Memes

Yes, that's standard at least in Germany

Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90's.

I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I'd learned just about everything they taught that wasn't specific to the US or the English language (and even some of those…) either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.

I'm American, I definitely learned this stuff in 7th or 8th grade. Granted, I didn't use it past high school, and I forgot it before I finished college, but that's definitely when I learned it.

Idk what middle school really is because it's not been a thing at any of the schools I've been to, but it's definitely something you do a lot earlier than calculus. If calculus comes in in your last three or four years of high school, quadratics are what you're doing for at least two years before that.

In Hong Kong too, though the dividing is a bit different. High school is like the last 3 years of secondary school, and middle school is like the 3 years in primary school and 3 years in secondary school.

We also have vector and matrix on top of calculus in high school if you take the elective course. The compulsory part contains geometry, complex, probability, etc.

If you want, we have some samples. I took module 2. Compulsory Module 1: Calculus + Statistics Module 2: Algebra + Calculus

Yeah seriously WTF, I didn't even learn basic Algebra until freshmen year of high school! We never even got to the math with the fancy letters in it. I have no idea what those cursive f, d, and w characters mean.

Oh, sorry the 45 page document is for something else. The only person who understands this dataset is Dave and he was made redundant 5 years ago. Anyway, can you get this done today?

Dang, I was really hoping this would be one of those stories that goes like:

"How long will that take?"

"It's a lot of data...like a month?" (But I actually wrote a Python script that compiles and formats it perfectly in like 5 minutes.)

"You're such a hard worker!"

Yup this is every job now. Wrangling numbers. The actual job or calculation could be done in days if less. But dealing with dirty information and playing detective which isnt even part of it is the sink hole of every job right now.

If Timmy has 45 pages to read on a bus traveling an average speed of 35 mph with an mean stop distance being 0.7 kms how many stops will Timmy pass before this fucking meeting ends ?

That's software development for you. Why is that weird value there? Because some guy, at some point, had checked for that and somehow it's still relevant.

I know of a system that churns through literally millions of transactions representing millions of Euros every day, and their interface has load bearing typos (because Germans in the 90s were really bad at the Englishs).

You might also have discalcula, which is a real but somewhat uncommon thing where you're absolutely shit at math. I have no idea how to get tested for it though.

Khan academy can solve this for you, if you want.

That is usury. That cannot be legal? Oh, no, I just checked, wow, usury laws are weak af.

Sounds like predatory lending

53%?!

Sounds like one of those shitty used car joints “no credit, no problem” that you sign your life away for a mediocre car.

AcTuArIe

As an engineer, doubt.

I recently had to do linear algebra for the first time ever irl. I’ve been out of school for ~15 years. I was trying to make a rotation matrix to transform some points in 2D space. It took me a very long time to remember how it’s performed yet alone “transformation matrix” which is something I’d never heard of before. I got my code all working and was so proud, then later found that one of the r packages I was using could have just solved it all automatically :/

Stokes' theorem. Almost the same thing as the high school one. It generalizes the fundamental theorem of calculus to arbitrary smooth manifolds. In the case that M is the interval [a, x] and ω is the differential 1-form f(t)dt on M, one has dω = f'(t)dt and ∂M is the oriented tuple {+x, -a}. Integrating f(t)dt over a finite set of oriented points is the same as evaluating at each point and summing, with negatively-oriented points getting a negative sign. Then Stokes' theorem as written says that f(x) - f(a) = integral from a to x of f'(t) dt.