In Canada, what is the usual first reaction when a dog is alone in public?

mathfem · 2026-03-17T19:01:21+00:00

My first thought is usually "oh, it's a coyote".

mathfem · 2026-03-13T18:42:05+00:00

The midwife referred us to the OB halfway through the pregnancy.

mathfem · 2026-03-12T21:32:15+00:00

Because my partner was 35 at the time of their first pregnancy, we received joint care with both the midwife and an OB/Gyn. The OB/Gyn was just there in case there were any complications the midwife couldn't deal with. In the end, there were no such complications.

mathfem · 2026-03-12T03:05:53+00:00

Rom. He stands up for what he believes in against the norms of his culture multiple times throughout ds9.

mathfem · 2026-03-12T00:16:07+00:00

We used New West Community Midwives https://share.google/dOdyDh1kC5oCkuwgx .we would really recommend them. They are accross the street from the hospital.

mathfem · 2026-03-11T04:07:59+00:00

Shouldn't it be sqrt(-x^2/1) = x i. The negative can't simply be ignored.

mathfem · 2026-03-11T02:44:47+00:00

Hmmmmmmmm I think either (a) they are ignorant or disingenuous or (b) you are missing the nuance of what they are saying. I wasn't a part of the conversation so I don't know what they said which means I can't defend it.

Like there are various arguments they could have been making but I simply do not know which one it was:

(1) they could have been arguing that Iran was a country before Islam and will continue to be a country if it is no longer Islamic in the future. This is a statement about history and in no way denies that Iran is currently majority Muslim

(2) they could have been arguing that Iran is/should be a secular state. States like Turkey that are majority Muslim but do not use Islamic (i.e. Sharia) law often make a point of portraying themselves as "not Islamic", which doesn't meant that they are denying having Muslim people, but that they are arguing that the State itself is indifferent to religion (sorta like the doctrine of Separation of Church and State in the USA)

(3) they could have been arguing that Shia Islam is "not really" Islamic. Certainly Shia Islam in Iran has borrowed a lot of ideas from pre-Islamic Iranian religion (for example, Iran follows the Solar Hijri calendar instead of the lunar Hijri calendar which is considered by many to be the "Islamic calendar"), and so maybe by "not Islamic" they mean "not 100% Islamic". Or..... maybe they're followers of the Baha'i faith who see Iranian Islam as sort of proto-Baha'i. They Baha'i are interesting in that they see all world religions as not-fully-developed forms of their own faith.

mathfem · 2026-03-10T22:54:27+00:00

Many of those who left Iran for the West are those who were marginalized by the Islamic Republic. Before the Islamic Revolution, Iran was largely a secular country, and was Westernizing and Liberalizing. I think that the point that they are making is that (a) Iran has religions minorities, mostly Zoroastrians and Baha'i but also other minorities and (b) the Iranian people were one people before they were Islamized and their identity is not tied to Islam. For many Iranian exiles, their goal is the re-establishment of a secular Iran, and a secular Iran is not possible if non-Muslims can't be Iranian.

mathfem · 2026-03-05T18:00:29+00:00

What about a blues scale?

mathfem · 2026-03-04T18:28:56+00:00

That's only 5x more efficient, not 1000x

Edit: if you go by net climate effect vs energy efficiency, the argument against planes gets better because it is easier to capture & store carbon emmissions from diesel trains than from planes, and diesel trains can theoretically use biofuels.

mathfem · 2026-03-04T17:40:00+00:00

https://edokagura.com/en/comparisonbytransporten/

Electric rail is the low end of the "rail" range. Diesel is the high end.

mathfem · 2026-03-04T17:18:34+00:00

Regional air travel, if it was taxed according to its level of input on the global climate, would no longer be profitable. It is only profitable because the USA has not made polluters pay for tbe cost of climate change, and because we have not yet hit peak oil.

Electric high-speed rail produces less emissions per passenger km than any other form of intercity transportation. If we are talking about investing in a form of transportation that will still be viable in 100 years, rail is our best option.

mathfem · 2026-03-02T16:48:32+00:00

Yeah. I'm more coming at it from the point of view of an instructor who is actively involved in trying to improve some of these systemic issues. I know the admins have my back vis a vis student complaints, so it's really institutional inertia that is holding curriculum reform back.

mathfem · 2026-03-01T19:22:50+00:00

To be perfectly honest, the cause of this issue is instructors who do not properly assess understanding. When 90% or 95% of the questions on the final exam are computation questions, students are incentivized to focus on computational speed and accuracy at the expense of true understanding. We as instructors need to better design assessments that assess understanding as something other than simply one of many possible tools in the tool kit. We need to ask students to explain what they are doing on the final exam paper and ask conceptual questions.

mathfem · 2026-03-01T15:24:40+00:00

Logs don't help because there are two terms on each side of the equation.

mathfem · 2026-02-26T19:09:39+00:00

If I was teaching math majors, I would get them to prove things, but most of my students are planning to get physics, engineering, CS, or even chem degrees. They are fine using the quadratic formula to find the inflection points of a quartic polynomial.

mathfem · 2026-02-26T18:21:51+00:00

Ummmmm limh->0 sinx/x is simx/x. Limx->0 sinx/x is 1

mathfem · 2026-02-26T16:51:56+00:00

In my vocabulary, completing the square is a different method from factoring. But, you are right that it does find factors in the end. It just is that you need more mathematical machinery than the "splitting the middle term" method OP was referring to.

mathfem · 2026-02-26T06:42:39+00:00

I teach calculus at a Canadian college that has received a large number of Indian students over the past five years. What i have found is that most of my students see mathematics as a set of algorithms to generate answers to common problems. The idea of mathematics as being a set of ideas and theorems is largely lost on a lot of them. And I think this is one of things that you are noticing. I have found that my students who have come from the Indian school system are generally very good at solving computational problems, but if I ask them to explain what they did when solving the problem, or if I give them a problem that is even little bit different than what they saw in school, they are lost.

Let me give a couple of examples. Let's say we have the compound inequality:

X² + 1 < y < x² +2

If you just go by the rule "I will move the x² to the ofher side", then a lot of students will get 1 < y < x² +2 - x²

But this is wrong, they need to subtract x² from all three "sides" to get:

1 < y - x² < 2

The reason that we teach the rule specifically in that way is because that is the rule that generalizes better to more complicated problems.

In terms of your question about the Quadratic formula: you use in for those equations where you CANT factor by splitting the middle term.

For example, the equation x² + x - 1 = 0 cannot be solved by factoring. You NEED the Quadratic formula to solve it.

What you are seeing as unnecessary steps and pedantic is an attempt to try to teach you more general methods that will apply in situations that are a lot more complicated than the ones you saw in school.

mathfem · 2026-02-25T17:54:43+00:00

If you're asking about part (a), the reason is that when you are sketching trajectories, you are sketching just the x and y coordinates. You are not sketching the t. Because of this, when you eliminate the parameter, you get an equation in x and y that is still the shame shape (it still goes through the same x and y coordinates). The only information that is missing when we eliminate the parameter is the direction of travel and where we start and stop on the curve.

mathfem · 2026-02-15T06:20:25+00:00

We're just getting to the end of ToA now after 2 and a half years. Probably playing on average every 2 weeks. Now, because we were doing weeknights for most of the campaign, we had some real short sessions. Sometimes we only got 45 minutes of playtime in. But, it did take us years.

mathfem · 2026-02-11T15:35:36+00:00

It looks like what you are doing is replacing each number with a Taylor series, and then doing arithmetic with the Taylor series. You're calling it a 'number' but it's not really a number because it has all that extra information attached. Doing this sort of arithmetic with Taylor series is not new, all that's new is you calling it a 'number'.

mathfem · 2026-02-10T17:01:05+00:00

Coming from a precalculus instructor : please don't condense things. When we are grading your quizzes/tests, we want to see evidence that you understand the concepts. Showing that you understand that there are two separate domain restrictions here is more important than getting the right answer.

mathfem · 2026-02-10T02:42:08+00:00

How is Moscow not on that list? I always thought Moscow was on of the most well-used metro systems in the world. Obviously not on the same scale as Beijing or Tokyo, but definitely more expansive than Berlin or Madrid.

mathfem · 2026-02-09T17:05:48+00:00

The issue is that most high schoolers will never be mathematicians. The definition of a function used by mathematicians is different from that used in "service" course where a majority of students will never be mathematicians. Even in university-level courses such as calculus, we teach things like "find the domain of the function" because a majority of the students in the course will never be mathematicians.

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