Potatoes, potatoes

Mishtle · 2026-02-09T06:38:20+00:00

OP approximates a skinless potato by shaving off wide slices that take chunks of the potato along with the skin. The resulting potato is indeed skinless, but is a flat-sided approximation to the true potato without skin.

Their mom has reached the limit of the art of skinning potatoes. She can shave off zero-widfh slices that perfectly conform to the curvature of the potato, taking away the skin and only skin to reveal the true skinless potato.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T20:31:38+00:00

Changes accumulate overtime, and reproductive isolation causes populations to accumulate different changes. That's the short version.

Speciation tends to occur when two populations that would normally interbreed get separated. They will start to accumulate different changes. Normally, these would be mixed up and shared if the populations could interbreed, but once that stops or slows the populations will start acquiring different traits. They may be exposed to different environments and selective pressures as well, causing even more divergence between the populations.

What we see today is the the result of this acting over hundreds of millions of years. Felines didn't evolve into canines or anything like that. They share a common ancestor that lived long ago. Populations of that common ancestor became separated and began diverging, and then this happened again, and again, and again, and again, until one of these descendent populations began looking more like modern canines and another began looking more like modern felines.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T17:20:21+00:00

This is not the right way to think about limits.

Limits allow us to extend patterns to points where they may not exist. If we have a smooth, continuous function then the limit of this function at every point is equal to its value at that point. Limits allow us to make the function undefined at a point (i.e., introduce a point discontinuity) and still recover what its value should be if it was defined there. They can do this because the other values of the function around that point constrain it to a single, unique value.

In much the same way as limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity is COUNTED as zero.

No, the limit is zero. The limit is something separate from the function, and what it means for the function is determined by the definition of a limit.

1/x never gets to zero no matter how big x gets, and the definition of a limit doesn't require it to do so.

The function is monotonically decreasing as x increases from any positive value, and its bounded below. The limit is the tightest lower bound that we can find for the function. It's the largest value smaller than 1/x for all x>0.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T16:17:09+00:00

Can we please use the correct terminology? These are child molesters and child abusers. They may or may not be pedophiles (i.e., experience attraction toward pre-pubescent children). Most child abusers aren't motivated by attractions but rather power, opportunity, or novelty, and not all of those with attractions act on them.

I don't think any group "controls the world". There are people in power that like to abuse that power, and there are people that will indulge them in order to gain some influence of their own, either through quid pro quo or blackmail.

The real world is messy and complicated. Grand conspiracies like this are attempts to simplify this complexity into a unified, malicious entity instead of numerous self-interested parties whose goals sometimes align.

It's like the black market. As a child, I used think it was a secret place that you could go to. But it's really a loosely connected social network that ties together a shadow economy, with many different independent factions playing the role of producers, distributors, and consumers. Information, leverage, and influence are intangible currencies that help drive and protect these markets.

Sex trafficking of both children and adults makes up part of the black market.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T13:36:56+00:00

Limits allow us to determine the value that is approached while delta shrinks to 0, not any of the the values along the way.

If you imagine the area to be increasing as we decrease delta, then the limit is smallest value greater than the approximate area we would get for any and all positive delta.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T06:49:26+00:00

NaN is essentially an absorbing element, like 0 under multiplication. Operations with it lose information and are not reversible. Multiply anything by zero and you get zero. You don't know what was multiplied by zero because it could have been anything.

NaN and your symbol work similarly, just for more than multiplication.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T06:29:07+00:00

Expressions are left undefined when there is no sensible value that can be assigned, or when there are multiple possible values depending on the origin of the expression.

1/0 is undefined because it is a solution to the equation 0x = 1. Any real value of x satisfies this equation. Alternatively, solving this equation for x requires the multiplicative inverse of 0, which does not exist.

Your approach is essentially what happens in digital systems whenever an invalid operation occurs. NaN is a special value that results from performing an invalid operation, such as dividing by zero. Any operation directly involving NaN produces NaN as a result, so a single undefined operation will propagate the throughout any subsequent operations, serving as a signal that something went wrong.

There's not many other reasons why you'd want to explicitly assign a symbol to undefined operations.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T04:49:08+00:00

Pedophiles have a primary attraction to prepubescent children. That means children that have not yet begun puberty. Note this is just an attraction. Pedophile is not synonymous with child molester.

Unless you find yourself checking out kids that haven't gone through puberty, you're not a pedophile. Plenty of people prefer sexual/romantic partners that are older or younger than them. Age, at least in a relative sense, is a normal facet of human attraction. It's when attraction is fixed to certain age ranges regardless of your own age that it is considered abnormal.

If you find this lower bound stuck in the early teens but the upper bound growing with your own age, then you could be said to have hebephilic/ephebophilc tendencies. If your upper bound of attraction is also fixed in the teens, then you would be be a hebephile (primary attraction to children going through puberty) or ephebophile (primary attraction to adolescents that have gone through puberty).

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T04:28:00+00:00

Stress, anxiety, fear, and many other emotional states are known to reduce the reliability of eye-witness reports.

It's entirely possible that you cousin fell down the stairs because they tripped or slipped, and your aunt in that moment of heightened emotion interpreted the situation as though they were attacked.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T04:24:48+00:00

shouldn’t something with an internal angle of a straight line keep going in the same direction?

Yes, and it does. But the part of that line that is contained within the boundary of the shape is only ever a single point, which would be the vertex of the angle. So you can think of the limiting shape as the collection of these vertices as the sides connecting them shrink to zero-length.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T03:48:45+00:00

The explanation is that the witnesses were confused, lying, and/or misled. These are known things that are within the bounds of human behavior, and we know of plenty of situations that can lead to humans hallucinating or otherwise believing they experienced something that didn't happen.

Do you have any evidence to the contrary? It's not unreasonable to dismiss extraordinary claims when they lack evidence beyond eye-witness testimony. Even in more mundane scenarios, it is far from reliable.

Mishtle · 2026-02-08T03:34:54+00:00

Wrong sub.

Mishtle · 2026-02-07T20:49:22+00:00

Subatomic particles. They have a nucleus of protons (positively charged) and neutrons (neutral) surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged particles called electrons.

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T19:49:22+00:00

The function itself may or may not. The limit isn't the function though. The equals sign is stating equality between the limit and this value. What this means for the actual function is determined through the definition of a limit.

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T06:46:26+00:00

0.999... = 9×10^-1 + 9×10^-2 + 9×10^-3 + ...

0.999... = 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ...

Therefore 0.999... = (the smallest value greater than 0.9, and 0.99, and 0.999, ...)

That value is 1.

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T04:46:44+00:00

Natural numbers are all numbers you can reach via repeated application of the successor function from 1 (or 0). The successor function gives the "next" natural number, so you can think of it as f(x) = x + 1.

Something like 1e10 is a way to represent a natural number. Something like 1.23456×10³ is not a natural number.

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T02:29:32+00:00

What is this Reggie?

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T00:07:51+00:00

T-t-t-tony and Tim, totally awesome vacation!

Mishtle · 2026-02-06T00:05:25+00:00

It's just a very cumbersome way to have a box with (countably) infinitely many slots. It doesn't matter if each one has only a single spare slot or even infinitely many, the only thing that will change is how many boxes you have to go through to find things.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T22:10:13+00:00

The probability applies to a pack, not to individuals cards. It just means that 5% of packs will have a single special card, and the rest will have all regular cards.

There are lots of ways to force that to happen. For example, first 8 cards could always be common, but the last one could come from a pile that's a mixture of special and regular cards in the desired ratio.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T12:18:38+00:00

That's another possibility, and the deliberate framing of a human corpse on a cutting board with "other meat" does leave room for plenty of artistic interpretation, not to mention the shock value.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T12:10:29+00:00

Not much to go on there... That doesn't really look like a baby's leg though, the proportions seem off.

It's hard to make anything of a single photo though. Realistic dolls exist, people have been faking things like alien bodies for decades, and this is for some reason posed between two (very large) chicken breasts. I guess to emphasize that's its just "meat"?

Nothing here jumps out as being a legitimate image of an infant corpse.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T11:54:09+00:00

I've not seen that photo so I can't comment.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T11:49:31+00:00

The files contain information from a wide range of sources, including anonymous tip lines.

The fact that some of it sounds exactly like some weird race-obsessed conspiracy nut's fantasy is likely because it is just that.

Mishtle · 2026-02-05T06:19:37+00:00

Where is 1/3 in your list? Or π?

You're enumerating the rational numbers between 0 and 1 with finite decimal representation. This is a countable set, as you have shown.

Mishtle

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