This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

If you want to contact me, I’m at /u/lvxferre@mander.xyz

  • 2 Posts
  • 719 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 9th, 2021

help-circle




  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlto4chan@lemmy.worldA math lesson from 4chan
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    137
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    That’s surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

    My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

    • the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
    • the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
    • the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
    • the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

    It’s a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.







  • Glacial = anhydrous. People call it this way because pure acetic acid has a rather high freezing point (16°C), and it looks a lot like plain ice when frozen. (It still stinks vinegar once you open the bottle though.) But once you add even a bit of water, the freezing point drops considerably, so acetic acid solutions don’t show the same “ice”.

    So in colder days, you need to rewarm it back into a liquid. Then people get really sloppy (I know it not just from that professor’s anecdote, but from watching it). They say “I’m just rewarming it, and it’s just acetic acid, what could go wrong?”. Well, it’s still a big flask of a corrosive, volatile, and flammable substance.

    In the meantime, the same people doing dangerous reactions like nitration (it literally explodes if you let it get too hot - spreading nitric acid, sulphuric acid, and some carcinogenic solvent) “miraculously” pay full attention, obsessively taking care of the temperature of the ice bath.

    Part of the advice that I mentioned in that comment chain is that - smaller dangers are still dangers, do not underestimate them.



  • Most “rules of thumb” become awful advice when used indiscriminately.

    People assign slightly different meanings to the same words. You need to acknowledge this to understand what they say.

    Words also change meaning depending on the context.

    When you still don’t get what someone else said, it’s often more useful to think that you’re lacking a key piece of info than to assume that the other person does.

    Hell is paved with good intentions. This piece of advice is popular, but still not heard enough.

    Related to the above: if someone in your life is consistently rushing towards conclusions, based on little to no information, minimise the impact of that person in your life.

    Have at least one recipe using leftovers of other recipes. It’ll reduce waste.

    Alcohol vinegar is bland, boring, and awful for cooking. But it’s a great cleaning agent.

    Identify what you need to keep vs. throw away. Don’t “default” this indiscriminately, analyse it on a per case basis.

    The world does not revolve around your belly button and nature won’t “magically” change because of your feelings.

    You can cultivate herbs in a backyard. No backyard? Flower pots. No flower pots? Old margarine pot. (Check which herbs grow well where you live.)








  • It isn’t “Hangul” that is saving the language, but the fact that it’s getting an orthography. That orthography could be theoretically in any writing system - not just Latin or Arabic (both already exist for Cia-Cia, contrariwise to what the video claims), but even a native one or Cyrillic or even, dunno, the Cherokee syllabary.

    Abidin looks informed on the matter; the same cannot be said about whoever produced this video. I’ll highlight a few issues.

    [0:33] - pretty much all languages are “syllable-based”. They organise sounds into syllables. The video is likely trying to convey that it’s a CV (consonant, vowel, repeat) language, unlike, say, Russian or English (that cram quite a lot of consonants in a single syllable).

    [0:36] The video is trying to use “transliterated” as a posh synonym for “spelled”; both are not the same thing. Transliteration is to convert text from a script from another; for example, “Quis credis esse, Bellum?” (Latin, using the Latin script) → “Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?” (Latin, using the Cyrillic script instead) is transliteration.

    And you can spell pretty much any language in any writing system. The association between grapheme and sounds (or phonemes) is arbitrary.

    You might say “but the Latin alphabet doesn’t have a letter for /ɓ/!” - well, it doesn’t have a letter for /ʃ/ either. Italian handled it by spelling it ⟨sci⟩, English as ⟨sh⟩, Polish as ⟨sz⟩, Portuguese kind of repurposed ⟨x⟩. And the current Latin spelling for Cia-Cia - that you can check here - handled /ɓ/ just fine, using a similar approach as the Hangul one.