Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[pisskop]

Im willing to guess slightly older, but it never really occurred to ask because theyre welcome here.  And they know math.

[Frumple]

Y'know, every time I get some kind of new personal electronic device that involves spell checkers, I find I've forgotten how much of a pain in the ass it is to teach the thing vulgarities again. Someone really should just... include standard curse words in these things dictionaries. This one didn't even have ass in it until earlier today!

How old is nature girl? She doesn't know factorials, so... Some twelve years old or less? I guess most countries go over that by that age.

Could just be older, or not messed with math much. I'd actually forgotten what a factorial was, too, and I'm better'n two decades past twelve. Mostly because I've used the things for precisely sod all since whenever I ran into them in math classes. Just not using factorials much or at all is also a possibility.

Actually, the hell are they even used for out in the wild? Haven't seen even mild need in general life stuff, nor when I was doing accountancy training.

[pisskop]

I use them when playing around with the odds of things happening.  Actually I recently realized I ' 'count' ' cards when playing hearts or spades.

And I kind of sort of use it to judge human behavior.  i.e. malice versus ignorance, etc.  Maybe flawed, but the numbers tend to not lie.

[Trekkin]

Actually, the hell are they even used for out in the wild? Haven't seen even mild need in general life stuff, nor when I was doing accountancy training.

They're used in calculating combinations and permutations, among even more obscure things.

As ever, whether you need it "in real life" depends largely on your life.

[MrRoboto75]

I didn't learn factorials til about college, as part of statistics class.  They're a part of calculating probability, I think.

That said, the standard issue TI-83 that every high school uses had a factorial function.

[Naturegirl1999]

How old is nature girl? She doesn't know factorials, so... Some twelve years old or less? I guess most countries go over that by that age.

Since you gave an example of a factorial, I realize I have seen them before. I haven’t seen them since grade school/high school. It has just been a while since I have heard the name or used them, and the person mentioning it mentioned shouting so I thought what they were referring to was something with variables/letters. I am 20. The reason I didn’t know what factorials were is because I haven’t heard the word in a while. I am actually curious what an equation of exclusively variables is called though, there was a unit in an algebra course on them but I don’t remember if there is an official name for them or if they are just called numberless equations

[Trekkin]

I am actually curious what an equation of exclusively variables is called though, there was a unit in an algebra course on them but I don’t remember if there is an official name for them or if they are just called numberless equations

Literal equations, maybe? It's a term for equations with many variables (so not strictly numberless), but it would show up in an algebra course.

[Naturegirl1999]

I am actually curious what an equation of exclusively variables is called though, there was a unit in an algebra course on them but I don’t remember if there is an official name for them or if they are just called numberless equations

Literal equations, maybe? It's a term for equations with many variables (so not strictly numberless), but it would show up in an algebra course.

Thank you

I use them when playing around with the odds of things happening.  Actually I recently realized I ' 'count' ' cards when playing hearts or spades.

And I kind of sort of use it to judge human behavior.  i.e. malice versus ignorance, etc.  Maybe flawed, but the numbers tend to not lie.

What are your calculations for human malice/ignorance? How did you arrive at the numbers?

[pisskop]

i wrote them down, but i think i deleted them.

i use the probabilities of mistakes happening, and the consistency of mistakes, to judge an intent of my employees.

[Eschar]

i wrote them down, but i think i deleted them.

i use the probabilities of mistakes happening, and the consistency of mistakes, to judge an intent of my employees.

That's very interesting. How accurate is it?

[pisskop]

Im an asocial jerk in real life.  trying to visualize social interactions and work performance as numbers is easier than trying to talk about that new song or the sportsball team or the new pokemons.

so i usually sleep on my decisions.  probably 70%?  I feel like it works for me, even if its kind of just homebrew.

[heydude6]

Factorials were not a part of the curriculum at all in my high school. I still haven’t learned about them in college yet either, but I expect that will at least change soon.

[MaximumZero]

Factorials were not a part of the curriculum at all in my high school. I still haven’t learned about them in college yet either, but I expect that will at least change soon.

I graduated high school in 2001, and community college in 2013, so take this with a grain of salt: I had one single day of training on them in Technical Math in my last year of college in a Computer Science degree. One day.

[JoshuaFH]

The proper equation to use for that is n(n+1)/2 =x which is the solution of 1+2+3+..+n = x

To get 'n' from x, note that for big numbers n * (n+1) is very close to n². So you can just take the 12,614,400, double that (to account for the division by two in the above equation), then take the square root and round down, and that's how many items the full song will have. So a 1-year song could have 5022 items. Call that 5000 items.

(5000 * 5001)/2= 12,502,500 sung items in a year, which work out at almost 24 sung items per minute, which is very close to the original estimate. So you could start singing the "5000 days of Christmas" at midnight New Years Eve and complete the whole song by midnight New Years Eve the next year, ready to start again.

However, if you made a version of the song with N = 12,500,000 items, and it took a year to sing just the last verse, then to sing the whole song would take N(N+1)/2 steps, which would work out at 6.25 million years to complete the whole song. Which makes perfect sense. You're singing every version of the song from length 1 to length N, so the average length of a verse is N/2, and you're doing that N times. So you're singing 12.5 million verses but the average length of a verse is half the longest, so with 12.5 million items taking a year, it takes half that or 6.25 million years to sing.

Thanks Reelya, you really deliver.

[Iduno]

How old is nature girl? She doesn't know factorials, so... Some twelve years old or less? I guess most countries go over that by that age.

Factorials are a weird thing. I think you either learn them early, or not at all. I learned them, but have no idea what they are used for. It's possible it went into something in calculus or differential equations that I've forgotten over the years.