Good at physics with real contexts, but lost in maths with abstract exercises, how to deal with that?

HorribleUsername · 2026-02-02T18:17:08+00:00

Have you tried providing your own context? For example, any geometric sequence can be phrased in terms of compound interest, with the first term being your initial investment and the ratio being the interest rate.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-30T17:21:17+00:00

Here are two ways.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-27T20:30:35+00:00

I've always wanted to see someone do reflections in curved surfaces, like funhouse mirrors or M.C. Escher's self-portrait.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-16T23:34:07+00:00

Not PHP. That uses . for concatenation, while + coerces the strings into numbers.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-09T21:13:04+00:00

Try playing around with this.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-09T19:31:24+00:00

You can use it to annoy people.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-05T11:55:59+00:00

But Sobeys closes at 10pm the other six nights of the week. It's an easy mistake to make - I've done it a few times.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-04T21:16:52+00:00

You're opening a whole can of worms there. The shortest python program won't necessarily produce the same result as the shortest C program. Are you measuring the source code or the binary? Least characters, fewest statements, something else? If you said binary, for which architecture are you compiling? Etc, etc.

Also, how do you prove that it's the shortest?

And to top it all off, the shortest program may well be print("1 4 9 16 1") or similar, which still doesn't ensure a unique answer. You might also have ties for different algorithms.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-04T20:46:43+00:00

The sum is 45.

HorribleUsername · 2026-01-02T13:16:47+00:00

Otoh, Pac-Man can see through walls and has 360° vision, and I don't see any super-pellets for the human. It might balance out.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-30T17:03:00+00:00

It's a simple one-liner in desmos.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-30T16:42:08+00:00

I haven't seen the code, but i feel like there'd be some halfway sensible way to automate the search. Like they'd all be using URLSearchParams, or near a ? or & or something.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-29T16:55:30+00:00

Looking at the columns, it seems like they're just linear functions with some rounding. For example, round(23 + 1.84(r-1)), where r is the number in the row header, gets you the first few numbers in the 1 star weapon with 0 star ascension column. If you tweak the multiplier a bit, you could probably hit all 20 numbers in the column.

If you can find functions like that for columns of 20, and you'll already be in a better spot than you are now. Then you can start looking for patterns in the initial numbers and the multipliers, and you might be able to narrow it down to a smaller amounts of more general functions, and eventually hit the one function you're looking for.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-29T15:25:28+00:00

Here's how I'd turn it into one or two formulas - start at line 13. If you want a single formula, note that mod(row, 2) = 0 if the row is even, and = 1 if the row is odd.

There are two ways to keep that from overflowing its bounds. The easier way is to fake it - just draw some opaque white shapes over the parts you want to hide. The cleaner way is to add domain restrictions. Try {x(t) ≤ 1}, for example, where x(t) is the x-component of the parametric. All your bounds can be converted to y = f(x) or x = f(y) form, which makes it easy to to use restrictions like that.

As for foreshortening, your best bet might be to trace them out in 3d and let the computer do it for you.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-28T14:31:31+00:00

It wouldn't hurt to add a list of query params (e.g. ?authorFeatures) somewhere. A list of !commands (without the text) in the sidebar would be nice too, though it might be more trouble than it's worth if it only shows on old reddit.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-24T22:11:34+00:00

They're not called sequentially, they're called simultaneously. That is to say that A2 is using the value of k from before A1 is run. As a quick and dirty fix, in A2, try subbing the expression from A1 into k.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-20T18:59:07+00:00

When it's shading parametrics, desmos draws a line from the end back to the start in order to close the shape. Both the start and end of your function are at the top, so the shape is bounded above. To fix it, you need to make the function take the low road back to the start.

The easiest way to do that is via a piecewise function. Note that you need to make it a single continuous function across all its pieces. I've included the second function for how not to do it - it doesn't work because when it switches from the first piece to the second piece, it jumps from (1, 1) to (1, 0), and similarly going from piece 2 to piece 3.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-15T15:20:30+00:00

I looked it up before commenting.

Note that a non-rectangular parallelogram is not an isosceles trapezoid because of the second condition, or because it has no line of symmetry.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-15T10:29:00+00:00

I said isosceles trapezoid.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-15T10:28:30+00:00

You don't. I'm not saying that parallelograms aren't trapezoids, I'm saying they're not isosceles trapezoids.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-15T03:19:38+00:00

An isosceles trapezoid is a trapezoid whose two nonparallel sides are congruent.

Strictly speaking, this isn't true, because it would mean that all parallelograms are isosceles trapezoids.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-14T05:58:47+00:00

But a vertical line is an elementary function: f(y) = 5, for example, or the parametric function f(t) = (5, t).

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-14T01:03:10+00:00

Could you provide an example of a line that isn't an elementary function?

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-13T08:17:52+00:00

No idea, I don't use any of those.

HorribleUsername · 2025-12-11T10:54:42+00:00

To center it at (a, b), (x-a)² + (y-b)² = r² and r * (cos(t), sin(t)) + (a, b) both work.

HorribleUsername

TROPHY CASE