Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Misc. comments 66: ( terminology, the river Thames, recipes and ingredients, family trees, classifying fruit, covid precautions, learning math, subscription prices, reasons for blogging )
( covid vaccination and masking )

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minoanmiss was talking about kids at the place she works trying to get out of math class. amaebi talked about her son's math classes, and I wrote:

Reading this comment, I think part of why I came out of high school still liking math may be the teachers, and another part may be the slightly odd curriculum they were using. It was the "experimental" math track per my high school, and "unified" according to the university that promoted it; we got a lot of the standard material, up to calculus, but also propositional logic (in eighth grade), Cartesian geometry (instead of Euclidean), and combinatorics. The school also had a "regular" math sequence, and students who found experimental too difficult (or, I would guess, whose parents thought it was too weird) could move into those classes, which also led to calculus).

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In response to brithistorian wondering about weird magazine prescription costs:

My guess, beyond late stage capitalism being weird, is that they're somehow still selling advertising to companies based on the number of people who are reading, or at least getting, the print edition.

If so, it benefits them to be sending out more paper copies, even to people who read the digital version and will throw the paper magazines away without opening them. It sounds like the prices of daily newspapers increased when they were selling fewer ads. What I paid at the newsstand in the morning was about enough to cover the paper and printing costs, and the reporters' and editors' salaries, the fees for syndicated comics and columnists, and any profits all were paid for by advertising.

It's not quite "if you aren't the customer, you're the product," but it's a little bit in that direction. At one point, my daily English-language newspaper options in New York included several that cost about 50 cents, plus two free papers given out at subway and railroad station entrances, and the Wall Street Journal and Women's Wear Daily.

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finch was talking about "why do I blog anyway?" and I said:

Part of why I post here is for my own later reference, which includes both things I hope will be interesting to others, and minutiae of stuff like starting on new meds. I made a bunch of posts early in the pandemic because I could feel time just slipping away, then.

My posts here are also about talking to people, which is sometimes conversation and sometimes "here is information I think you might find useful.".

There's a pinned post at the top of my Dreamwidth account page, which says this is [partly] an online substitute for a paper journal, and also invites new readers to introduce themselves.

I turned in the copyediting job, and am now back to proofreading a math book. Here at the bottom of page 16, I find "By the axiom of choice, there exists a set B which consists of one element from each Aα."

I'm not sure why I'm so pleased by today's xkcd, but I am. (cattitude says the mouseover text is what makes it, but I was smiling before I got to that)

More saved comments: ( poetry and structure, comfort food, warnings for disturbing content, the distinctions languages make, reading and rereading, 'guilty' pleasures )

than geometry: but you can't always get what you want.

Cold-reading a geometry book is useful. Doing the same for an algebra book is that, and sometimes also fun.

Also: I left today after getting to a lesson whose beginning falls into "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." A sentence in a high-school math review/test prep book that begins "If lines are congruent," has nowhere useful to go. I'm hoping that in the morning I will be able to get some idea of what the writer actually meant to say and/or what the editor thought was there, which may mean guessing at the line that the compositor dropped. If not, it gets flagged as "Rosemary, this doesn't make any sense. What's in the manuscript?"

This is, I think, more technicality/terminology than anything. One of my fellow editors ran into this:

Is y-0 [equivalently, f(x)=0] a function that is symmetric with respect to the x-axis?

It seems to me and her that it is, but a site she often finds reliable claims that there are no such functions.

[Note: this is a technical point, not that she and I have forgotten how to graph simple curves: y=x² is a function, but x=y² is not a function but a relation.]

ETA: Thank you all. Within a couple of hours, I was able to go back to Marta and tell her that I'd had responses from people I trusted, including a Ph.D. mathematician, and she and I were right and the web site was wrong. When she first asked me, after lunch, she wasn't going to consult her usual source because the manuscript is due Monday.

I just inadvertently downloaded a calculus textbook.

Downloading a calculus textbook isn't inherently weird, but I suspect most people who do so, do so on purpose. I followed a link in an email message to "my new favorite calculus textbook," expecting to find a review, or a chance to buy the book. What I found was Marsden and Weinstein's Calculus Without Limits. I haven't read far enough to know whether it's any good, though the authors do seem capable of putting together paragraphs of English prose.

At the moment, the state of the Vicki is "somewhat stressed," of the sort where I realized from physical signs and then stopped and figured out (at least most of) why. Much of it is self-limiting: both my menstrual period and my pre-con jitters will be over soon, no matter what I do.

This afternoon at work, I wound up explaining to my officemate why "what does the graph of e^dx/dy look like?" isn't a well-defined question, after he asked me what said curve would look like. (No, this had nothing to do with anything either of us was working on, and next time I'll let him re-teach himself calculus; I had to explain to him that yes, derivatives are calculus.) He was willing to accept it when I wrote down four relatively straightforward equations, the relevant derivatives for each, and how different e^{those values} were. Nothing weird, just stuff like f(x)=x², f(x)=x-3, and f(x)=cos(x). And then I went back to fiddling with grammar and typos, and looking up the diameter of Betelgeuse (which was work-related) and the area of Florida (ditto).

I've also been to the gym, which helps some with the stress. ( numbers cut, as usual )

I spent my lunch hour at my bank, opening an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) [1] at the last minute. The computer system didn't believe it was before the deadline for a 2006 IRA, but the humans did, and there had been enough calls about this before the banker helping me picked up the phone that they gave her the workaround in a very calm way. (It involves hand-amending the documents, in red, and both bank employee and customer initialing the change.) cattitude and I will sit down and talk a bit about suitable investments for said money, and I'll go in next week or the week after and get that sorted out; on this sort of last-minute thing, it had to go in a bank IRA for the nonce. [The reasons it was done at the last minute are obscure and uninteresting.]

After work, I went to the big post office at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, and mailed our "please give us an extension" forms, complete with checks based on rough calculations in case we hadn't gotten in under the deadline to open the IRA. In a week or two, we'll file an actual tax return, including "and send us back the money we just sent, we have a significantly smaller taxable income than we thought we might." And then I walked up to Ben and Jerry's, because I was feeling very much in need of an ice cream cone.

The rest of the day, I spent cheerfully copyediting a book that I'm thinking of as "review all of high school math in four days," not because the students will be expected to go through it that fast, but because I am. This really does seem to be a fairly complete package: linear equations to fractals, Euclidean geometry to conditional probability. Conditional probability was late this afternoon. I got to that lesson, thought something deep like "conditional probability, good" and then proceeded to tinker with the phrasing. That I think things like "conditional probability, good" is probably right up there with my persistence in checking the arithmetic (and leaving annotated corrections in some places) with why they're happy to give me all the math, and give the language arts projects to someone who has more of a feel for what's wanted there. (I also cheerfully do science and social studies.)

And now I am reheating chili; cattitude is out at a play, but I felt the need for a quiet night at home.

[1] There are tax deductions involved, which is why there's a meaningful deadline.

I would further like to note that an isoceles right triangle cannot have sides all of whose lengths are a whole number of units, and that whoever edited that manuscript should have noticed that 20:20:24 isn't even close to the right value of the hypotenuse. Since the point of the example is naming shapes of triangles, not the Pythagorean theorem, and they haven't had irrationals or the Pythagorean theorem yet, it got a suggested change to 28 (the closest integer to the actual value), and a note that we can't avoid irrationals, with the shorthand explanation "(1:1:√2)". I haven't handed it in yet, and am now wondering whether it would be better not to give a length for the hypotenuse. The editor on this project may know their pedagogy, but they're not sufficiently intimate with numbers.