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Hey math teachers/homeschooler people - what's your thinking on when to allow calculators? Prompted by 9-year-old getting gnarly long division problems. She can set up the logic and can execute but no adult would ever do these by hand.
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 Not Saturday, but did just finish my Chex. I am neither of those but it seems to me that there is a difference between the concepts and the mechanics, the latter being where the calculator comes in. ~50 y/a, my parents swore I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket but ignore that. Calculators aside, like times tables, there are probably a bunch of divisions anyone should be able to do in their head. Good luck! @ZachWeinersmith i would let her control her hand divisions with the calculator. Maybe add gamification in the sense of “if you do part 1 error free in x minutes, then you may use calculator on the first calculation of the next part” etc. I second whoever suggested estimates: correct use of calculator includes expecting the right order of magnitude.  @ZachWeinersmith Teaching manual algorithms like long discussion is a useful way to teach mathematical thinking, even if you don’t do it in real life anymore. The exercise has intrinsic value. Once you move on to higher concepts, though, there’s no need to force kids to do division, addition, etc. by hand. As a classroom teacher, though, I might give extra credit if they can show how to do it by hand IN ADDITION TO solving a word problem. Hey cosmolo...don Why does Inflation imply that the universe is flat? The usual analogy given is that if you're on the surface of Earth and it suddenly rapidly expands, it'd look flat. I don't get this analogy. Like, wouldn't that also be true if the expansion were gradual? Also, and I'm sorry if this is especially stupid, but... the Earth's surface is closed not flat. Anyone have a better explanation?
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 @ZachWeinersmith I've never liked or got the "bug walking on a balloon" analogy and it's variants😡 If the Earth were expanded to, say, a radius of 1 million light years while we remain the same size, how could any practicable measurement taken on the surface be distinguished from the same measurement taken on an completely flat surface? @ZachWeinersmith Inflation is important because it happens faster than the speed of light, so the points in spacetime can't talk to each other while they're inflating. If they can't talk to each other, they can't transfer energy, and energy causes clumping and thus gravity because of General Relativity. Gravity *is* non-zero curvature. @ZachWeinersmith Jesus Christ, Mr Weinersmith, you came for the throat of my whole career! I mean you're right but, still.... Transcendence @ZachWeinersmith Thanks for capturing the bizarreness of having my feeds full of scary warm weather and travel pix from people “healing” on this mountain and “reconnecting” in that jungle, evidently for the backdrop. May be my favorite of your many excellent cartoons. 🙏
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  @ZachWeinersmith I hate that one. Lips creep me out, and the teeth only make it worse! It's unfortunate that my only interactions with you have been "I don't like that comic" - I'll do better! Literary fun fact: When Paradise Lost was first released in 1667, it was reasonably popular, but got a number of complaints that it "rhymes not." So, by the 1674 edition, it came with a note at the beginning aggressively talking shit about rhymed verse, calling it "the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter..." (Source is the Second Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, edited by Teskey)
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 @ZachWeinersmith That first panel is top notch. I think I'll be using that bit of wisdom in my day-to-day. @ZachWeinersmith I love the line “SURROUND YOURSELF WITH SHIT THAT YOU CAN PUNCH, MY BOY, AND YOU WILL KNOW PEACE.”. Proper wisdom.
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 @ZachWeinersmith Seeing the large amount of machine learning jokes lately, I wonder if wAInersmith needs more diverse training data.... @ZachWeinersmith there is a method where you add a special kind of watermark to your images to do exactly this https://adversarial-designs.shop/blogs/blog/how-to-tell-if-someone-trained-a-model-on-your-data
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 @ZachWeinersmith Finally! The world makes sense now. And I can open a Facebook account and feel good about it. Thank you, thank you, thank you! |
@ZachWeinersmith That's a strong headline.
@ZachWeinersmith "It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money." attributed apocryphally to "Canada Bill" Jones.