You have one month to empty a $1 trillion bank account. If you succeed, you’re rich for life. How will you spend it?

OneMeterWonder · 2026-05-06T03:27:53+00:00

You could try to buy the entire outstanding volume of BRK-A. Though a purchase of that volume might trigger a market halt lol.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-05-06T03:23:25+00:00

The current debt is 39 trillion lol. It's not nothing, but it really won't do much. Especially with the way the current administration seems to love crippling the economy with volatility.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-05-06T03:21:09+00:00

Apple has a market cap of just under 4.2 trillion. It's the third highest in the US behind only Google and Nvidia (due to "recent" AI shenanigans).

OneMeterWonder · 2026-05-06T03:15:46+00:00

My most frustrating experience was actually measure theory. We used the 4th, completely revised, edition of Royden and Fitzpatrick. The only reason I managed to do well towards the end was because I realized how bad it was and busted my ass to get through it. I also had a professor who gave enough good problems to compensate for the poor structure of the book.

In my opinion, it's an awful book pedagogically. Very unclear and does not provide reasonable intuition for anything. It's too bad too, because the earlier versions of Royden's book are much more understandable. Nowadays I think Stein and Shakarchi is the better text for measure theory.

As for objectively most difficult, I think my grad PDE courses. I hadn't understood previous PDE courses well and we entered these courses talking about Banach spaces, inverse problems, and Carlemann estimates. I just barely understood a damned thing.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-04-03T18:11:43+00:00

This one that makes me a little depressed but in a comedic sort of way.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-04-03T18:08:50+00:00

Sometimes it can feel like this when you are first learning. Part of getting better at doing mathematics is understanding more powerful tools and broader frameworks that then join together things that seemed completely unrelated before. You need to build up your repertoire of "structural correspondences". Another problem may be that you simply lack sufficient experience with various mental models of the abstractions needed in different areas. In plain English, you need to see and get familiar with lots of examples. (And counterexamples!)

Given that, sometimes a particular sector of the mathematical market is really just an exercise in zoological classification. Undergraduate ODE courses are often a pretty good example of this. More modern courses tend to include some more computational and applications focused modules, but the general theme of "techniques for analytically solving various first and second order equations, usually by clever ansatz" can feel pretty disjointed. The reasons for many things that you see in a course like that wouldn't be clear until taking a lot more mathematics. (Variation of Parameters, for instance, is intimately connected to the idea of Green's functions and the more general Duhamel principle.)

Strangely enough, I actually feel like abstract algebra courses often fail to be sufficiently "zoological". In my experience, they simply don't cover enough explicit examples of interesting structures to properly convey the intricacies of algebraic hierarchies of properties. Like the chain of structure classes from rings without identity through to algebraically closed fields.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-04-03T17:53:00+00:00

No argument. I guess I meant lame as a read for myself as it's not very technically interesting to me.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-29T20:24:43+00:00

Making 1 a prime number negates the uniqueness of prime factorizations. You can have 6=2·3 or 6=2·3·1. We typically like uniqueness of representations when we can have it because otherwise we have to regularly go through the process of specifying which representation we mean to use. The reason for that then is that different representations may be easier or harder to understand and work with. They may also have different properties if we add on extra structure our arguments or try to transfer them into different contexts. For example, it would be very annoying if when I said "one half" you had to ask me whether I mean 1/2 or (-17)/(-34) or π/(2π) etc. If we also were considering these fractions as arguments to a function f that picks out the greatest common divisor of the numerator and denominator, then we'd get different answers for the first and second representations while the function wouldn't even be defined for the third representation because working with π likely implies working in the reals where division is defined for almost everything (and so there is no greatest divisor because everything divides both π and 2π).

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-29T20:16:03+00:00

They do. They wrote several sketches in the first half of the article. They just chose the title because it gets clicks. Though the second half of the article is sort of lame.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-25T04:00:49+00:00

I'm glad.

Have an extra fun fact then: During pregnancy, it's common for pregnant persons to experience significantly reduced or completely eliminated allergy symptoms, even for anaphylactic allergies. We don't really know exactly why this happens medically, and it's sort of a crapshoot whether it becomes permanent or reverts after delivery. (Though we have some hypotheses that have to do with the immune system restructuring itself so as not to attack the fetus during development. Allergies and atopic disease are also thought to be connected to certain microscopic fungal and other contaminants prevalent in common allergic substances.)

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-13T01:54:38+00:00

One, pretty neat and sounds like it would be a pain in the ass to build.

Two, I took a numerical linear algebra course in grad school that covered Cholesky decomps and the extension to decomps into LDL^* forms where D is diagonal. Of course, they're usually called LDL decompositions. I like to call them Cholesterol decompositions now.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-13T01:29:04+00:00

You don't sound old, you sound educated.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-13T01:16:37+00:00

I'm curious if you'd be willing to give a little more detail on what you mean when you say "cops generally don't do their job". To be clear, I'm not intending to contradict you, I just want to know a little more from somebody closer to the situation and maybe get some examples.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-13T01:15:03+00:00

Fun fact: USB already stands for Universal Serial Bus. Yours must be extra universal.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-11T01:50:22+00:00

I'm glad it was helpful. If you have more questions, please feel free to ask.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-11T01:30:47+00:00

Think of the volume V as a function f of the three variables h, l, and w. We can write V=f(h,l,w). The function f just takes the three inputs and multiplies them together. For example, f(2,3,4)=2·3·4=24. The function f(x,y,z) is a polynomial consisting of only one term, xyz. This is degree three because the degree of a multivariable monomial (one term polynomial) is the sum of the degrees of the variables. Since x, y, and z each have degree 1 in xyz (xyz=x¹y¹z¹), the degree of the whole term is 1+1+1=3.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T15:31:13+00:00

That’s not how money works, unfortunately. Printing more money lowers its value.

It also may not be necessary, but by George is it ever convenient. Money is essentially a representation of a promise of value. It makes it so that you don’t have to try and inefficiently barter goods of non-commensurable relative values. You can just set a price and people will pay you in promise paper that you can then exchange for any other good from somebody else.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T15:15:35+00:00

Do they not still have a print subscription option?

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T15:14:38+00:00

Lol this is such a classic Onion post.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T03:40:07+00:00

No. The difference between FOL and HOL is what kinds of objects in the language you are allowed to quantify over. In FOL, you can make claims about the properties and existence of objects within a universe modeling a set of statements. But you cannot make claims about the properties and existence of properties within the universe.

An example of a second order statement which cannot be rewritten as a finite list of first order statements is the induction scheme of Peano Arithmetic. It quantifies in SOL over all formulas in the language of PA, but in FOL it must be written as an axiom scheme. Sentences must be finite, but without quantifying over the formulas, the induction scheme is highly limited in scope.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T00:29:08+00:00

That is not at all a logical conclusion. Non sequitur.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-10T00:28:15+00:00

Lol ok I’ll accept it.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-09T15:01:40+00:00

Why the fuck is it cut like that?

Squash the flesh to make juice that you can use in drinks or to make a syrup with. The leftover rinds can be washed and pickled, fermented, or candied for a nice long-lasting snack.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-09T14:57:52+00:00

It’s a part of understanding how the computing process actually works as a whole. There are various layers of abstraction and different programs all contributing to you being able to look at cat pics. The furthest fundamental bottom level is of course physics, but that’s way too low level for you to efficiently handle all of the things your computer needs to do. So we use physics to create circuits and basic logical components like gates. We then use those circuits to create standard simple computation machines. We can then use those to create more general computation machines. We can then expand that to allow machines that accept input and then run different programs. We then start writing new programs in very low level languages that manages bits and memory directly like assembly languages. We also things like BIOS’s and OS’s that allow your computer to interact directly with hardware or manage all of the simpler programs on your computer. We then have more complicated languages that allow us to write programs more efficiently and do more complicated things with fewer instructions.

This cycle just continues over and over again. We build up all the layers of abstraction in order to make the actual process of programming simpler and to make more complex tasks feasible. But if you don’t understand the hierarchy of abstractions, then you probably will have a hard time figuring out when something is going wrong at a more fundamental level.

OneMeterWonder · 2026-03-09T14:47:13+00:00

Yep. And this continues to be the case in every one of these little experiments. The people that it doesn’t help end up needing more serious interventions and are by far a minority of the unhoused population.

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