Innumeracy

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Classic!!

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Should have used x^2 - 1

I used 20 x 17 - 17

however, on an episode of Big Bang Theory, a drunk Amy says, this is great, why don’t we do this all the time.

In response he asks her, What is 14 x 16?

I respond quickly 224. My family stares at me.

I go knowing 15^2 is 225, 14 x 16 is (x+1)(x-1) which is x^2 -1, so 224. The starring got worse.

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i feel this. i’ve shortened stuff to “it’s hard to explain” when it is something I know or remember or whatever.

  1. I know the square numbers. You know: 4, 9, 16,… I know them up to X.
  2. I also remember my 7th or 8th grade Algebra. Do you recall any of that? Well, I do, and have for the past Y years.
  3. And so on.

I think Algebra teachers should point this out as an easy way to multiply numbers that are equally distant from a number between them.

Not so easy unless all three are integers.

Advanced innumeracy - have you taken a stat class? :grinning_face:

Starting around 1:55 he says “I don’t trust the BLS labor report … 24 of the last 26 months have been revised lower … initially it beats estimates but by the third revision it is lower .. something like 11 or 12 standard deviations when that happens

If it were truly an independent coin flip, the probability of exactly 24 out of 26 coin flips in a specified direction is 1 in 206,489 (that drops to 190K if I allow 25 and 26). Of course it isn’t independent, I don’t offer exact details but I would suspect something about the procedure of collecting and revising data could obviously be correlated from month to month. Anything associated with 11 standard deviations is on the order of 1 in 10^27.

Posted here since M_S pointed out the error

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From a protest re: the location of the upcoming International Conference of Mathematics:

Oh c’mon, at least hit the origin. I’ll accept the bad artwork on going over 1, but you can label your y-axis after drawing the curve to make sure the peaks and valleys are at +/- 1. And is that curve on the right really going to have the same min as established on the left?

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Technically it IS a sine, it’s just 0.9 sin (x - pi/8) + 0.2

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It’s a bad sine.

It’s a sine of the times . . .

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This thread is going on a sin(tan()).

math is hard