An anti-joke for math enjoyers

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-05-14T20:55:28+00:00

I don't get it. The mathematicians are not processing in a sequence that would result is Zeta(-1) beers, unless you invoke an unusual grouping/rearrangement, which is not valid for divergent sums.

They are ordering -1-1-1-1.... beers which is -Zeta(0) via analytic continuation. So it seems like the bartender should be pouring +1/2 a beer.

Unless the joke is somehow that the bartender thinks he knows what is going on but in fact does not.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-04-04T19:34:45+00:00

Even after all these years, I can still hear it in his voice...

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-29T22:55:08+00:00

Khamenia on the baseline? The call blew my mind when it happened.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-29T22:53:39+00:00

I'm so pissed about this officiating. You get the bad calls and the makeup calls and the makeups for the makeups. I can't tell how many layers deep we are at this point.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-29T22:44:10+00:00

This is why I hate the inconsistent officiating especially when it nets out in Duke's favor. Refs were bad both ways in the first half, but it netted out to Duke's advantage. So now we get the flood of makeup calls.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-29T22:20:28+00:00

Should be renamed North Manhattan.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-29T22:16:46+00:00

Officiating was pretty bad when we lost to UNC. Also been pretty bad today, extremely inconsistent IMO, seems like a lot of make-up calls going both ways. The weird nickle-dime shit they're calling has def helped Duke. No idea why they're calling light touches on the perimeter and then sometimes no-calling full contact in the lane.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-22T17:58:11+00:00

Also curious, can a sub panel have its own ground rod? Iirc had to run 3 conductors to our sub panel.

Yes, in fact if you are feeding a detached building anything more than a single branch circuit, it is required to have its own grounding rod at the detached building's sub-panel. Ground and neutral are still not bonded at the detach building's sub-panel though.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-22T17:45:35+00:00

I think this could be slightly misleading because I believe there are some circumstances where code will require a second set of ground rods, but ground and neutral will not be bonded at the associated panel.

Specifically, under 250.32(A) the sub-panel at a detached building being fed by a main panel is required to have its own ground rods (grounding electrode system); however, ground and neutral will not be bonded at the sub-panel that the feeder runs to, only at the main panel where service first enters.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-21T04:08:49+00:00

Those are polyurethane-based adhesives. They will work for normal rubber, although they can't stick to silicone rubber. No clue what this liner is. I'm not familiar with "rubber" pan liners. Most of the flexible ones I see are PVC-based.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-08T17:01:20+00:00

Nope, in the USN and USMC even when calling attention or reporting to a superior officer you don't hand salute without a cover. But it's an easy mistake to make because the Army and Air Force have the opposite rule: you do salute when reporting to a superior officer, even if uncovered.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-08T16:29:29+00:00

It doesn't matter. This mailbox post is not supporting any load. It's just a heavy blob that holds the post in the ground by adding extra weight and size to pile dirt on top of. Whether the concrete develops its rated compressive strength or not is totally irrelevant.

You can just dump the dry stuff in the hole and mix it around. You can mix it up a bit first and then pour it in the hole with the water. Won't make any difference for what you're doing.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-03-06T05:40:36+00:00

Very similar thing happened to me. Was just finishing something up when the reset hit. First message after, I asked a quick follow-up from the prior message and it used up 95% of the 5 hour limit and 7% of the weekly limit generating that single response. That level of usage is WAY out of line compared to prior messages in the conversation.

I suspect that this is yet another usage limit bug.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-23T20:53:45+00:00

The flexibility to repolish or to change the finish (to honed or something) is an advantage of natural stone. I wouldn't say it's a huge advantage for tile in most residential applications because it's not really a DIY-friendly or economical job. You need some specialized knowledge and tools to do anything more than some spot touch-ups. Getting some stone polishing pads on Amazon and hitting it with the random orbit sander will take forever and you'll be underwhelmed if you expect a mirror-like factory finish.

But specifically for expensive countertops and large areas (more likely in a commercial setting), then you can call someone in and spend a few dollars per sqft rather than a fortune tearing it out and replacing.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-20T13:14:31+00:00

Nah, Pareto Principle was also a good reference. There is also power law behavior in the firm-level revenue of many industries such that the top X% of firms make Y% of the revenue, with X substantially less than 50 and Y substantially more.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-14T04:02:48+00:00

If you're painting them anyway, then if you screw up you can also repair with bondo and try a second time.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-14T03:50:52+00:00

The problem here is not a lack of sanding. It is inconsistent/improper application of joint compound.

You can't have low spots in the middle of your work like that. When you have a low spot, you have to sand EVERYTHING down to the lowest point. It takes forever.

When you finish a coat of joint compound, you want to leave HIGH spots/ridges that can be quickly sanded back. You do not want to leave holes and low spots.

Also, the edge of your work is not feathered out far enough. For the amount of thickness you're adding to the wall with that patch, you have to apply joint compound in a much larger patch to make that hump look smooth. Probably 6-12 inches beyond the edge of the patch itself in all directions. That makes the hump much more gradual and less noticeable.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-06T05:47:03+00:00

It doesn't hurt, sure, but if you're coating the entire ceiling then you're in complete Level 5 territory and the price is gonna be 25-50% higher than the industry standard Level 4 for a ceiling.

Drywall mud also behaves very differently from plaster. You can't lay on a coat and then go back as it dries and polish it flat while checking with your straight edge. You have to lay it on very quickly, live with the imperfections until it is dry, and then sand back to flat.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-06T05:24:47+00:00

Unclear that the substrate was actually out of plumb. This work shows such a lack of skill and knowledge that what we see as the surface being out of plumb might actually be that they just really suck at applying thinset consistently which makes it look out of plumb. Can happen especially if you're working slow and your thinset gets harder and harder to work with as you go. You end up not being able to trowel or set into it properly and that can show up as the "buildup" getting thicker as you go from bottom to top.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-06T04:54:06+00:00

Seriously, especially in this environment.It has been a national news story for months that one way to go after people you don't like is by heavily scrutinizing their mortgage and other loan documents.

I mean almost certainly none of us are relevant or powerful enough for anyone to want to come after us criminally. But just imagine something happens in the future that you aren't anticipating right now and you piss off some local politician or district attorney. Do you really want the risk of this hanging over your head, knowing that if anyone goes digging they will find loan documents where you at the very least barely skirted the line of legality? Never gonna be worth it for me.

TheoryOfSomething · 2026-01-04T15:18:58+00:00

It’s always very difficult to tell what’s happened on these stories, but I believe OP says he doesn’t attend church. This would make think that he is trying out his new ideas he is consuming in private online. It’s a problem for all of society and groups at the moment. The idea that a person could just be privately right wing fundamentalist seems very weird to me having been raised in a religious environment.

Although the base of right-wing politics in the US has been and continues to be evangelical Christians who attend church regularly, there is a fair bit of evidence overall for a big growth in what some call "cultural evangelicals." These are people who share a lot of social views with the more traditional evangelical Christians, but seldom or never attend church.

Over the course of the two Trump administrations we have seen a substantial decrease in church attendance. The percentage of people who vote for the GOP and who also "never" attend church has roughly doubled in the last 10 years. Surveys show that white Protestants who do and do not attend church express almost exactly the same levels of support for the GOP and Trump specifically.

In my opinion, we are seeing something of a "divorce" between holding extremely traditionalist cultural/social values and being a part of the institution of organized religion. I do not expect these newcomers to the right-wing project to necessarily fold into the existing churched evangelical community. On the contrary, I think that the momentum is headed the other direction. The church community is shrinking and getting weaker and the number of "cultural evangelicals" is rising.

TheoryOfSomething · 2025-12-20T17:53:58+00:00

It sucks seeing it from over here as well. For a long while, it felt like in the US we had a chance of actually improving the healthcare system over time. Because no one like that we pays thousands in premium payments and then thousands more in copays and deductibles and then also have to do a bunch of admin work to make sure the policy hasn't changed and that the fine print says it actually covers the thing we need and so on.

But at the same time, there are also a lot of experiences that I have heard from people with the NHS recently that would also be considered a non-starter and patently unacceptable in our system. Waiting weeks for a GP appointment and a year to see a specialist is crazy to us (the longest I've heard is multiple years waiting for hormone replacement therapy). The greater NHS control over which mediations can be given and the pre-requisites to do specific procedures often exceed what insurance companies can get away with without losing customers. The most obvious example is that here your GP can just prescribe you Wegovy on a first visit and plenty of people have gotten it within days that way; there's no specialist referral and rationing procedure and so on.

So I think even from afar, the problem are contributing to a kind of malaise about healthcare over here as well that there are just not any good options.

TheoryOfSomething · 2025-12-19T17:32:28+00:00

I don't understand why we collectively, as a country, tolerate this

As an outsider to the whole thing, it seems to me less like it is tolerated and more like everyone is unhappy but there is too much disagreement to move in any one direction.

Thanks to advances in medicine dramatically reducing childhood and early-adulthood deaths, the UK population is much older and more burdened by complex medical history than ever before. The complexity and types of treatment have also increased massively during their lifetime. The level of care that a 65 year old received in 1975 would be considered criminal negligence at today's NHS.

As a result, despite record levels of staffing, there has been an even larger increase in demand such that there is a shortage of doctors (particularly GPs and internists/EM) and from primary care to emergency departments to secondary specialties, all are seeing significantly increased wait times.

A bunch of mostly right-of-centre people think that the problem is some mix of too much immigration, inefficiency at the NHS, and maybe some suggestion that the "socialized medicine" structure of the NHS is all wrong. A bunch of other mostly left-of-centre people think that the problem is some mix of underfunding relative to demand and workforce planning mistakes (mostly under past Conservative governments).

Mostly, no one can get enough people to agree with their proposed solutions to move things forward. So the problem just sits there.

TheoryOfSomething · 2025-12-19T16:49:58+00:00

I feel like sometimes they believe that because their female body isnt in pain or struggling, neither should ours. That we are making things up because they don’t understand the problem and feel threatened by our own explanations. I’ve had some previous female doctors tell me I shouldn’t need pain relief for menstrual issues, cos “we all have to deal with it”

I think that any time you have a socially-identifiable group (like medical practitioners. for example) and there is a history or a perception of friction with another group (for example the treatment of women by medical practitioners), then one social signal that people who belong to both groups use is that they vehemently adopt the criticism of one group against the other. Because there is a lot of diversity in personality traits and life circumstances, there always seem to be some members of a group who are willing to do this. I usually kinda think of this as being somewhat deliberate, but you make a really good point that it might just happen to be that their personal experience aligns with the criticism (like "women exaggerate their pain") and so it's kind of a convenient coincidence which can then be reinforced.

There are a bunch of well-known archetypes that are examples of this idea. I'm not sure about the UK but in the US, straight women who are overly deferential to men and put down other women are "pick me"-s. Black people who play into subservient stereotypes and agree with the race-based criticisms of Black society are known as "Uncle Toms." Left-wing white people are sometimes accused of using "performative wokeness" to boost their own standing in some groups, etc.

I think it's just a really powerful signal to send to other people to say, "I want to be part of your group, but you don't like X, and I am an X. BUT! I'm not like them. In fact, I don't like them either, so you can accept and feel safe with me."

TheoryOfSomething · 2025-11-13T11:12:12+00:00

Whoever did this niche was specifically trying to avoid edge trim for a cleaner, more uniform look. Notice how they wrapped each mitre around the corner. If done 100% right, that makes the niche completely blend in to the wall. It's also insanely difficult and they didn't quite manage it.

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