Thursday, April 30
Daily News Stuff 30 April 2020
No End Of Excitement Edition
No End Of Excitement Edition
Tech News
- Coles is doing home deliveries again. My chickie nuggies and fried rices arrive Tuesday.
- USB 4.0 will support DisplayPort 2.0 with bit rates up to 80Gbps. (AnandTech)
That's in one direction over an active cable (the same as Thunderbolt 3). With a regular USB cable it drops to just 40Gbps.
At full speed it can handle 8K 60Hz at 30 bits per pixel. With a normal cable it can do 8K with 4:2:2 colour or 5K 60Hz.
- The 48-core Threadripper 3980X probably doesn't exist. (Tom's Hardware)
But possibly not. My first reaction was that AMD wouldn't configure it with 192MB of L3 cache - which would mean six 8-core dies - but instead with eight 6-core dies and a total of 256MB of cache.
But on the Epyc side of things they offer both options, so that doesn't rule it out as a real leak.
- 18 plugins for writing Python in VS Code. (Switowski)
Or - bear with me - you could just use PyCharm which costs all of free for the Community Edition.
- Half of Americans aren't complete idiots. (Ars Technica)
- The US government has finally recognised Amazon's market-leading efforts in selling counterfeit crap to everyone in the universe. (Politico)
Just look up SD cards. The site is inundated with fakes.
- Holy crap bandwidth from Google Cloud is expensive.
Arithmetic Music Video of the Day
Disclaimer: You can't take three from two, two is less than three.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:20 PM
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1
Am i missing the joke, or is there now an even more roundabout, NEW-new math? The new math Tom sings about is the way I learned how, and distinctly remember people ranting about the 'new math' elemetary schools were teaching while i was in highschool.
Posted by: Karl Drexler at Thursday, April 30 2020 11:54 PM (B7S37)
2
VS Code is free, too.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:32 AM (Iwkd4)
3
Yes, Common Core incorporates a new new math, which is really "just" trying to force the kind of shortcuts quick thinkers have come up with on kids who aren't ready for them yet, or rather, things that look like said shortcuts.
From an example I found real quick, instead of adding 78 and 57 to get 135, you can add 70 and 50 to get 120, then ad 8 and 7 to get 15, then add those two intermediate sums to get the final answer. Or the one that really troubles people, instead of subtracting 28 from 86 the old-fashioned way in the video, you notice that 28 + 2 = 30, and 30 + 10 = 40 and 40 + 40 = 80, and if you add 6 more, you get 86. So now add up the 2 and the 10 and the 40 and the 6 to get 58, and there's your result. It's kinda-sorta similar to the way I would do that in my own head, although backwards, and also as if someone with a low IQ listened to my explanation and misunderstood it.
From an example I found real quick, instead of adding 78 and 57 to get 135, you can add 70 and 50 to get 120, then ad 8 and 7 to get 15, then add those two intermediate sums to get the final answer. Or the one that really troubles people, instead of subtracting 28 from 86 the old-fashioned way in the video, you notice that 28 + 2 = 30, and 30 + 10 = 40 and 40 + 40 = 80, and if you add 6 more, you get 86. So now add up the 2 and the 10 and the 40 and the 6 to get 58, and there's your result. It's kinda-sorta similar to the way I would do that in my own head, although backwards, and also as if someone with a low IQ listened to my explanation and misunderstood it.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)
4
The way I would do the last problem is, instead of messing around with extraneous steps like converting the subtraction to addition, I'd just go 86 - 10 = 76 - 10 - 66 (etc) until I was at 36. Now I have a running-total partial answer of 50. I can then either subtract 6 to get to 30, then subtract 2 more to get to 28, add the 6 and the 2 to the 50 to get 58, or just go from 36 to 28, and add the 8 to the 50. The differences are that I've skipped the unnecessary re-framing of the problem, and I've been doing partial sums strictly by tens and ones because it simplifies the numbers I have to keep in my head, and I also don't add/subtract by 40s, for the same reason.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:55 AM (Iwkd4)
5
Oh! Almost forgot--the other, equally-bad or maybe worse problem, is they START with this shortcut-that-actually-isn't instead of explaining the long way and then saying "now here's a faster way."
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:57 AM (Iwkd4)
6
I went to a mixture of private and state-run schools, but the private schools were old-fashioned enough to make us memorize our tables, so that when I did go to the state-run school I was way ahead of the idiots who'd grown up in that system. When I finally started looking at the "New Math" (which was a 1960s thing that still hadn't penetrated the hinterlands in the 1980s) is looked like a lame attempt to introduce algebraic thinking to arithmetic. While this is perfectly valid philosophically, it's silly in elementary education, because memorizing is far far faster (and more reliable), especially for children whose brains are very good at memorization and not quite so great at abstraction.
Even now, 40 years on, I can say "6*9=54" without having to think about it.
Even now, 40 years on, I can say "6*9=54" without having to think about it.
Posted by: normal at Friday, May 01 2020 08:28 AM (obo9H)
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