"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Order of function error: does not compute! *heh*
Ran into someone who thought πr² meant (πr)². No, it’s π(r²). (πr)² yields a SUBSTANTIALLY different number.
Example: where r = 2, (3.14159 x 2)² = 39.4783509124, whereas 3.14159 x 4 [that is, r²] = 12.56636. That area is less than ⅓ of the incorrect computation.
Correct math can help define and comprehend the material world. Innumerates are easy prey for professional liars (like, say, politicians and mass MEdia Hivemind Podpeople).
Went to a Trivial Pursuit party, oh, about 40 years ago, held at the home of a guy who owned a moving company. OK, that’s trivializing his company. What he moved was HOUSES (was fun being a minor part of the move when he moved some Army barracks that had been declared surplus).
What impressed me most about the evening was not how trivial the Trivial Pursuit play was but his library. It was a mezzanine floor that encompassed three sides of the great room where we played our mini single-elimination tournament. I do not recall anything else about the house, but that library has featured in more than a few of my dreams over the years since. . .
Just saw someone use “belie” to mean “confirm.” That’s like Dhimmicraps “defending democracy” by promoting vote fraud.
And even then, maybe not. Case in point *heh* —
“Case and point, the roaring metal stallion balanced on two shining wheels that bared down on him. . .”
Case IN point and bore. (Note on the conjugation of “to bear”)
Some “writers” obviously failed Remedial English and then had their “work” reviewed by Bonobo Chimpanzees.
If you see any form of “decimate” used in any text published in this century, you can be at least 90% certain it is misused. Even the most corrupt definition listed by contemporary lexicographers seems to be eschewed by at least 90% of contemporary speakers of English, because words only USED to have meaning.
(Most “readers” in English-speaking countries will not be able to understand the above text.)
“Oh. There’s a test today? Anyone have a pen I can borrow?” *throws some change in a cup and picks up a Blue Book*
And yeh, I didn’t buy the books for the course, either. I was a real snot, sometimes.
It’s been several years since I have been “trapped” by a listserv-posted novel. New chapters (or just pieces of new chapters, in some cases) posted at regular or irregular intervals, as the writer is able or as the writer simply feels like doing, just does not appeal to me, especially since everything is usually first draft, unedited.
But. . . yeh. in my sporadic armchair pseudo-anthropological dabbling in understanding the background of a subset of 20-something or 30-nothing grups, I usually read some litrpg/isekai/wuxia fiction each week, out of the usual 10+ books of various genres (including a few non-fiction from varied subject lines). So, I was snagged by a Royal Road thread featuring a variation of isekai-wuxia I had not run across before. Only 20 chapters on RR, so. . . Patreon. But no, not paying $8/month to have instant access to new material, etc. The book is better-written and more interesting than 90% of the its genre, but not THAT musch better-written or interesting.
Winds of Destiny: A Cultivator’s Odyssey. Fluff, but entertaining and not even nearly as badly-written as most normally published self-pubs available on Amazon.
Grammar exercise for the day. Diagram:
“After a long sleepless night, [Character Name] comes across a man chasing a woman thief named [Other Character Name], who soon becomes [Personal Possessive Pronoun] loyal ally in the wild.” Lil clue: as it (rather much) later turns out, the sentence does not actually say what the writer intended. *smh*
Any writer that wants to be paid for their work and yet
should be taken behind the woodshed for a wee bit of “education.”
(The spur this time was “Senor” for “Señor”. . . after too many other execrable stupidities. Just not going to read anything else by this producer of stuff unworthy of even being used for fertilizer.)
I am constantly amazed at folks who just see no benefit from even such simple maths as algebra, trig, geometry, etc., in their daily lives. There was a brief point in my life, college calculus classes, when I could pretty much just look at a simple math problem and know the answer. (Gave my prof fits, ‘cos I rarely wrote down the steps to achieve the answer. . . cos I hadn’t thought of ’em.) But. . . word problems in that class that attempted to use semi-sorta “real world” situations where different calculus functions could be used to solve things were not so much my metier at the time.
Time passed, as is its wont, and everyday circumstances took on “math meaning” in my perceptions more and more often, until not a day passes that something doesn’t trigger algebraic, “trig-ic” *heh*, differential. . .-ic ?, or whatever thoughts.