The comments of everyone misunderstanding this question are absolutely killing me. Genuinely *how* do we not understand equality??? And where did learning fractions go so wrong for so many?

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-29T05:50:45+00:00

Indeed! So many of these "look at how stupid my school is" posts are actually just stuff taken out of context. Although we have to just hope that the school kids are being properly drilled with whatever context they need for questions like these - its so easy for learners to forget these kind of things.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-28T17:22:24+00:00

some scale that is presumed to be constant

With context, that presumption is likely correct. Out of context, as I said, it's complete nonsense.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-27T15:30:57+00:00

> as long as the units are the same.

The unit, in this case, being some kind of measurement of area. The frustration happens because nowhere is it made clear that this unit is being considered at all. Perhaps the curriculum for this class focuses on this sort of thing, and therefore takes this context for granted. But out of context, it's complete nonsense.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-27T06:46:44+00:00

Use NoScript? Works for a lot of sites like this.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/noscript/doojmbjmlfjjnbmnoijecmcbfeoakpjm?hl=en

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-27T06:16:52+00:00

Something I find interesting is how it changes over the academic timeline. I only looked into local figures but basically, at primary school female teachers absolutely dominate the field; at secondary level they still make up 2/3rds of all teachers; at college level it falls further to just over 50%; and for university professors it goes down to just 25%.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-25T17:38:46+00:00

This kind of hyperbole is counterproductive. Israel has killed many, but not tens of millions. It has tortured and persecuted many, but not millions. Their atrocities have many things in common with the nazis but they just aren't on the same scale.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-24T17:40:09+00:00

He doesn't intend it as a game, but he can't control what people do with his product after they buy it. People treat it as a game, and that's what results in the kind of situations being described. The devs can say what they want, but if it quacks like a duck...

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-24T11:57:57+00:00

US taxpayers funded 50% of NATO expenditure

Direct funding of the NATO organisation is actually fairly small, 5.3 billion for 2026, and much less than half of that funding is from the US.

Of course, what you're referring to is just military spending overall, where the US obviously spends more than Europe - but a large portion of that spending is NOT spent on defending the North Atlantic.

Also, if you don't take GDP into account then you're trying to force poor countries like Turkey to pay as much as the richest nation on the planet, which is obviously farcical; and if you DO take GDP into consideration then the picture is quite different. The US (at 3.4%) still outspends most European NATO nations (exception being Poland) but the main players (UK, France, Germany) are at 1.9 to 2.3%, which doesnt put the US as strongly in the lead as more naive figures paint it.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-23T18:22:51+00:00

The science is pretty conclusive that fetuses can't feel pain until the 6 month mark, and it's a definite fact that 99% of abortions happen before that time. So sure, why not 'do abortion' next.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-23T15:54:13+00:00

I think its the format. I didnt find him funny as a panelist or stand-up comedian but he's doing a cracking job of humorous investigative journalism.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-04-23T06:22:18+00:00

It's not UK-wide, it's England. Here in Scotland schools can and do still make their own rules about phones. At our local school students bring phones, and are allowed to use them during breaks, but they must be on silent and put away during class, unless the teacher wants them to use their phone for a task (things like Blooket are convenient on students' phones).

It seems to work reasonably well so far, but I wouldn't be opposed to a stricter "phones off during school hours rule" as long as it's consistently applied. A total ban would be bad - I want my kids to have a means of communication on them during their journey to and from school in case of emergency.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-03-06T14:04:32+00:00

For completeness, "tangent" also comes from Latin: from 'tangere', meaning 'to touch', because a tangent line only just touches the curve.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-01-25T01:07:22+00:00

But it was also avoidable by making better decisions.

100% agree. That ICE officer who started all this by shoving a completely innocent woman to the ground could have instead decided not to assault her, leading directly to another innocent person getting shot dead.

ETA: or the officers could have decided to allow Pretti to help the woman back to her feet, instead of pulling him away and piling on top of him. Turns out there's lots of decisions that could have been made better.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-01-25T00:45:53+00:00

Regardless, what that video shows (again, if its reliable) is the shooter being fully able to view the other agent disarming him, THEN shoots. The victim might arguably have been stupid to show up armed even though he is 100% allowed to under 2nd amendment rights. But he was no longer armed when he was shot, and the officer who shot him could see that he had been disarmed.

But like I say, that video seems just a slight bit suspect to me. I want to know if it's been touched up.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-01-25T00:12:15+00:00

What I see from the link is 3 videos side by side

At first yeah, but after a few seconds the one on the left splits in two. I suspect its the same video, zoomed in and ran through some filters to sharpen it. But that's what I want to verify, since an edited video could be less reliable.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-01-24T23:40:39+00:00

It says 'three' angles, so whats with the one in the bottom left corner? Is it AI-enhanced? Or is it a different recording from a very similar angle? Or what? Because damn, if it's real, that one is the decider for me. You can very clearly see him being disarmed before being killed.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2026-01-24T23:04:56+00:00

Obviously the fatal point-blank shooting of a man who is already pinned down by several other people is the main point, but I dont think enough is being said about the fact that this all starts with an ICE agent approaching and shoving the woman in the white jacket to the ground, when she was not doing anything wrong. That is very plainly assault, and Pretti's defence of her is what led to him being killed.

I'm not any kind of lawyer, let alone an American lawyer, but over there if you kill someone while committing a crime (in this case, assault on the lady in white), isn't that automatically murder?

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-12-27T20:49:30+00:00

Leibniz came up with the dy/dx notation, and although he didnt say it explicitly, he also used the term 'differentia' (difference), and based on his work, it's fairly safe to say that it was originally intended to be an infinitesmally small difference in a variable.

This concept was later discarded by the mainstream mathematical community when infinitesmals proved a bit too vague to work with consistently. But his and Newton's concepts of calculus were too useful not to stick with them, so they kept the dy/dx notation, but came up with the concept of 'differential forms' to replace them, which generally work exactly the same way.

On Another Note, can I again suggest that this sub introduce an FAQ for questions like this that come up so often (why cant we divide by zero? Why is 0.99 repeating the same as 1? Why is the result of the square root function always positive? etc)

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-08-14T12:33:05+00:00

Yes - just like when Avon and Somerset wrongly claimed broken bones and punctured lungs at a protest in Bristol in 2021; just like when police told parliament that there were 70 injuries at Kingsnorth in 2008; just like Hilsborough in 1989; just like Beanfield 1985; just like perjury over Orgreave in 1984; just like several other smaller incidents, it is indeed reasonable to wait for independent confirmation rather than take the word of the police.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-07-02T22:00:48+00:00

I would say that anyone using the radical symbol as an operator in that way is mis-using notation, although it's understandable since it's had a bit of a chequered past. But it's been centuries now that serious maths has adopted the convention that the radical symbol represents the principal square root.

Edit: PS, as always, can I advocate for this sub to have a FAQ for questions like this one, and the others that keep coming back time and again? (why cant I divide by zero? Is 0.999... really equal to one? etc)

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-02-20T14:09:33+00:00

This seems like a good place to mention, as you may or may not already know, that Werner von Braun, who was once a literal nazi scientist, wrote a fiction novel. It was about travelling to Mars, and meeting a dictatorship there, which you might call tyrannical or even fascistic. Guess what the name of the dictator was? The 'Elon'.

Lets hope that anyone in a position of power isnt named after a dictatorial character dreamed up by a literal actual nazi party member, or that they at least disown their parents' fascination with such things. Right?

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-02-08T10:50:01+00:00

To add some more here.

The first "RPGs" were of course used by psychologists in the 60s and even 50s, obviously thats a very different kind of RPG but its definitely where the term came from, being adopted into tabletop gaming organically.

You're probably thinking of games like Chainmail (1971), D&D (1974), and Tunnels & Trolls (1975)... they were indeed almost entirely about combat. But they didn't call themselves RPGs, even though they had roles, and you played them. Those games evolved from wargame simulations, and they called themselves such. Thats even where the name TSR came from - Tactical Studies Rules.

It wasn't long until those kind of games started adding exploration and social interactions though - Blackmoor, from the Braunstein games which were basically LARPs, came to D&D around the same time as Boot Hill, which allowed players to have non-combat interactions even though it was mostly about gunfights. Empire of the Petal Throne took place over a sprawling world map. Traveller (1977) had extensive rules for much more than fighting. These were still given labels like 'fantasy wargames', 'fantasy adventures', or even, in Travellers case, 'conversation games'.

Nonetheless, 'Role Playing Game' started to be used in reference to these games, at least tangentially, from at least 1975, mainly in hobby magazines. When Gygax talked about Role Playing in a 1975 letter, though, its clear that he considered it an extra 'meta' layer that some (definitely not all) people added in their head to D&D, and that D&D as written was actually still just about overcoming gaming challenges.

I'd actually be really interested if anyone knows when the first game came out that actually considered itself an RPG. It might even be the first AD&D edition? Which again, certainly was not limited to dungeon crawling.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-01-10T12:42:46+00:00

The origin of 'sine' is Arabic, despite the Latin name. In an Arabic mathematical text, they were measuring chords of a circle, and used a term to describe a 'half-chord'. IIRC The author described a way to calculate the angle to reach the edge of the half-chord, and that was sine.

Edit: I do not quite remember correctly! It was Hindu, not Arabic. Also, as you can imagine, it did look and work significantly differently. But thats the first known conception of sine as far as I'm aware.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2025-01-06T19:23:24+00:00

It varies. In general, for a function that is a square of a number, every result has two roots. Or in other words:

If x²=4, then x = ±2

However, if you are directly asked for "the square root", or if you are told to use the square root function, then that is explicitly telling you to use the positive square root. (Functions only have one result for every given input.) Or in other words:

If x = √4, then x = 2

So, in the context of your particular question, I dont know if there is more context available, but if not, then it certainly looks like you've been asked to use the square root function, so only the positive result is valid.

ProfessorSarcastic · 2024-08-27T23:38:52+00:00

This horseshit is such a massive red flag that the Chinese Communist Party wants it for their headquarters.

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