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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • I watched (some) of a History of Mathmatics documentary, and what struck me was how many of the theorems ancient people came up with were just common sense. But they wrote it down: that’s what made it noteable.

    There were some theorems/axioms that i had trouble getting my brain to accept, but generally it came down to me not “getting” their number/tally system or simply having no context for why they needed that math in the first place (ie: it wasn’t common sense to me). For example. I’m not an ancient accountant who needs to be able to calculate grain taxes and – at the same time – be able to assure a farmer (who can’t read my number system) that i’m taking the correct amount of his food, so their method of long division using different colored stones seemed needlessly convoluted to me.


  • I think it’s because English isn’t super consistent with the spelling of vowel sounds. Consider also “choose” (rhymes with “lose”) and “chose” (which doesn’t rhyme with either).

    I guess really the vowel sound in loose/lose is basically the same; the difference is whether or not the “s” makes a “s” sound or a “z” sound… It is admittely odd that the presence or absence of an extra “o” would affect the sound of an adjacent constant (especially when we have a perfectly good “z” character available).

    Which reminds me of my pet peeve: when people use “breath” or “cloth” instead of “breathe” or “clothe”.




  • Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we’d be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we’d have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I’d read the heck out of it.