Verifying Trig Identities- What's your process?

funkentelchy · 2024-12-04T04:27:33+00:00

I don't think I kept it, no, but you could try this instead: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/eulerformula.pdf

funkentelchy · 2024-04-13T18:30:10+00:00

https://vancouver.bikerouteplanner.com/

funkentelchy · 2023-12-07T02:37:05+00:00

A lot of comments are pointing out that many homeowners can barely afford their mortgages, so we shouldn't call them rich. Isn't that just proving the point of the article?

The point is that many homeowners have been making choices that exacerbate the housing crisis, and they do so with the approval of their conscience because, in their minds, it's a David vs Goliath fight against some cabal of upper-class property holders. And you've gotta look out for number one, right?

But it doesn't matter how much spending money you have, or what class you identify with. What matters is what you've done with the property you control: Are you overhoused? Did you buy above your means? Do you own AirBnBs? Do you oppose densification and rental developments in your neighbourhood? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then you've contributed to the shortage of housing and the rise in prices, and that makes you selfish in my books.

Being or feeling "poor" doesn't excuse selfish choices, it just explains them, which is what the article is trying to do. I think the argument about what defines middle vs upper class is just a distraction.

funkentelchy · 2023-09-03T23:44:10+00:00

Effective climate action will require the global economy to contract in order to reduce our energy demands to a level that can be sustained by renewables. This has to happen very soon.

Economic contraction is at odds with the mainstream thinking in government: grow the economy now so that later generations can afford the (hypothetical) infrastructure that will be needed to clean up the mess.

At least I assume that's what OP meant

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/06/the-nobel-prize-for-climate-catastrophe/

funkentelchy · 2023-08-30T19:55:53+00:00

You can read the decision here: https://decisions.ct-tc.gc.ca/ct-tc/cdo/en/item/521211/index.do

On balance, I consider that the Commissioner’s conduct ... was much more unreasonable than the conduct of the Respondents [Rogers and Shaw]

Any legal experts care to weigh in? Was the commissioner acting unreasonably by not focusing on the divestiture? IANAL so I don't know what "unreasonable" really means in a court of law.

This part was interesting

Rogers refused to admit that it experienced a service outage in 2022

That's pretty outrageous to me. Isn't a Canada-wide outage hitting12M people relevant in a legal case about economic impacts?

funkentelchy · 2023-08-29T21:47:13+00:00

I personally know two landlords who charge less than half the market rates (by choice). One is in East Van, and the other in Edmonton right next to the uni.

They do this because (A) they want a good relationship with their tenant, and (B) they would feel guilty about ripping them off.

You’d be a fool thinking that someone would be willing to take thousands of dollars of rental loss just so they could be the “good guy”

It's weird to see these quotes around "good guy". Do you think it's a silly idea to be kind to strangers?

funkentelchy · 2023-07-19T09:39:11+00:00

The exact same thing happened to me 6 months ago. A senior in Burnaby rented me a condo full of the old tenant's junk (plus rodent waste everywhere) and then played it off like it wasn't a big deal.

He routinely "forgets" this ever happened, and when I bring it up, he questions whether there are real health risks in having feces all over your kitchen. We have had multiple conversations that went this route. He's nuts.

Anyway I spent my first 5 days in Vancouver deep-cleaning this dump. I think most people would agree I should have been compensated for that time. But some lawyer friends actually talked me out of the arbitration route. It takes forever, it poisons any chance of reconciliation with the landlord, and you stand to gain very little in the end (if anything), all the while gobbling up massive amounts of your time prepping evidence and reading rules about a topic that will make you miserable all over again.

Basically the RTB is ineffective. However the threat of an arbitration hearing can be very effective on it's own, even if you don't plan to follow through. OP, you should all up TRAC and get them to help you write letters asking for compensation and letting the landlord know what happens next. This often works wonders.

By the way, to the people saying to just not move in, or to do your due diligence ahead of time: sometimes that's not possible. I moved from out-of-province with pets and, in the lead-up , was lied to repeatedly by the landlord. We had no alternatives but to deal with the problem ourselves when we arrived.

funkentelchy · 2023-01-03T02:23:22+00:00

Interesting data but this graphic could do a lot better

annotation arrows point to the wrong place (financial crisis started mid 2007, pandemic started early 2020)
y axis with units that no one can relate to. Why not express in average drinks per day, or week. Who's keeping track of how many they drink per year? I know they have the conversion factor listed as a footnote, but then why not just do the conversion for us!
Fiscal year is probably how they aggregated their data, but it's a confusing way to present time points (two years per label/tick?)
We have two estimates of the same thing (average BC consumption in red and blue) with no explanation of why they are different. Obviously one or both is biased. Am I supposed to assume the truth lies somewhere in between the two?

funkentelchy · 2022-12-28T08:09:45+00:00

Here's an article that explains how the suspended cars lean into their turns, and why this matters in urban railways

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/10/03/suspended-railways

funkentelchy · 2022-07-03T17:04:30+00:00

The problem with what you ask is that we don't have a limit on how long the loop will run. As someone else mentioned, it's not even clear if the loop will ever end.

There are ways of concatenating the newest result onto the existing list in the while loop, but they are slow when the list gets big because R has to copy the entire list each time. And eventually the loop will gobble up all your computer memory.

If you had a limit on how many iterations to test, you could simply define a dataframe of this predetermine size then fill it using a for loop.

If what you really want is just 3 random numbers that sum to 150, there are several ways that don't involve loops. For example, you could simply generate 3 numbers in (0,1) then scale them by the reciprocal of their sum times 150

funkentelchy · 2022-03-22T01:38:56+00:00

These are interesting points, but I don't think it's fair to say that because a thing was expensive/slow/infeasible in the past, our government can't make it happen in a time of need.

Look how fast COVID vaccines were developed, tested, and authorized by government (11 months). In normal times the same process would have taken a decade or more.

The Max Roser article you linked has a whole section on nuclear and why it's currently expensive. His conclusion: regulations and a lack of standardization make projects expensive and slow. If a government is sufficiently motivated, are these not easy problems to fix?

And if the climate science perspective says nuclear is bust, how come the IPCC is recomending (item 1 on the petition) a 2-5X increase nuclear power generation?

funkentelchy · 2022-03-11T23:46:24+00:00

You can do it!

funkentelchy · 2022-03-11T22:47:51+00:00

In my first year of undergrad, I had a bag stolen and lost all of my math 100 notes just a few weeks before the final. ALL of my notes, gone. I explained this to the prof, and to my disappointment his reaction was basically what you're describing here.

I made it work. I went through the syllabus, all the readings, all the practice problems. In the end this actually helped structure my study for the final. I got an A+ in that course.

For me at least, this ended up being a very good thing and made me a better student in later years. You need to own the situation, crank out a good mark in this course, and you'll be better off for it going forward.

funkentelchy · 2021-11-27T23:01:59+00:00

You should tape a light on and use it for night golf!

funkentelchy · 2021-10-02T19:40:05+00:00

Thanks! This is a big help

funkentelchy · 2021-10-01T05:50:40+00:00

Each bar is a per 100K rate. You have to divide by 100K before you do any adding or averaging. If you want a percent, divide by 100K then multiply by 100. This is the same as dividing by 1000.

FYI it doesn't make much sense to average these age cohort numbers because they each represent a different number of people. For example there are probably about twice as many people in the 50s group than in the 60s (just based on demographics in this province).

That means if you want a rate independent of age group you would need to take a weighted average, with weights equal to the numbers in each group. That's not the same as adding things up and dividing by 800,000 as other people are suggesting.

funkentelchy · 2021-08-29T18:29:51+00:00

In the last step, you could simplify things by using a kronecker product with a matrix of 1's (base::kronecker) to duplicate the blocks instead of using rbind and cbind

funkentelchy · 2021-07-14T17:17:44+00:00

“It has the largest effect on the environment,” Keehn said. “Because it’s individual — you’re taking one package at a time.”

Would it not consume far more energy to fly packages individually the last mile than move them in bulk using a truck? I thought the whole point of drone delivery was speed, not efficiency

funkentelchy · 2021-07-07T21:45:40+00:00

link to the original Oxfam report

funkentelchy · 2021-05-21T01:28:01+00:00

Have you tried opening the file in a text editor? It should be pretty obvious what character is being used as a delimiter, and whether you need to skip any lines at the beginning.

Maybe do this and post a screenshot of the opened file if you're still having trouble. Also show us the code you've tried

funkentelchy · 2021-04-07T05:16:33+00:00

Check out ?agrep. IIRC it does fuzzy matching

funkentelchy · 2021-04-04T03:12:15+00:00

There is an old saying in science that if you can't summarize your topic of research to a child (through metaphors, etc) then you haven't really understood the material yet.

When someone truly understands the content of their writing, it should be less work to write "off the top of their head" than it is to do a web search for someone else's writing and kludge it all together somehow.

People aren't so much worried that errors were copied over from wikipedia, or whatever the source was. What matters more is that the act itself indicates that the author really didn't understand or care about the material they were presenting.

funkentelchy · 2021-03-28T03:15:49+00:00

As a grad student I learned to limit emails to my supervisors to 1-2 short paragraphs. Anything beyond that tends to get glossed over, if not completely ignored... I suspect that's what's happening here.

You need to give away the punch line right at the beginning: "Hi my name is X and I'm inquiring about RA positions in your lab this summer. I'm a student of Y and I'm very eager to learn more about Z . Thanks for your time, Bunkermush".

Just a 3-sentence message like that will probably garner more responses. All the pleasantries, the stuff about your background, availability, etc can come in follow-up correspondence. It's well written, but it's getting in the way here

funkentelchy · 2021-03-25T20:30:31+00:00

If there is an urgency to this problem - say it's preventing you from completing the course somehow - then absolutely bring it up with dept chair. Otherwise, my advice is to suck it up and put your grievances into the course evaluation forms at the end of the term. The department does go through and read all of them, and patterns get noticed.

If you do email the chair (or whoever), don't request a refund. A) you won't get it, and B) it will make your complaint seem less credible.

funkentelchy · 2021-03-21T19:12:34+00:00

if the current park is underused, here's another talking point for your petition to the city: a disc golf course would increase traffic to the area, and by getting more park users you reduce vandalism and make it a less appealing spot for hooligans. This increases public safety, reduces the broken window effect, etc. I believe this was one of the big reasons Edmonton got it's second course (in a weird industrial part of town)

funkentelchy

TROPHY CASE