Are you sure you’re not thinking of “naught”? I’ll admit I don’t know that Brits don’t use “Zed” for zero, but I’ve never heard it from any British YouTuber I’ve watched, including maths YouTubers, nor any British TV I’ve watched. But it’s possible one of their dialects uses it maybe?

All the ones I’ve heard say naught though.

For completeness I’ll say Canadians typically don’t say naught unless they’re British themselves, we say zero.

Another common one for me that I didn’t even notice for a while was Gen-Z, which I will always say “jenzi”. Zed sounds unacceptable there, even though I say zed in most other cases besides those you’ve outlined.

As a Canadian, I have never heard anyone refer to zero as zed. I guess in theory if I was reading out a label or something that specifically had a “Z” to signify zero I would say zed, but that’s because I’m saying the letter rather than because I’m saying zero, but I can’t think of any time when someone would label something as “Z” to mean zero when they could just do “0”, so I don’t think that’s common.

Sorry bud.

I love the timing of this post, being right after the “I just had my first 3some” one. I like to imagine you finish getting plowed and being like “wow, that was amazing”, and then one of the guys being like “oh, you think that was amazing? You know what’s amazing is these pandas with bucket on their heads” and then the other guy being like “yo, after that there’s this great video I’ve got to show you” and squishing you in the middle and you’re like “nooooooooooo…”

Maybe I’m confused about the current state of things, but I thought we weren’t 100% sure Will Shakespeare was even a real guy, or a single guy, but now we’re testing residue off the inside of a clay pipe we know was his and attributing plays to that?

Physics tends to treat numbers as inputs, outputs, and sometimes constants which are also inputs, but more like calibration to make the math describe our world. Like, c could have any value and the math would be math, but in our universe there’s a particular value that produces useful outputs and all others don’t. So we use that one.

As for whether or not it’s worth studying, I think that depends on you. Basically no physicist in the last 50 years does any real calculating in their head. We have tools for that, and they do a fine job. So if you can’t memorize your multiplication tables, who cares. Not important.

But the reasoning part is important. The problem solving part of figuring out how to put pieces together, or how to model something, is important, and also is a skill and mindset. Also, what I didn’t cover is algebra, which is a set of rules for transforming an input into an output, transforming one tool into another, while keeping all the relationships intact. Still not numbers, but again, it is a mindset. Like a language, you have to learn it and become adept at it, and it takes practice to get used to it. And that is very important.

So! The good news is there’s nothing stopping you! You can lookup a list of, like, highschool physics equations and constants, some highschool problems, and see if you can get some answers! Use a calculator, use Excel, whatever! Play around with stuff, get a feel for how it handles. The numbers aren’t the interesting part, the equations are, and how they’re used. For you, the numbers will just be something you punch in at the end to see if you got your reasoning right.

So yeah, give it a shot, there are no rules, and try not to get discouraged! 😛

Yeah, I had a teacher who had one and I thought it’d be cool to not need as many floppies. But that’s the only time I was ever near one, and I don’t think I ever held one in my hands. Then I forgot because better stuff came along 😛

Man’s leggiest tool.

Math, or at least this part of it, is all about relationships between values. Let’s ignore numbers for a bit. If you take a long stick and put a big rock under it, then when you move your side of the stick down, the other side will move up. And if you were to measure how much you moved your side versus how much the other side moved, you’d notice that unless you put the rock right in the dead middle, the other side would move a different amount. This isn’t because something is magically making this happen, it just a property of the construction of your system. The other side just does move more or less, and it’s different depending on where the pivot point is.

Similarly, if you have two gear wheels with different numbers of teeth, and you mesh them together, and you turn one and count how many times you’ve turned it, and also count how far the other one has turned, you’ll find a relationship there too! And again, this relationship is just built into the way these objects interact. It’s just the way this system works.

Okay, so, stay with me now, saying y = 2x + 5 is the same. It’s defining a relationship, it’s building a system that’s says the value we’re calling “y”, chosen arbitrarily it could be any name, is always twice as big as “x” (also chosen arbitrarily), and then 5 more than that. It’s a system we’ve built, just like the levers or gears, that produces a relationship we want to express for some reason. And you can put them together in any way, and they’ll always describe some relationship, even if it’s not a useful one.

Now, people have spent hundreds of years, depending on how you want to count, trying to find relationships that also happen to have predictive power. They’ve built systems where the relationship between “d” and “t” is modeled to be the same as the relationship between “the distance that rock flew from me” and “the time since I threw that rock”. And what’s nice about finding these relationships is that now that you know what the relationship is, now that you’ve built the system of levers and pulleys and gears that turn in just the right way, you can start guessing about the rocks before you even throw them, because this relationship you’ve got on the page is similar to the one you’ve seen in real life with the rock and the stopwatch.

Once you’ve got a bunch of these, picking the right one and combining them because more like a puzzle or a maze. I’ve got these things I know, like the weight of the rock, and the size of the Earth, and how stiff the metal in the spring I’m using to launch this thing is. And I’m trying to figure out its top speed. And I’ve got a bag of relationships I know are battle-tested. So all I have to do now is start finding relationships that depend on stuff I know to get me stuff I don’t know. And if I can link them together like a Rube Goldberg machine, I can figure out something I didn’t know using this one relationship, which is handy because this other relationship I’d quite like to use needed that thing I didn’t know before but do now.

And so I can work through a chain of relating things to things until I can get to the point where I have enough to use one of the relationships I do know that predicts speed. And once I’ve got that, I’m done! I trust the relationships I’ve used, presumably I used them properly and didn’t make any dumb mistakes, and so I followed a chain of things I knew, through tools that used those things, to tools that used the things the other tools produced, until I found a path to my goal.

The only thing stopping you from there is the complexity of the relationship, the accuracy of the relationship to the real situation, and how accurately you can measure the things you know.

That would be a useful thing to appear in the pamphlet or whatever, but I do still think there’s some value in saying “expected value of 5 minutes” somewhere prominent.

Because the whole point of quick charging is that (most of the time) you aren’t charging to 100% when you’re also in a time crunch. You’re either slowly charging to 100, or you’re quickly charging until you reach the limit of quick charging, and then driving to the next quick charger.

So what matters in practice is “how long until quick charge stops” and “how much range does that charge get me”

So you’re saying there’s a chance… 😛

Oh, so L could be “lead”! Or similarly “live”

“Nevermind” or “Next” would be pretty good.

L could maybe be “Lagos” because there’s two cities named that and they’re pronounced differently?

You can make it all grainy and greyscale, but I still know that backdrop is bright orange and purple 😛

Obviously for this case we need to add a signifier for the countdown so it’s clear to the other parties that you are aware of the standard and adhering to it before you even begin the countdown.

Like “ISO three two one GO!”

This is semi-backwards compatible, but still confusing for normies.

Even better, just make up new words where the ambiguity never existed. No numbers at all, just “glarp dook peow” and we always go on “peow” and always have. No backwards compatibility, but you’ll be guaranteed that a person who doesn’t understand will need clarification, and won’t go unexpectedly through imagined agreement.

Or, if backwards compatibility is required, we could count up from 1 to 3… and our signifier phrase could be something like “awnthree”. As a label for the standard we’re using! Like, “awnthree, one, two, three”.

I think that could work 😛

This is one of those ones that’s a tragedy. Biweekly “should” always mean every two weeks. Twice a week is “semi-weekly”, aka every half a week.

But regardless of what it “should” mean, people use it wrong often enough that you have to check every time, not because the word is ambiguous, but because people are often mistaken.

It’s a shame, but it’s part of human communication 😅

Whose SEC? The Wall Street Criminal’s? Huh. Strange that…

Honestly, I didn’t know Artimus was happening. That’s how busy the news is. I saw memes about astronauts and Outlook, assumed it was the ISS, and only when I saw the pictures of the Earth from the moon was I like “Wait, what? We have humans going to the moon right now? And they’re already there? When did that happen?”

They’re living out their dreams, and doing something very rare for our species, and I wouldn’t recognize them if they were in line in front of me at the grocery store. Huh.

I meeeean, they’re definitely bad people, and the guy definitely isn’t a good guy, and he definitely discarded them, and the patriarchy is definitely bad… but in this case I don’t think it was the patriarchy. He’s a man, they’re women, but he’s discarded lots of men as well for basically the same reason.

He’s a piece of shit, they’re pieces of shit, he’s not great to women in general, but in this case he treated these women the same way he treated the men, which is disposable garbage.

Sometimes I try to swipe up and the phone interprets it as a sideways swipe and dismisses something I hadn’t read. So I’ve hit the history feature to see what that might have been.

Now, what I’d prefer is an undo button, and I wouldn’t have expected that history to persist more than 10 minutes, but it’s not 100% useless.