Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@shortstories @n1vux

cuneiform numbers aren’t bad at all. though it’s disturbing how they have place value but no zero

I just added in the cuneiform with the other number systems on a whim, not really thinking about the implications of it not having a zero (really, I forgot that they didn’t have zero it is a base 60 system, They *do* use place value, but with great ambiguity: it’s one of the things that makes translating old numeric tablets difficult.)

This caused many excellent questions!

“why don’t the ancient ones have a zero?”

twas not invented then, my child

@knowuh

What is the lecture about I’m curious

Content feudalism.

Saw a clip of a guy who was making fun of "AI slop soul music" -- but, because the AI song was played on the Joe Rogan show, he would only play very short clips: he didn't want to get a content strike from youTube.

These people have put the music I grew up with in church in a blender, performed necromancy, puppeted the dead and that's fine... but if a person who *isn't* powerful uses more than three seconds of "their intellectual property" that person will be punished.

@jabgoe2089

That's the part they could map... but they knew it kept going and I think some people had some notions that circumnavigation might be possible. But mostly the world just seemed big and infinite in those days I think.

The fastest you could travel was on a horse.

@DaveMWilburn

The lack of regulations and taxes, and the ability to manipulate the local government matter much more than long term efficiency.

Ants would NEVER.

AWN. That is my new reaction to so many things like this that just are not logical or efficient even if you accept the premise of their existence.

All that air conditioning. I don't get it.

@petealexharris

I will not be accused of ignoring this tech and not giving it a "chance" --but yeah.

AZ is cool and water rich, what a perfect place to build huge data centers... that could go anywhere in the world.

I guess they have...solar power?

Not even getting into the question of IF this is what we should be building, what about the WHERE?

@Tallish_Tom

"The more specific your need, the less likely an AI is to meet it."

This exactly.

I asked chatGPT to make some problems for me. It couldn't understand what I was asking for.

Also they have put up a new paywall today you get five chats a day. Let's see how many people sign up.

(I will write a program to make some amusing problems for me, I already have an English dictionary I use for my "wordle cheating" programs... this should be fun.)

@uriel

OK but what happened to everything being so much safer? That was the part that got me interested in the first place.

I think that part has been forgotten. This is just "don't want to hire a driver"

@Phosphenes @Zumbador

Computers give the impression of working with the analog, so much of the way we work with them obscures their fundamentally discrete nature.

But under the hood? that's still how it works.

@Phosphenes @Zumbador

Also, there is a big gap between being aware that "computers use a language of 1s and 0s" and really understanding how that is built in to the way these machines work. Everything must be encoded and decoded. So, I think this concept of encoding and representation is very important.

Not so that you can read binary, but rather so you have a clear sense of what it means to use layers of algorithms to take something like an image and make it into binary.

@Phosphenes @Zumbador

It has never fallen out of favor with those of us in math who want young people to have a good foundation in discrete mathematics?

I have a worksheet where you add, subtract, multiply and divide words in HEX and fifth graders find this VERY amusing.

Things like D6FD-CAFE=BFF

(If you know of any good hex math problems like this please share as I collect them. )

@spacehobo @hakona @MCDuncanLab

Yes. Red meat is generally more expensive than chicken. Fish is complex, some fish is fancy some isn't.

But as Speed demon says the prices generally reflect these differences.

We then work on short conversion programs in python. If anything they come out of it with a better understanding of multiple number bases... but I think we could also learn some things about sorting with some adaptation.

I'm really excited about how well one of my new lesson ideas for fifth grade CS is working out.

I teach them to count in binary early in the class which they LOVE. In the new lesson I have seven sets of cards with numbers and symbols on them from:

binary
hexadecimal
base 3
base 3 but with different symbols
base 5 but with different symbols
cuneiform
decimal

Each set of cards contains numbers from 1 to 150. Students put them in order and match symbols of the same value.

It's chaos.

@Virginicus @graydon

Design an algorithm, implement the algorithm. Use logical operators correctly, subtize and abstract a problem into variables, objects, functions, and understand both the potential and limitations of your abstraction.

Those are the big ideas I'm trying to teach.

I also have come to like the "soft typing" of python. Variable types are important, but some of the time it makes doing simple tasks so cluttered the main idea can get lost.