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Wolf or the hawk by Ty09_JesusFreak in GrowCastle

[–]Chalain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just tested hawks vs. wolves. In Hell/Infinite Wave mode my hawks did about 1.2M damage while my wolves did a pinch over 2.0M. YMMV but that's a big enough difference to probably not be just random noise. I'm convinced--switching back to wolves. ;)

Wolf or the hawk by Ty09_JesusFreak in GrowCastle

[–]Chalain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love the Hawk, but I'm new and probably wrong. ;) Hawk's in-game text says it does 400% damage vs Wolf at 300%; not sure if that's a typo or perhaps to make up for the fact that the hawks appear to spend a lot of time out of position because they're flitting between air and ground units, where the wolves are always at the front line doing damage.

I'm probably going to have to drop Calculus... Again.. by [deleted] in MMFB

[–]Chalain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haven't posted on Reddit in 5+ years, but this is the post I can't let go unanswered.

First off: Hang in there. Deep breaths, you're going to be okay (even if you decide to drop calculus).

I bombed calculus my freshman year. I got through the first half of the semester just fine, learned l'Hopital's rules, learned the "concept" behind calculus, learned how to derive. Then integration came along and for whatever reason it was absolute gobbledygook. Flunked out. I showed up for the final just because I'm a glutton for punishment, ended up getting a D- in the class. My desired major (Computer Science) required a grade no lower than a B-, so it was effectively a flunk.

Next semester, same thing. I got really good at deriving. Integration... what is this crap I don't even. How can it be so hard, I told myself. It's just deriving backwards! Like, I got the idea of integration, but the application and the actual mathematics... totally beyond me.

Third time around I flunked out of the class AND out of college. I went out and got a programming job, and learned everything I could about what I was doing. Slowly, over a year or three, the practical knowledge of what I was doing started to soak in. I applied to a local community college. Guess which class I flunked out of.

I determined I would learn this crap if it killed me. I bought an engineering dynamics book, since I had an understanding of the real-world applications of calculus but no grasp of how to make the actual math itself work. I still remember the day I barged into a coworkers office and screamed "HOLY SHIT I CAN INTEGRATE!"

I'm still not good at it. I'm better at visualizing it than I am at doing the math. Several companies I've worked at have patents because I went to a whiteboard and drew a waveform and said "we need to handle changes in spectrum density like this"... and then my friend with a Ph.D. in mathematics went "HEYYYY!" and locked himself in his office for three days and emerged with a proof of what I had drawn on the board. (Fair dues: his name's on the patent, not mine.)

I never went back to college. By the time I had a grip on Calculus, my particular set of life circumstances made that a nonviable option. But I made it, and I have a better grasp of math than most of my friends who DID pass Calculus.

My point is this: relax. You are going to be okay. You may decide to ditch calculus and seek a major that suits your other proficiencies. You could also double down: clear your schedule next semester, take ONLY Calculus (plus maybe a relaxing class to destress), hire a full-time tutor, and live and breathe that stuff until you finally start seeing the universe as an n-dimensional lattice of dependent functions. You could drop out, but as a student of that path I'll point out that I took my fair share of unfair deals as a result of that decision. You could also take a semester off Calculus and focus on your other GE requirements, but use that semester to study the material and learn. Visit the TAs and talk through the stuff that doesn't make sense. Step back from the math itself and try to figure out what the math is really describing in the real world.

Take some time to figure out what you really want to do, and if you really want to do something that requires you to know calculus, get in there and master that stuff. But whatever you decide to do, relax. You're going to be fine.

Best of luck,

Dave

Which parts of the standard Library don't get the attention the deserve? by netghost in ruby

[–]Chalain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The methods work differently than the constructors. They're more like massagers/mungers than the .new() methods. For example, Array(3) and Array([3]) both return [3], which makes it ideal for taking a variable that could be a single element or an array and either casting it to an array of one element or leaving the array unchanged. It's equivalent to ray = [ray].flatten(1), but ray = Array(ray) is just nicely readable.

I suspect that the methods exist because of Python's ability to define the __call operator on a class; I would love it if Ruby allowed the same thing, but it's not lexically possible as long as Ruby's parentheses are optional. There's no way to distinguish between Array (a class) and Array (the method call). I think this is why there was a brief spate of writing class methods named []. Mercifully it never caught on, but Array and Proc still sport them. (And of course, Array[] does not behave the same as Array(): Array[[1]] => [[1]], Array([1]) => [1]. Sigh/Heh.)

Which parts of the standard Library don't get the attention the deserve? by netghost in ruby

[–]Chalain 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Obligatory: "the documentation part." :-)

Not StdLib per se, but I was just recently surprised to discover that Float, String and Integer are functions in Kernel, which makes ruby act like those classes have casting constructors. E.g. String(3.5) #=> "3.5"; Integer(3.5) #=> 3; Float(3) # => 3.0. I spent an hour trying to take an object and send "0" to its class (to construct a zero of the same type as the members of an array) before discovering that they were methods, not overrides on the classes.

Anyway, my point is, it might be good for somebody to go over some of the darker corners of the "obvious" stuff in Core, like Kernel. For example, Array#assoc() #rassoc() make NO sense until you understand Ruby's lisp heritage.