irishsultan

The word epidemic does not imply contagiousness, not in the medical context and therefore definitely not outside of it.

You've used reasonable twice, but haven't explained how it's reasonable.

So let me get this right: It's okay for a blind person to write content about accessibility being trash, but it's not okay for a privileged person without disabilities to share that content.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a reasonable point of view. Keeping the problems nicely hidden from the larger community is not going to help anyone. Of course merely talking about a problem isn't going to solve it either, but it's more likely to lead to solutions in the long term.

Aren't discrete and discreet homophones?

I'm very confused, the author talks about having to charge a device instead of replacing batteries and blames it on Lithium-ion batteries, instead of doing the sensible thing and blaming it on devices with non-replaceable batteries.

The form factor of AA and AAA batteries (which the author prefers) exists with all kinds of chemistries, including Lithium-ion nowadays, you can recharge them, but while you are doing that you can also put new batteries in your device and use it immediately.

> Q is indeed dense in R, but firstly it’s very clear that there isn’t an equal number of them because rational numbers are a subset of the real numbers and there exists at least one irrational number (I pick “e”) that is in R but not in Q. So R must be at least bigger than Q.

This isn't a correct explanation, because I can use the same explanation to show that there are more integers than that there are even integers.

"it’s very clear that there isn’t an equal number of them because even numbers (let's call it E) are a subset of the natural numbers (let's call that N) and there exists at least one odd number (I pick 1) that is in N but not in E. So N must be at least bigger than E."

I don't see how you could interpret "a != b != c" as equivalent to "not (a == b == c)" in the first place. In the first expression a doesn't equal b and b doesn't equal c (no restriction on a and c). In the second expression you could have a == b, but b != c (and vice versa), clearly that's not equivalent to the first expression.

> It may look obvious to you, but someone will interpret “the same value” as literally the same.

But it is literally the same? Numbers are immutable, so there is a performance optimization where you can avoid using pointers internally, but the fact that they are immutable also means there is no way to distinguish between them being the same value and them being "different instances".

If you do `let a = []; let b = a; a = [1]` would your students expect that b equals [1] or would they understand that a and b now contain different arrays? If the latter, then why would think that after `let a = 22; let b = a; a = 50;` b also equals 50?

Sorting your data before searching it will only pay off if you need to search multiple things. If instead you need to search for one specific thing then going through things linearly is O(n) while sorting and searching the sorted result will be O(n log(n)).

TeX and Metafont have version numbers that are approaching pi and e respectively, so the sensible way is to read these as decimals.

IANAL, but I think the right comparison for standby power usage would be the power usage in sleep, not in idle.

bc and dc are arbitrary precision. By using -l you are specifying that it should keep track of 20 decimal digits (plus you are importing some extra stuff).

You can try higher precision by setting the scale.

    $ echo "scale = 100; (2/3)*3 - 2" | bc 
    -.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
    0000000000000000000000000000000002

When they tell you "the price is low if A is the case, and high if A is not the case" and you say "I'll take the lower price" and A is not the case then you are deceiving them.

Imagine the expansion rate starts out at 2. Then 1 day later it's 1.5, after 1 more day it's 1.25 and after another day it's 1.125.

Hopefully you can see that if this series continues then the expansion rate is always dropping, but it's headed towards 1, not 0. (And if expansion rate of 1 is too confusing in this context imagine if it starts out at 3 and goes to 2.5, 2.25, 2.125, ..., it still is always decreasing, but it will never be less than 2 which means the universe keeps expanding).