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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

    The quadratic formula.

    When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

    I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.













  • King has almost always written his stories in the immediate present. There are a few exceptions, but they are intentional and critical to the plot. In all the others, it is fully in keeping with his style to update cultural references to set the story in the recent past, the now, or the very near future. He is a contemporary writer of contemporary stories, that is fundamentally the reason. King also seems to feel no loyalty to preserving his past works. He is alive. His stories are more about the lives of the characters than fashion or pop culture. I’m not always a fan of his revisions either (The Gunslinger being a good example), but it’s part of the total package of his writing philosophy.


  • You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.