I’m now envisioning a car wrecking its way into a house, and then trying to make cat sounds with its engine and stuff (the meows would be kinda hard, but whining would be easy enough) at the door of the restroom, and then the tires just squeal as it zooms away as the person opens the restroom door. I’m envisioning the sheer, overwhelming perplexity on their face.

I’m completely cracking up over this image. It’s amazing.

The TumblrBot’s response to the “do you want to be human” question made me crack up.

It’s fantastic. A bit insulting, playful, charming - man, that’s amazing. I’m going to be randomly giggling about that answer. Coming from an AI… haha!

The problem is, that’s exactly what the … is for. It is a little weird to our heads, granted, but it does allow the conversion. 0.33 is not the same thing as 0.333… The first is close to one third. The second one is one third. It’s how we express things as a decimal that don’t cleanly map to base ten. It may look funky, but it works.

???

Not sure what you’re aiming for. It proves that the setup works, I suppose.

x = 0.555…

10x = 5.555…

10x = 5 + 0.555…

10x = 5+x

9x = 5

x = 5/9

5/9 = 0.555…

So it shows that this approach will indeed provide a result for x that matches what x is supposed to be.

Hopefully it helped?

This is so cute and weirdly wholesome

Even if Jellico was right about it being a superior system, he was still being a shit leader.

You don’t come into a management position and instantly change everything up. You start by learning how things have been going with your staff and setting up a series of changes, with adequate forewarning, for them to adjust to reasonably.

You sure as hell don’t come into a situation that’s tense with time pressures, emotional pressures, legitimate causes to fear for their lives, etc, and then force a wide array of changes onto your staff.

Even if the 4-shift thing is unquestionably superior (and let’s assume it is, ignoring the Bajor comments people are making) - it’s still a stupid as fuck thing to do, under the circumstances.

Especially considering all the other changes and pressures he was adding on, all at the last minute, before a major battle.

Engine overhaul, protocol changes, shift changes, multi-day extreme overtime, on a staff that’s emotionally distressed right before their lives will be put at severe risk?

He’s an absolutely terrible captain and a disgrace to Starfleet. His bullshit would have endangered everyone’s lives for no good reason, had he not been damned lucky that the battle never came.

The way I think of it, there is no subtraction, and there is no division. Or square roots.

There is the singular layer of operations (the adding/subtracting layer which I think of as counting, multiplying/dividing layer which I think of as grouping, etc).

Everything within that layer is fundamentally the same thing. But we just have multiple ways of saying it.

Partly because teaching kids negative numbers is harder than subtraction, and thinking of fractions is hard enough without thinking of it as a representative process of relationships via multiplication.

Again, just how my brain does things. I’m not a mathematician or anything, but I’m pretty decent at regular math.