Hi!

My previous/alt account is yetAnotherUser@feddit.de which will be abandoned soon.

  • 0 Posts
  • 269 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2024

help-circle

  • I don’t think that’s why kids hate it. Rather, teachers fail to explain the underlying motivations, the reasoning and the purpose which makes math feel like arbitrary decisions.

    I’d argue math is much more uncertain than other subjects. What’s the purpose of the endoplasmic reticulum in your cells? Just memorize the textbook. Find all X such that [statement] is true? You better have some creativity! Or a lot, depending on the problem.

    Some accompanying evidence for uncertainty: https://xkcd.com/2117/



  • I’ve found a proper approximation after some time and some searching.

    Since the binomial distribution has a very large n, we can use the central limit theorem and treat it as a normal distribution. The mean would be obviously 500 billion, the standard deviation is √(n * p * (1-p)) which results in 500,000.

    You still cannot plug that into WA unfortunately so we have to use a workaround.

    You would calculate it manually through:

    Φ(b) - Φ(a), with
    b = (510 billion - mean) / (standard deviation) = 20,000
    and
    a = (490 billion - mean) / (standard deviation) = -20,000
    and
    Φ(x) = 0.5 * (1 + erf(x/√2))
    

    erf(x) is the error function which has the neat property: erf(-x) = -erf(x)

    You could replace erf(x) with an integral but this would be illegible without LaTeX.

    Therefore:

    Φ(20,000) - Φ(-20,000)
    = 0.5 * [ erf(20,000/√2) - erf(-20,000/2) ]
    = erf(20,000/√2)
     erf(14,142)
    

    WolframAlpha will unfortunately not calculate this either.

    However, according to Wikipedia an approximation exists which shows that:

    1 - erf(x) ≈ [(1 - e^(-Ax))e^(-x²)] / (Bx√π)
    

    And apparently A = 1.98 and B = 1.135 give good approximations for all x≥0.

    After failing to get a proper approximation from WA again and having to calculate every part by itself, the result is very roughly around 1 - 10^(-86,857,234).

    So it is very safe to assume you will lose between 49% and 51% of your gut bacteria. For a more realistic 10 trillion you should replace a and b above with around ±63,200 but I don’t want to bother calculating the rest and having WolframAlpha tell me my intermediary steps are equal to zero.




  • The walls of the echo-chamber have been built up and reinforced for over a decade. No single election cycle will ever pierce through.

    These people are lost causes unless a massive culture shift happens. And it’s not looking like that will happen in the next decades. You, just like other countries, will have to deal with a growing strong block of far right, young men who will grow up to be far right seniors.

    The warning signs started being obvious with Gamergate but they were ignored. The only thing that can be done is preventing the growth of these echo-chambers but the damage is done. It’s just like how carbon capture will not solve climate change, only stopping emitting more as soon as possible.



  • That… doesn’t seem overwhelming?

    In the city council election I voted in (Germany) you had ~40 votes (don’t remember the exact number) to distribute among candidates. Each party put up to ~40 candidates on the ballot and you had to distribute your vote among the candidates. You received like 10 ballots, with each party being on a separate one and had to cast your vote in an envelope with the relevant ballots.

    Additionally, you can give up to 3 of your votes to any one candidate by putting a digit next to their name or just cast one party’s ballot without entering anything to give one vote to each candidate on that ballot.

    Sure, it sounds complicated but you received the ballots with some information two weeks before the election and were encouraged to bring them filled out to the polling station (to reduce waiting time) or register for mail-in voting. Most people probably just casted their entire vote for one party anyways.



  • And so claimed my German ancestors.

    Yet none of them fled the country, none of them joined the small, albeit existing resistance, none of those conscripted deserted the military and none of them claimed to have responsibility. Curious, isn’t it? Everybody seemed to have clean hands because only a few thousand people directly orchestrated the Holocaust. The fact that it could only happen due to both mass support and mass toleration is ignored.



  • Everyone’s hands are clean. The workers at Raytheon producing weapons that kills Palestinians, the people who finance that through taxes, whoever flies the plane or steers the ship delivering the weapons to Israel and even the American soldiers training Israeli forces with the new weapons.

    Everyone of you can give plenty of reasons why they’re not at fault. My German ancestors did the same in 1945. They “didn’t know” or they couldn’t have done anything against it or they voted for the social democrats in the last election or or or…