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Please Evict My Dumb-Ass Senator
🕑 Added 2021-07-23 17:40:30 +0000 UTC
As you all know, I am not on Twitter. But I check in with the site now and then, just to see if there are any under-the-radar news stories I might otherwise miss.
Right now, there's another "debate" raging about PEMDAS, aka the order of mathematical operations. The fact that there is a debate, as such, just shows how intimate the connection is between the Internet and our current post-truth cultural climate.
How exactly are people arguing different positions on math? It's either wrong or right, and so far as I know there is no mathematical equivalent to "intelligent design" or other Christian canards regarding science, nor is there a branch of nihilistic, postmodern math-relativism. But in reading up on PEMDAS (or BOMDAS, if you're nasty), I discovered this alarming fact.
For those of you who can't read the lowest line on the eye chart: Microsoft Calculator has two different settings, "standard" and "scientific." The former simply performs operations as they are inputted (or "from left to right," if the equation were written down). The latter actually accounts for PEMDAS and gives you the correct answer.
That's right! Microsoft has a Right and a Wrong way to compute math problems, and allows the user to toggle between the two. I don't know that I'm going to make it to 2030 without murdering someone.
Comments
Where is the "ecstatic truth calculation" button?
Tim boom
Oh I love it - everyone is having these convoluted conversations around epistemology who would otherwise have no interest in the matter. It's like a giant collective discourse on Gadamer, all because us Americans remember like two different things from our math curricula.
