u/EdgyMathWhiz

Not to be "that guy", but having 6 divines is NOT half way in game time to having 12 I'm afraid, as the chance of each new divine being a duplicate goes up as you go along.

In particular, when you have 11 divines, the expected number of new divines you need before you get the last one you need is 12.  

Genuinely thought you were saying it lead to her death, so this is actually a relief...

Living on Mars. Great idea. Wonderful idea.  Did you know, you can live on Mars with just a few potatoes? They made a documentary.

Elon tells me if it wasn't for woke NASA we'd already have a colony on Mars.  

So I am hereby announcing a 10 year plan to start a colony on Mars, starting with building Donald Trump Spaceport.  Thank you for your attention.

[I'm no good at this particular parody, but it's fairly obvious Liz is reading from a certain American politician's playbook.]

If we're being honest, I think another big factor is money.  The expectation is to compete (and often), to take workshops, private lessons.  It all adds up, while at the same time a lot of young people are struggling to pay the rent.

I think the discrepancy is even more than that.

If a good lead asks a beginner-to-intermediate follow, they will find themselves able to do things they haven't been taught yet; they'll think "oh wow, I can follow" even if the lead is adjusting really hard behind the scenes to make things work.

If a good follow asks a beginner-to-intermediate lead, it won't really be a massively better experience for the lead than dancing with a beginner - it may even feel worse, because the follow may well NOT automatically do "the exact beginner move the lead is expecting them to do because it's the move that was taught in class even though they can't actually lead it yet".

And then compounding that, if beginners talk about their experiences, the follows are all going "I danced with this advanced dancer, and he lead me into all these amazing moves and it was fantastic", and the beginner leads become very aware where they stand in the pecking order.

TBH, I'd guess this is wildly optimistic.  I'd guess the half-life for leads is more like 6 weeks.

I'm not sure many other dances do any better.  The initial learning curve for a lead is pretty brutal.

If Liz suggested it, it's probably a bad idea...

I was looking at her Wiki page for the timeline and I feel it doesn't really reflect how it felt at the time.

I remember when Hunt replaced Kwateung there was a strong undercurrent of him being "actually in charge".

And what I remember most was a brutal, brutal press conference (I think it was the one after Hunt's appointment was confirmed) where she genuinely looked like she'd taken some kind of mood suppressant and the undercurrent of at least one question was "why are you still here?".  

I can't stand the woman, and she's certainly not contrite in the aftermath, but that situation would have broken a lot of people, and I think it broke her.  Denial as a defense strategy (facilitated by hedge funds who see her as a useful idiot) seems entirely predictable.

My 4 point budget of 

(1) Cure cancer

(2) Fix the climate crisis

(3) Universal Prosperity

(4) World peace

is technically correct too!

"if thick" shows a level of self-doubt and introspection far beyond anything Liz Truss could aspire to....

You sure that's not 6.1mm.thick?  61mm.is Lord of the Rings type territory.

Decent leads are pretty good at considering follower height and it's done fairly subconsciously so we're not even thinking about it. (I'll have more issues dancing with even a short follow with a substantial hair clip - I have to consciously allow a bit more room then).

IMHO, the adjustment that's worth making is distance - it's a lot easier to give a lot of vertical clearance if the follow stays close.  

(Also, head ducks are tricky with tall follows - I don't feel qualified to advise whether to adjust there, but I think it's the one place where you might want to temporarily make yourself shorter).

TIL! I knew 5ft9 was pretty much bang on average when I reached it about 40 years ago, but I thought it had gone up an inch or 2 since - the younger men dancing now seem taller...

Shortish lead (5 foot 9) and I'd absolutely recommend standing tall and not compromising your posture.  

I don't believe deterministic MR is a big deal in practice.  It's not hard to get to where it's more likely to be wrong because a cosmic ray flipped a memory bit than the actual math uncertainty.

Aside from that, there's also the issue that an AI might produce a 100,000 page rambling argument that we believe to be true because it was converted into 100 million lines of Lean and machine verified, but no human is going to understand it without many, many years of study.

A common refrain with Mochizuki's abc "proof" is even if it is somehow correct, if a large number of experts in the field can't follow it then it's not a "true proof".

Certainly there's a danger we get to where most math is being doing by AIs talking to each other, with the arguments being well beyond human understanding.  

Suppose you need to divide 4357 into 26121.  It's not particularly obvious what even the first digit is (it turns out 6 x 4357 is just a little bit too big, so it's 5).

If you actually had to do this (to several d.p.), I'm fairly sure the best plan is to start out by making a table for 2x4357, 3x4357 etc so you don't have to ever worry about "what's 7 x 4357?" etc.  Which is a bit of practical advice I don't think I've seen printed.  (From memory, explanations of long division essentially behave as if multiplication of the divisor is trivial).

Software implementations are a lot more straightforward because you can work in binary and then multiplication of the divisor really is trivial.

I work in a reasonably "technical" field (computer graphics), and have interviewed a fair number of people with degrees in computer science.  We used to ask questions about similar low level tasks,  but even 10 years ago, it was extremely unusual to find a candidates who could do even a simple task along those lines, to the point we decided those questions were not even really worth asking.

Yeah, degree level was overstating it, but i wanted a term that would be universally understood and was after the point you'd expect someone to know how to do this. 

I always feel long division is such a stupid test case.  It's legitimately hard (outside of trivial sized divisors) and there's no reason to not let a machine do it for you.  I've got a degree in maths and worked in mathematical fields for 30+ years and outside of recreational maths I've never needed to know how to do it as an adult.

I'd have no issue at all hiring an engineer who couldn't do long division on paper, let alone in his head.

People not knowing how to multiply say 13 x 7, or (at degree level) how to multiply (3x + 7)(5x - 9) strikes me as more concerning.

Massively up at my.local supermarket - I've personally seen people shoplifting from it about 10 times since Covid.  Didn't notice it once in the previous 10 years.

Obviously a lot more that that has happened without me seeing it. One security guard got a shoulder dislocated in an altercation and was off work for several weeks.

Each time it's been very blatant and in your face - it's not surreptitiously sticking a bar of chocolate in a pocket, it's filling two bags with bottles of wine, and then staring down the staff while walking out.

Some of these are to do with tempo preferences, surely?  If people really like a song but it's too fast for them to dance to, they're going to prefer (to dance to) a slower version, even if it might not sound as good.

That WCS dancers should get over their "anything over 120bpm is for Lindyhoppers" attitude  is another unpopular opinion I guess...

In the UK, I'd say that it's more accurate to say

"no" is a complete sentence, that sentence being "no, and don't ever ask me again".  

Heck, even "no thank you" is probably being interpreted as "don't ask again tonight".

And if that's what you mean, then fine.  But understand that's how it's likely interpreted.

But do you know a lock picking lawyer?

It's a QoL thing to auto delete Singular Zodiacs.