It took me forever to get around to this one, because I basically find derivative shortcuts pretty boring. I like explaining conceptual things, but I do not like going over rote material that needs to be memorized. In person, I avoid lecturing much on this by making the students work through these rules from prompts, up at the board. But for here, I basically hedged - this diverges from a real calculus class, and is more like a meta-description of what you would be doing in class.

Lesson 5: Derivative Shortcuts

Prior:

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

On the plus side, they've added in pageless viewing since my last entry, so pictures aren't cut off anymore! Someone from Google must be learning calculus this summer.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe twenty six

This is either so obvious that people don't say it, or people say it and I've missed it, but we all agree that Elon Musk just is Donald Trump, right? A Trump for a new generation: the limitless narcissism, the absolute lack of a moral impulse, the lack of self-control, the substantial but vastly inflated wealth, the rich asshole father, the ability to play the media, the bossman posturing, the loser fanboys...if he hadn't been born in South Africa, I'd put money on him being president one day.

I mostly haven't been following this, as it seems wisest not to. I've mostly gotten my impressions from Michael Hobbes (Rotten in Denmark) who is perpetually furious that the evidence all clearly supports her allegations of abuse, and yet it's being treated as both-sides.

I also saw a tweet sequence where a black person said, "Johnny Depp is OJ for white people" and someone responded, "But Depp is innocent!" and the first person said "Exactly."

So that's the extent of my understanding. Slow news day, huh?

Anyone feel like explaining what I should know about how its going? Wars are one of those topics that makes every lightbulb in my head shut off. Pretty much all I've absorbed in the past five months is that it's a humanitarian disaster for the civilians and Zelensky is kind of a matinee idol who has a knack for doing everything right.

Spoken English and written English are obviously not playing by the same rules. I find that texting is a funny middle ground, because it communicates more like speech than like writing. The rule that I keep noticing is the one on run-on sentences. I often feel like a run-on sentence better captures how the other person should read my words out loud in their heads, over using a semicolon or breaking it into two sentences.

Example:
"is everyone going to the movies tonight?"
"i don't know, we're going to the pool."

You obviously could write it with a semi-colon or break it into two sentences, but the rules for spoken English really feel like they call for a comma. I mean, I've never heard someone use a semi-colon when they're speaking out loud.

Anybody else remember the book The Fourth Procedure from the late '90s? I remember loving it and I read it multiple times (although I used to re-read everything multiple times back then).

This first comment from Goodreads is pretty spot-on:

I read this book probably 25 years ago. I remember exactly one thing about it. Otherwise, I only have a vague feeling it was meh and too long.

But that one thing was so true--so perfectly, pathetically true--that I still remember The Fourth Procedure and think about it every time the abortion debate rises above the general noise. And that one thing is this: [Spoiler under the jump]. It's absurd but the truth behind the "what if" is undeniable, because time and again we've all watched people in power lack empathy for anyone different from them or for any concept they haven't personally experienced.

So is The Fourth Procedure a great book worth reading? Not at all. Its genius could be captured in a short story, or probably even a tweet. But it is on the very short list of "books that I read in the 1990s that I can still name," and I give Mr. Pottinger points for that.

(The spoiler is behind a cut in the original comment, so I preserved that.)

I feel a little less harshly towards it, but I've been recalling it lately for the exact same reason, and I kinda wish it had been released today instead of in 1995, when abortion rights seemed a lot safer.

Spoiler: someone figures out a procedure to transplant a growing fetus (amniotic sac and all) from a pregnant woman into a man, and then uses the procedure to impregnate the swing vote on the US Supreme Court so that he will truly understand being forcibly pregnant and then he casts the deciding vote to protect abortion rights for women.

This is exactly what I remember so vividly, too. I remember this part being, while obviously far-fetched, done with sufficient realism that I loved the whole poetic justice of it, no pun intended.