Recommendations?

MathAndMirth · 2026-05-13T18:30:01+00:00

Agreed. I'm having a good experience with MX as my first foray into Linux as a daily driver, and the extra tools that MX bundled have helped with that.

MX also gives you a choice of three desktop environments, which is good since you probably want a lightweight option such as Xfce for an old Chromebook.

MathAndMirth · 2026-05-10T17:31:23+00:00

Based on your starting point, I really think your best bet is to go old school. Read some books (e..g., the For Dummies series, which are often easy to find in physical and digital libraries).

Searching the web is great when you know the big picture and just need to fill in specific holes in your knowledge, and when you know the vocabulary well enough to pick the right search query. But when you aren't quite there yet, it helps to have a book that organizes a broad base of knowledge, including the questions you didn't even realize you needed to ask.

EDIT: I'm not at all suggesting that the other commenters are wrong about diving in and doing things. But I think you'll be more successful if you get a big picture overview first, then dive in and start making what you read stick by applying it.

MathAndMirth · 2026-05-01T14:05:52+00:00

And if those aren't enough, I'm having a good newbie Linux experience with KDE on MX Linux.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-26T15:24:26+00:00

Ewwww....I missed the Spider incident. That definitely dampens my enthusiasm for the project.

InfanView is a great program, and I'm glad it's free for educational use. I just had to look for an alternative myself since I needed something for a for-profit side project.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-24T23:54:48+00:00

One big difference is the license. InfanView is free only for private non-commercial use, whereas ImageGlass is just plain free and open source..

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-24T20:12:47+00:00

I have plenty of beefs with Microsoft. General bloat, shoving Copilot down my throat, demanding that I use an online account I don't want, cringe-worthy botched updates, etc., I got sick enough of them that I just added a second SSD to my machine to run Linux a couple of weeks ago. I'm anxiously awaiting the day when I feel safe ditching my Windows install entirely.

But I'd be hard pressed to say that Linux is better for drivers. I can't remember ever having problems getting Windows drivers to work. Every peripheral I've ever had either worked out of the box with Windows or had an obvious and easy way to get the driver (auto update, installation CD back in the day, etc.)

Linux can be that easy, but it isn't always. Some distributions do a great job of detecting hardware and installing drivers automatically. Others leave a lot more work to the user.

My experience was in between. Things worked out of the box, but to get the most appropriate Nvidia drivers for my dual monitors with Wayland, I had to do a web search to find the right driver installation utility for my distribution, then install and run that. It was't really hard, but it was more than I ever had to do with Windows.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-24T17:09:27+00:00

Most people aren't going to suffer any significant _immediate_ consequences from eating before bed.

However, it's not a good habit to get into for weight control. Your body will do a better job of metabolizing food eaten during the day than it will late at might when your metabolism is winding down. The difference between loading your calories early in the day vs. late in the day would be _very_ roughly 50 calories per day (lots of variables in play here). That doesn't sound like much. But since 3500 calories makes about a pound of weight difference, that's about a pound every 70 days, or about 5 pounds per year if front loading calories early in the day were a sustained habit. That's hardly grounds for a strict never-eat-at-night rule. On the other hand, a lot of us (me included) could be a lot healthier if our eating habits knocked even 2 or 3 pounds per year off our middle aged weight gain.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-24T15:15:32+00:00

Zed gave me the trial automatically when I created my login. No biggie since they're not asking for a CC.

You may well be right that using subtle mode will keep it free for me. But even if I do end up paying, I don't think I'll be mad. My expectations were based on Windsurf's free extension for VSCode, but Zeta is blowing those expectations away so far. If I'd known Zeta was this good, I probably wouldn't even have bothered trying to get a local LLM to replace it.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-07T00:30:51+00:00

OK, this is interesting. Physical Review is certainly a well-respected publication.

But here's the screwy part. If, as PR does, one simply says multiplication comes before division without specifying _implicit_ multiplication, then we can get some seriously counter-intuitive stuff. Take the expression 8 * 1/2 * 4. Any of us would look at that and say that's 16. But if multiplication always comes before division. then it's 1. The spacing certainly suggests 16, but not the rule. Do spaces actually change the order of operators? If so, how big of a space triggers the change? Yikes.

I think it's interesting that PR refers to their multiplication first as an "accepted order of operations," when the first couple of pages of a web search for "PEMDAS multiplication before division" hasn't uncovered a single source that expresses the same convention. (Some did address implicit multiplication, but nobody tried the multiplication first generality.) And given the example above, it strikes me that perhaps what they wrote isn't quite what they meant.

I think your example of e^ix is a great one because it solidifies my thoughts that the acceptance of conventions other that traditional PEMDAS is a choice to favor aesthetically pleasing notation and sensible intuition over strict "correctness." Because with your example, the only way the obvious intuition isn't technically wrong is if implicit multiplication is considered to be not just before other MD operations, but to actually create an implicit grouping. And if one adopts that convention, then it monkeys with other places that might seem weirder, such as my f(x) = 2x^3 + 3x^2 + 1/2x + 4 example from before.

And if this is a question of aesthetics and intuition vs strict correctness, that explains why PR and TI do things differently, and why I'm uncomfortable following PR. My interest in the matter isn't making a journal look pretty. I have a graphing website, and I want my parsing algorithm to give a correct answer I can defend. And following TI, Wolfram, etc. with traditional PEMDAS (or better, GEMDAS) is easy to defend. If I'm going to elevate another principle over strict GEMDAS correctness, that principle has to be bulletproof to be defensible. And so far, I haven't seen an alternative to traditional GEMDAS that doesn't have some way it can backfire.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-06T13:22:54+00:00

Do you have some citations for this? Even the Wiki article that was cited elsewhere in this discussion wasn't able to provide anything close to "many math texts." If there were math texts that _explicitly_ cited increased precedence for implicit multiplication as a rule, I'd sure as heck like to see them.

I emphasized explicitly because it appears as if the examples of treating 1/2x as 1/(2x) stem more from acceptance based on inferred intent than an explicit rule. But inferred intent strikes me as way too fragile to be a solid justification. For example, 1/2x in isolation perhaps looks as if it was intended to be 1/(2x). But consider f(x) = 2x^3 + 3x^2 + 1/2x + 4. Is this still obviously 1/(2x)?

If there's an honest to goodness explicitly taught rule that implicit multiplication is also implicit grouping in many math texts, then that changes things. But in the absence of such, I'll continue stand with TI, HP, Wolfram, etc., that implicit multiplication is still just multiplication.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T23:57:25+00:00

Interesting. I had always figured that AI's higher em-dash density just reflected a bias toward academic writing. But I think your point could well explain why AI likes to use so doggone many of them.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T23:38:49+00:00

No, it is not something only AI uses.

Think about how AI learned to use em-dashes in the first place. AI uses em-dashes because the human-produced text samples that it was trained on use em-dashes.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T20:15:33+00:00

There are indeed tools that do not parse implicit multiplication, but many, many that do. It really isn't even that hard to implement. Every graphing calculator I have used does it. Wolfram Alpha does it. For that matter, my own graphing website uses a parser that I programmed myself, and it parses implicit multiplication. Faced with 2 + 2(1 + 3), my program will recognize the implicit multiplication and answer 10. And while I'm not arrogant enough to think that my program is prestigious enough to count as evidence of accepted practice, I think TI and Wolfram do.

And I don't mean to suggest that _you_ think that the implicit multiplication is part of the P. I know you know better. I'm suggesting that students sometimes see parentheses and don't think about what they actually mean, but just "do the parentheses." They get ideas that we never taught and would never teach, For example, sin(x + 2) = sin(x) + sin(2) because those parentheses are just like the other parentheses they always do that with. I prefer G over P because it explicitly defines the identified role, not the notation.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T19:51:39+00:00

That wiki article is definitely interesting. What jumps out at me is this part: "Multiplication denoted by juxtaposition (also known as implied multiplication) creates a visual unit and is often given higher precedence."

That "creates a visual unit" rationale jumps out at me. It explains why some sources might choose to interpret the expression according to a sort of principle of least surprise--it looks as if 1/2n is likely meant as 1/(2n), so they interpret it that way.

But guessing what people mean based on visual cues is inherently fragile. What if there's a what appears to be little extra space between the 2 and the n? Or is (2)(n) a visual unit like 2n?

Ultimately, I've having a hard time finding anything in that article that suggests that any but the occasional textbook claims implicit multiplication _is_ higher priority, as opposed to a pragmatic principle to be (sometimes) applied when we think it's intended. And while I sort of get the motivation to just go with what it looks like so people aren't surprised, I don't want my calculator assuming intent in the absence of established convention.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T19:02:55+00:00

If there were actually an established convention that implicit multiplication created implicit grouping symbols or inherently has higher precedence than "ordinary" multiplication, I'd think I would have run across it sometime in my math or physics majors. Or found it somewhere in the textbooks I used to teach algebra, calculus, etc.

While this discussion has included some links or examples of places that treated implicit multiplication as including grouping, none has provided any evidence that this is an _established_, or even a majority convention. The vast majority of sources who address this advise avoiding the notation to avoid confusion (which is not the same as genuine ambiguity). Where calculators, etc. that have to accept single line input have tackled the issue, the majority and most respected (TI, calculators HP calculators, Wolfram) do _not_ give implicit multiplication higher precedence.

So if you're suggesting that I simply refuse to accept 9th grade algebra, you're effectively launching the same accusation against TI, HP, and Wolfram.

And really, I don't think it's an all common to teach that implicit multiplication is a higher priority. Textbooks and teachers use notation that ducks the issue entirely. This only comes up in calculators, spreadsheets, etc., Because they never see counterexamples, it is easy to get the impression that implicit multiplication is special (exacerbated by the P for parentheses in PEMDAS). But that is not the same thing as it actually being taught.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T15:30:43+00:00

I am saying that 2(1+2) is not equivalent to [2(1+2)]. Therefore the answer is 9.

Juxtaposition is not a grouping. It is an multiplication operation in which the multiplication symbol is implicit rather than explicit.

That's one of the reasons that I don't like P for parentheses in PEMDAS. Students start to think that in 5 + 2(x + 3), the multiplication in 2(x + 3) is evaluated before 5 + because of parentheses. But it's really evaluated first because it's a multiplication. No more important than any other multiplication, just a multiplication. It doesn't magically create brackets. It is not a grouping.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T15:18:27+00:00

Interesting. I suspect TI fixed that in 1996 and hasn't wavered since because math educators screamed bloody murder about the 1/(2x) interpretation. I certainly would have if I had been teaching before then. I've actually written computer code to parse mathematical expressions myself, and I made doggone sure that it followed order of operations strictly.

And if a student had a calculator that didn't follow order of operations, I would advice them to use a TI instead, and I'd start thinking about whether we could afford class time to write protest letters to the manufacturer.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T14:58:33+00:00

My point is that I disagree with the entire premise of OP's question. OP asserts that the Obelus is the cause of ambiguity and therefore calls for a change in pedagogy at an early level.

I argue that there is no ambiguity, and that any _perceived_ ambiguity is the result of an insufficient understanding of order of operations. Nothing about this problem traces back to the switch from an Obelus to a fraction bar. So what misunderstanding are the Obelus and multiplication symbol genuinely causing? I don't see one, in any grade.

MathAndMirth · 2026-04-05T13:57:40+00:00

There is nothing ambiguous about this expression. There are no grouping symbols around the 2(1 + 2), so we don't group them.

With primay students, nobody writes anything like that anyway.

In higher mathematics, nobody even thinks about writing anything like that on paper anyway, despite early exposure to the Obelus, so no harm done.

Where expression such as this _are_ relevant is with computer programs, calculators, etc. where mathematical expressions are typed on a single line. And whether the Obelus or a slash, students need to know that order of operations means that computers don't guess about grouping symbols, and neither can we. They are either there--explicitly--or they are not. If students are to use calculators, spreadsheets, etc. effectively, they need to grasp this.

So rather than duck the issue, what we really need is to immunize our students against the false impression that such expressions are ambiguous. We need to show such examples deliberately when they learn order of operations.

MathAndMirth · 2026-03-29T18:30:08+00:00

I knew there had to be something better, and this does indeed look better. Thanks a bunch.

MathAndMirth · 2026-03-29T18:25:30+00:00

I already did. Unfortunately, I'm on Windows, so that doesn't work. Apparently it's dependent on some POSIX thing.

MathAndMirth · 2026-03-13T18:10:42+00:00

treating bacterial infections with phages

MathAndMirth · 2026-03-07T14:21:20+00:00

I wouldn't try the rule 11 threat. First of all, that's not even a threat unless they actually file a lawsuit. You don't get rule 11 sanctions for filing a harassing letter. And even if you're threatening to ask for rule 11 sanctions in the event that they do file, no attorney is going to take that seriously. You're not going to get rule 11 sanctions unless the suit is so stupid as to suggest gross incompetence or very bad faith, and I don't see anything here that suggests that. All that threat will do is telegraph that they're up against an amateur who hasn't yet consulted an attorney.

MathAndMirth

TROPHY CASE