impendia

29 ms·

301.
by impendia 6y ago
> the large problem is the university expects you to use books from well known publishers Interesting, and disturbing. I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-l
302.
by impendia 6y ago
Nitpick: this blog post makes an incorrect statement, namely that the domain of the inverse tangent function is -pi/2 to pi/2. The domain of a function is the set of all possible inputs . In particular, the domain of the invers
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by impendia 6y ago
> Oh and 'cups', who came up with that? A cup is 8 oz., unless you're measuring coffee, in which case it's 5 oz. instead. I forever got confused when buying coffee makers...
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by impendia 6y ago
> I can't think of a community that "got better" when its best earners left. It's just such backwards thinking. Among other things, rents seem likely to go down, which will make a huge difference to many people's
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by impendia 6y ago
> Takeaway.com and others add a clause in their contract against putting such business cards in their order? Possibly, buried in the fine print somewhere, but enforced by whom? Aside from the restaurants, only the drivers will see the fo
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by impendia 6y ago
After reading the article I don't feel particularly inclined to take Grubhub at their word.
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by impendia 6y ago
Hi mlang, One of the things I really like about this site is that personal attacks on others are a strict taboo. It seems increasingly common on the Internet to believe that personal attacks are okay, in some cases even virtuous. To each th
308.
by impendia 6y ago
At the rate we're going now, many of the people taking the most risks will be infected with the disease, if they haven't been already. Prior infection has largely the same effect as a vaccine. I agree with you. We're in for a
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by impendia 6y ago
I believe that, in different conditions, we should reasonably ask that more people be tested over a longer period of time. But Covid is wracking absolute havoc on people's health, on the economy, and on everyone's lives. Personall
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by impendia 6y ago
I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run
311.
by impendia 6y ago
I grew up in Durham, NC, near Cary. The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy
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by impendia 6y ago
Wait, he was just taking phone calls in a parked car? Is there something objectionable with that? If my neighbors called the police on me for that, my first thought wouldn't be to bake pie for them.
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by impendia 6y ago
Yes. One has the identity: 1/(1 - x - x^2) = 1 + x + 2x^2 + 3x^3 + ... where the Fibonacci numbers are the coefficients on the right. Try writing it out! The basic idea is that because F_n = F_{n - 1} + F_{n - 2}, everything will neatl
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by impendia 6y ago
> It's the same in Academia though. Haha, interesting analogy! (Math professor here.) I'd say in many ways it's the same, but with one key difference. While administrators are fighting to push their visions, many faculty m
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by impendia 6y ago
Very good question. This is difficult. One way to do this is to participate on Math Stack Exchange: https://math.stackexchange.com/ I'd recommend not only asking, but also answering others' questions. It's no
316.
by impendia 6y ago
I am a math professor. In my observation, there is a huge amount of material available on the web, but it isn't very centralized -- especially at the upper levels. My advice would be to get a book on any topic which interests you, re
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by impendia 6y ago
Rely on them? I agree, certainly not. But at least they describe a plausible scenario.
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by impendia 6y ago
Herd immunity is relative. For example, I'm a professor at the University of South Carolina. Here we've had around 2,500 confirmed Covid cases, and perhaps around 10,000 cases in actuality. Nearly all of them happened in the first
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by impendia 6y ago
Various experts are predicting that the winter will be quite bad. See for example: https://covid19.healthdata.org/global?view=infections-testin... https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view
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by impendia 6y ago
I've always been a bit bewildered by notifications. I've had so many websites encourage me to sign up -- appealing to my fear that someone, somewhere, might write a blog post and I wouldn't know it right away. I couldn't
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by impendia 6y ago
I'm an academic mathematician who has used Discord professionally, in at least two contexts: 1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebra
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by impendia 6y ago
I think what people sense -- and this is related to the "Bayesian vs. frequentist" debate -- is that an election is not really a random event. The source of uncertainty is different. The Card Sharks example is a genuinely random
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by impendia 6y ago
> if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks... I developed and taught an entire undergraduate math class on the mathematics of game shows. https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf Muc
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by impendia 6y ago
Not generally, but I have occasionally done it when eating something truly delicious.
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by impendia 6y ago
I recently gave a 1-star review to Adobe Acrobat Reader, when it interrupted me to ask for an App Store rating. If I were using an app made my some small, scrappy developer, then there is no way I'd do this. It would feel rude, and I&#
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by impendia 6y ago
> There's the indie games, where great ideas are implemented on low budget. +1 for this. The best game I recently played was Return of the Obra Dinn , which incredibly seems to have been an essentially one-man effort: Lucas Pope wr
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by impendia 6y ago
> aren't flaws of PDF transparent? Ummmmm... no. Not really. > better suited for automated processing I write my papers for other humans. I'm dimly aware that there are a variety of "analytics" companies that are t
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by impendia 6y ago
This past weekend, I co-organized and co-hosted a virtual conference in number theory: https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/pajamas.html I found it to be a very worthwhile experience. We had around 100 participants, arou
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by impendia 6y ago
I'm a research mathematician, and I use LaTeX/PDF for everything I write. I'm happy with it, and so is virtually everyone I know. The only complaint I've heard, which strikes me as serious, is that PDF documents pose acc
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by impendia 6y ago
> What's troubling you here ? Given that many people are wearing masks, avoiding social gatherings or public places, practicing social distancing, and/or being meticulous about handwashing, one might expect the incidence of inf

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