christian

christian, 1 month ago

I don’t think even that’s true. I think any potential consequences this story making the news could possibly incite have already been set in motion from what’s already been in the news the past few months. They won’t take any additional hit from one more thing added to the pile, but this being in the news will make activists think twice about risking their lives to provide aid.

christian, 1 month ago

Really rough shift from NAK there.

christian, 1 month ago

I think what the number 44 specifically would look like was probably way outside the radar of whoever designed that font. Yeah, it looks similar, but even noticing that I still really wouldn’t have assumed that someone wearing intends it as a nazi symbol. Is there really a need to announce a ban and solidify that it will be one? Just change the damn font going forward. Are they going to ban 88 too?

christian, 1 month ago

Your last paragraph was pretty much where I was a couple years ago. I don’t remember who helped clarify this for me, but housing maintenance is very much a real job and deserves the same respect and compensation as any real job, but it can very easily be disjoint from being a landlord. Making money from owning the housing other people live in is distinct from maintaining that housing, and just because several people do both things doesn’t mean that we should treat them as the same job.

christian, 1 month ago

Like fifteen years ago I would buy physical books, I still have a huge collection. I was getting really into math and would buy textbooks. Sometimes they could be pricey, but for a good hardcover, it can really be worth it if you’re coming back to it a lot.

Very early 2010s the amazon books became awful overnight. You could pay $70 for a hardcover and the damn thing would start falling apart a few days into reading it. I really don’t think I’m hard on my books, I treat them with care. These things just couldn’t handle normal wear for even a short amount of time. Paperbacks were even less reliable and only slightly less expensive. So I completely ditched amazon and started ordering books directly from the publishers. Normally they’d be like $10-15 more than on amazon, but it’s worth it, they weren’t falling apart.

Probably around 2012 I finished reading volume 2 of Francis Borceux’s “Handbook of Categorical Algebra”. Those first two volumes are genuinely some of the best math books I’ve ever gone through, it took me like a year each though. Volume 3 was very expensive to get from the publisher, I think it was over $160, but since I had gotten so much mileage out of the first two I decided I wanted to just pony up. It was clear as soon as it arrived that it was a piece of shit, and did start falling apart immediately. I left emails and phone calls and they just ghosted me and I couldn’t figure out a way to get my money back. That was the last book I bought for like a full decade, and I don’t think I’ve made a book purchase from anywhere over $15 since.

Pretty sure that was Cambridge University Press, and I had purchased something else (although much much cheaper) from them the year before that was good quality.

I still greatly prefer having a physical copy, but I pirate almost everything I can’t find in a library now.

christian, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

it takes 162 pages to formally prove that 1+1=2

This is ridiculously backwards, Whitehead and Russell’s motivation for writing the PM was to come up with a set of axioms and deductive rules that the entirety of mathematics could be derived from. When they worked out their proof that 1 + 1 = 2, it didn’t tell the world that now 1 + 1 = 2 is now officially a fact, it told the world that the logic and axioms they built were enough to be capable of deducing some very simple facts that we’ve already been confident are true. The hope was that maybe if we keep working at this and modifying our rules when need be, we’ll be able to get a set of axioms and inference rules that are sufficient to determine the truth of any mathematical question. Calling that a proof that 1 + 1 = 2 would be saying their brand new theory was somehow more valid and more fundamental than addition of natural numbers.

A few years later Gödel came along and completely obliterated any hope of a project like that succeeding, and today literally no one thinks of the PM as more than a historical curiosity. (If you actually wanted to prove 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles today, you’d use the Peano axioms for the naturals: S0 + S0 = S(S0 + 0) = SS0, done.)

That’s a tangent from the actual topic but I feel compelled to call it out.

Getting back on track, probably 90% of the points I give on exams are for partial credit, because there need to be distinctions between having no clue, knowing where to start and getting stuck, understanding essentially every meaningful step but then writing 1 + 1 = 3 to wrap up, etc. I’m grading on both their ability to solve problems and their ability to communicate their ideas. Both are equally important.

This is very controversial, but I don’t go out of my way at all to worry about cheating. I don’t want to play policeman and teach with the mindset that my students are potential criminals. Even if I’m 99% sure a student is cheating, if I’m in the profession long enough I’ll eventually hit that 1% where I’m giving a decent student an undeservedly hard time. I’m not paid anywhere near enough for it to be worth having a more adversarial relationship with my students.

I had a student earlier this month where it looked like he probably snuck out his phone for an exam. I just wrote a note on those problems that I couldn’t follow his work and wasn’t comfortable giving points for work I don’t understand, please walk me through your solutions for the points back. I told him this verbally as well when I handed it back to him as well. He never took me up on that, but it feels more humanizing than just calling him a cheater. I think OP is getting at something similar, but I think there’s value in not phrasing it in an accusatory way.

Being somewhat sympathetic to OP though, there is a sense of feeling insulted when a student puts very little effort into pretending they’re not cheating. I try not to take it as an affront to me personally and imagine that they do the same for all their instructors, but I do feel kind of peeved sometimes.

christian, 1 month ago

But being charitable to the person you’re responding to, they twice said explicitly that they didn’t understand what was being said and asked for elaboration and both times got a reply that more or less suggested that they didn’t understand because they’re illiterate. At some point the reaction becomes understandable.

edit: different poster from the first two, but I think they were sympathizing with the other person

christian, 1 month ago

Somewhere in here there’s a joke about the cocaine laced with fentanyl that I keep getting told is a massive problem that requires more police funding to deal with.

The feds can’t imprison me for making cocaine “too entertaining”!

christian, 1 month ago

Oh, neat, these are interesting. I love that Bruce agrees to give an interview in exchange for coffee and donuts.

Carbery really does seem to be meshing well with the team. I understood that there was a high chance he’d get the team more in sync as long as he was given more time to get the players accustomed to the system he was trying to implement, so I did think that it was unlikely the disastrous start to the season would just continue, but he’s got them playing now at a higher level than I thought he could reach by the end of year 1. With that said, I think their good play now is to some degree also an indictment on how badly Laviolette had lost the room.

I live in the Detroit area now, so I likely won’t ever attend one of these myself, but thanks for sharing.

christian, 1 month ago

Meant to reply to this earlier but lost track - I’m skeptical it’s really ever an intentional decision, maybe a rare case or two, but I’d guess almost never. I think confidence in sports is not just a cliche and it has a real effect on performance. Players do care about playing well and will really try to follow through, but if they don’t have faith it’s going to be more difficult. If you really believe your playstyle is good enough to get your team wins on a consistent basis, you’ll have an easier time executing, less hesitation and less overthinking. A mistake can just be a mistake and not another piece of evidence that this isn’t working for us.

With a new coach, they can say “this shit isn’t working” but can be more open to the idea that if they keep pushing maybe the coach’s ideas will stick more. They’re more open to giving it an honest chance, even if it’s not working now. “Losing the room” means that the players are all thinking “this shit isn’t working” and have lost trust in the coach’s ability to get anything working, especially if the coach has a specific system they’re good at implementing and isn’t really interested in deviating too much from that.

In Kuznetsov’s Russian-language interview the past offseason where he went scorched-earth on Laviolette, he basically said that in that final year it was a constant fight for the players to be listened to. We haven’t heard Laviolette’s perspective on this, so maybe it’s fiction or sour grapes, but I’m inclined to believe it. I’m even inclined to believe he was speaking for more people in that locker room than just himself.

He said that last season the players pushed very hard for system changes and it took a confrontation where many players approached him together before he was willing to cave, and the response was that they went something like 15-2 over the remainder of that December and got back into playoff position. He said that when Backstrom and Wilson returned, the team was told they need to get back to playing “playoff hockey” to be ready for the upcoming grind, and the discussion about the systems was ended.

My point here is that I don’t think they sucked the rest of the season because they were trying to punish the coach, I think it was because the system they had returned to had stopped getting results, and they had seen that a system that does get results was possible but was being avoided. No one had faith they were going to win games consistently returning to a system that hadn’t been great for them earlier that year. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not a deliberate decision.

christian, 1 month ago

NYR is a lot worse to me because we’re not likely to make it out of the first round whatever happens, but losing to a Laviolette-coached rangers team would get under my skin for a good while afterwards.

christian, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Keeping it 0-0 after the second was working a miracle by Charlie. Even ignoring winning or losing, I am so glad they woke up in the third so he could complete the shutout.

Looking at players who have played in over half the current season, looks like Ovechkin is fifth in terms of age. Just wild to see the old man going berserk again.

christian, 2 months ago

Not his first time causing a goal reversal by interfering with the goalie in that exact spot.

christian, 2 months ago

A game with 12 goals in regulation that ends by a shootout with nine consecutive saves is silly. I’m kind of surprised we pulled it off, I kept thinking we were going to blow it. When it went to overtime I was like 90% chance 92 scores here.

christian, 2 months ago

Every time he pulls this shit it makes me tempted to stop watching. I’ve long been past the point where I care to form an opinion on whether this incident or that incident was intentional or justified or whatever. It makes hockey less fun for me either way.

christian, 2 months ago

That’s a crazy stat. Are all of the league’s bottom feeders good overtime teams? I feel like that’s the only explanation because it’s so hard for me to imagine San Jose or Chicago matching their opponents for goals over the course of almost seventy first (or second, or third) periods.

christian, 2 months ago

Wooooooooo

christian, 2 months ago

I kind of feel for Vancouver on that blown icing before our first goal, but I’ll take it. Great game overall, and we are inexplicably now in a playoff position by points percentage (not by points though).

christian, 2 months ago

I’d like to see them make it anyway. Good experience for the young guys and maybe we could try to make a little more progress next year. With that said, the odds are against us making it in.

christian, 2 months ago

I’m skeptical this was actually taken out of context. Trump had an interview about two years ago where he leveled this exact accusation against Putin. I really recommend watching this short clip for context, it’s still hard to believe most Americans aren’t aware of what was said here.

christian, 2 months ago

I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.

You don’t see this statement as dogmatic? How do you feel confident in this other than just a feeling?

The majority of the time the articles would require actual expertise to make that evaluation with confidence. An individual can take a few minutes to verify the sources, but for so many topics it’s not realistic to rule out omissions of sources that should be well-known, or even rule out that a source given provides an important broader context somewhere nearby that should be mentioned in the article but isn’t. Can you be sure that the author is trustworthy on this subject? It’s not enough to just check a single page mentioned in a book while ignoring the rest of the book and any context surrounding the author.

An expert on a very specialized topic could weigh with accuracy in on whether the wikipedia articles on their subject is well-researched and sourced, but that still won’t mean they can extrapolate their conclusion to other articles.

christian, 2 months ago

Their site is officially launching on (unfortunately) April 1st.

Realistically that shouldn’t have a big impact, but I would think that choosing any other day (April 2?) would be so painless that they would have done it anyway.

I don’t live in the DMV anymore, but I grew up in Frederick County. Good luck dude.

christian, 2 months ago

This is a disgustingly cynical interpretation and I really wish it wasn’t realistic.

christian, 2 months ago

Just want to say that I appreciate you guys putting in the effort to mod. I was hoping for a few years to see a caps community here, but I never started anything because I thought I would be the only one posting (I still think that this easily could have been true my first three years here), but more than that I just didn’t want the responsibility for that if something did get going.