Is it a beautiful art? An urgent set of universal civic skills? Key preparation for technical professions? I think a lot about the different arguments for math, and the ways that they support or contradict each other. (See? It’s such a good comic, I can just describe it.) (LARP = Live-Action Role-Playing Game, for those of you with less geeky acumen than I anticipate my audience to have.)īy the way, my friend Rayleen once described to me a brilliant comic, where one person asks, “When’s the baby due?” and the other person is drawn with a small horizontal stick figure emerging from their stick torso. You should already know not to buy lowfat yogurt.”) Mostly just forces you to turn off the auto-rotate setting on your phone.Īnyway, it reads: “Ask anything. I dunno why I thought that was a clever idea. Sorry again for putting the answer upside down. Lots of poets have found asymptotes a convenient literary symbol – the idea of eternal striving is a resonant one (even beyond the eternal striving of the struggling algebra student). In this case, “a mathematician” refers specifically to Matt Parker, whose excellent book Humble Pi discusses the first two of these mistakes. It reads: “Please complete the attached form (Z302: Aggregate Task Completion Rate Information Request) and we’ll process your inquiry in 4-6 weeks.”) (Sorry for putting the answer upside down. So what if the rates weren’t constant? Like in, say, a bureaucracy, where 20 times more people will accomplish only 1/20th as much? ![]() I’ve always enjoyed those puzzles like, “If 3 chickens can lay 3 eggs in 3 days, then how long will it take 100 chickens to lay 100 eggs?” They’re counter-intuitive (e.g., in my example, each chicken lays 1 egg per 3 days, so the answer is also 3 days), yet deal only with simple constant rates. Like, if you did unto others 1.618 times what you’d have them do unto you, then we’d all wind up exhausted.Īnd if you’re only doing 1/1.618 times unto them, then isn’t that a bit lazy? I find it troubling that the golden ratio has so little in common with the golden rule. Here’s an assortment of 35 cartoons I’ve posted to Twitter and Facebook in the last year.
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