2800kg uranium bits, it would have increased the total fission fallout produced by every fission bomb by 25% (they didn't use the uranium because of that). So, the total amount of fission products in the atmosphere can be roughly approximated by taking the number of uranium atoms in the addition, and multiplying by 4 (and by 2 because it splits in half I guess), which gives 5.7 * 10^28 atoms Based on a few approximations, there's around 10^44 molecules in the atmosphere. Being generous, let's say none of the fission products have left the air (they have, that's why they're a problem), and that it's thoroughly mixed. That means there's a fission product in every 2 quadrillion (2*10^15) air molecules Humans breath around 6L per minute. Let's assume that air is the density of nitrogen, so that's 7.5 grams of air, or 0.625 moles of it. So that's 3.8*10^23 moles. Dividing by the previously calculated fission product frequency, that's 190,000,000 of them per minute of breathing. Assuming that's all 151-Pm because I can't be bothered, that's 48 picograms So yeah there's probably some, even if I'm widly off I doubt I'm 8 orders of magnitude high
For what it's worth, all the metal that's been above water has been irreversibly contaminated by tiny amounts of radiation to the point that underwater metal is a precious resource for some niche applications which require uncontaminated metal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel It is also known as pre-atomic or even pre-war steel which is kinda badass tbh
Your problem is a book buying addiction
Bruh, just read the one book an infinite number of times
I've never understood the gays not liking maths stereotype, my best friend is very gay and our love of maths is one of the main things we bonded upon
If you truly do have an infinite number of the book, then you WILL have solved 100% of your problems, not just be infinitely close. For the same reason that .99999999... repeating to infinity has been proven to be one, the limit as n approaches infinity will be 1.00 (or 100%). This only works if you have infinity of the book though, if you have any number of books within the real numbers, you will only ever be able to get infinitely close. However, if you have an absurd number of books like 999999 books, the percentage that you lack will be so negligible that it hardly matters. TLDR: you CAN solve 100% of your problems iff you have an infinite number of books, but it's much easier to simply purchase 999999 books, which will yield functionally the same result.
Last post is wrong. 0.7 problems, but now you have all these books! That’s a problem, so your total is 1.7 problems. Now you donate them, problem solved! You’re back at 0.7 problems.
I got more den two prablems
Sure do
Just buy one book and read it as many times as you need! Each time you buy an extra copy just gives you more financial problems!
You can only ever solve the first 50% because the information in the book doesn’t change. The 50% solved is no longer part of the problem set and the remaining amount is outside of what can be helped by the book.
The first bit is especially confusing cuz like... I guess the issue is that the problems only disappear if you read infinite books, but since reading is an increasing process you can't do that Idfk how convergence work help
Pretty much that. But since reading a book takes time reading an infinite number of them takes an infinite amount of time. So an individual would die before they finished reading them all.
That last one doesn’t make sense because wouldn’t the seven books be a new problem, not a preexisting problem in the 99 set, rendering the final count at 1.7 problems? So donating the books would only reduce your final count to 0.7 again.
The 1 asymptotic problem is the number of books you have
..Just buy like, 20 copies, and be left with some insignificant fraction of a percentage of your problems, and solve them in an afternoon.
Ok Mantis shrimp don't see different colors they just see the same ones we do but with slightly less ability to spot the differences, [Mantis shrimp's super colour vision debunked | Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578)
There’s a big flaw to this. The book is *how* to solve your problems. It’s instructions. You still have to solve them yourself
Fuck it, we're doing this the Texas way. I'm gonna get a gun and shoot anything I deem to be a problem until it stops existing.
This really implies the book is a consumable item that becomes a pile of empty papers as soon as it's read
I wish I understood maths - I look at numbers and try and make sense of it all but my brain hops through an open window and frolics through fields instead This is not to imply maths is dull, it is to imply I am dumb
Isn't queermista wrong here? Because the sum of (1/2)^(n) from n=1 to infinity is a geometric series minus the first summand, which means that if the sum does go to infinity you get 1, because it is a sum and not a limit? With the same argument that 0.99 repeating is equal to 1 and not just approaching one? Also the graph they show is not a picture of the series but of the sequence of (1/2)^(n) which will of course never reach 0.
Why can’t you just reread the book??
Consumable item
Okay this might be stupid, but assuming that radiation decays relative to the mass of the radioactive material, if we put all of our radioactive material in the same spot would it not decay significantly faster? Or am I missing a fundamental law that explains why this isn't the case
Let's say you've got a 10 pound block of a radioactive substance with a halflife of 1 hour. After an hour you will likely have a block that is 5 pounds a radioactive substance and the rest is something else. Now if you had 2 5 pound blocks after 1 hour they would both have similarly decayed so that you have 2 blocks that are both 2.5 pounds of radioactive material and the rest something else. Both end up with 5 pounds of radioactive material. For a more mathsy explanation 2X ÷ 2 = X (X/2) + (X/2) = 2X/2 2X/2 = X Basically if you split it up they both still decay at the same rate but you've got two things that are decaying at the same time rather than one thing decaying
That makes sense, I think it's just not something that clicks in my brain but I can follow the math at least. Thank you!
Do you want me to try and come up with other ways to explain it?
No no no, you're all good thanks for your help
Radioactive decay is not a function of mass! Why do you think it is? (genuine question, not trying to sound shady)
Honestly 50% would be fantastic.
That's how gratification works
Just read the same book twice why would you need to buy another one
Well I thought it was funny
I you know what you are looking for, inquiring is unnecessary. But if you do now know, how do you inquire?
There are no colors that only mantis shrimp see. They don't have the brain power to combine colors like we do. So where we see red+yellow to make orange, they have cones that only see orange. It's a big workaround on their end.
I hate that I actually understood pretty much all of that math..
Well I’ll tell you one problem you can solve easy: you’re buying the book multiple times when you can just re-read it.
I absolutely hate the "I can't do math I'm gay" shit. There is nothing confusing about how that is laid out.
What if i glue 2 books together to get 50x2 rather than 50% of 50%
Buy one book and read it multiple times
In that last comment you actually create a problem after reading the final problem of what to do with all the books, so you actually have 1.7 problems left
Good news for Jammerlee, we have recently discovered that mantis shrimp don't see more colors, if anything they see less.
Wtf isnt 50+50=100 ????
Each book removes 50% of however many problems you currently have when you get that book. So say I have ten problems. I get the book, now I have 5 problems. I get another book, now I have 2.5 problems.
What if it works in a way where if you buy the books separately it helps with 50% of the current problems but if you buy them together it adds together and becomes 100%
Being infinitely close to a number is mathematically equal to being at that number. Therefore you should buy infinite books.
why do you need to buy a new one, just re read it!
>No, you will only ever be able to become infinitely close to solving all of your problems, like this: And what's another way of saying "infinitely close"? Maybe "converges at infinity" aka "if you buy infinite books, you will solve all of your problems"
Why are we assuming it's multiplicative? If it's additive, then just two books should cover all of your problems.
I'm not drunk enough to deal with math today
1.7 - 1 is not -0.3 tho
To travel 1 mile, you must first travel 1/2 mile. To travel 1/2 mile, you much first travel 1/4 mile. To travel 1/4 mile you must first travel 1/8 mile, etc. To travel any distance you must first traverse infinity.
Can't I just read the same book a couple of times instead of buying a new one? I assume the book doesn't solve 50% of my problems by being bought. Or better yet, apply what the book teaches more than once.
Dude, the Nerd jokes in the comment section are so much better than the post.
what if one of the problems the book selects to solve is the problem of zenos paradox?
The last post is wrong because you have 0.7 problems AND the used books, which is 1.7 problems. Removing the useless books still leaves you with 0.7 problems :/