It's worth pointing out that virtually every math teacher I had growing up, in retrospect, had no knowledge or experience with any actual math.

I recall wondering out loud in hs geometry if one infinity could be bigger than another in typical early high school "big brain" thinking, and at the time my high school geometry teacher basically shrugged their shoulders.

Years later when I discovered cardinalities of infinite sets, which comes up pretty quickly when studying math in college, I was fairly disappointed that such a great potential teaching moment was passed over. I'm pretty sure early high school me would have been dramatically more engaged with math if a teacher has said "funny you should mention that, do you know about the difference between integers and real numbers..."

The tragedy of this is that most Americans, even the ones teaching math, believe mathematics is calculation, and even at the advanced levels will only rarely be exposed to real mathematical thinking.

It's interesting, because I was introduced to cardinal numbers and alef zero, plus Cantor proof, precisely during highschool mathematics class. In Poland though.

“Yeah well you won’t always have an encyclopaedia… you won’t always be able to ask your friends…” I think the single biggest and most overlooked change in the past 20 years has been the creeping ubiquity of knowledge. It may not be as sexy as Trinity downloading a helicopter piloting program but the ability to pull a datasheet for almost any piece of equipment literally out of thin air is damn near as useful.

> creeping ubiquity of knowledge.

I'd rather call it "information". Knowledge is one level above that, knowledge is information integrated in a coherent whole. Nowadays it's very easy to find information about anything, but most people still know very little about most things. Confusing information with knowledge and knowing nothing at the same time is why misinformation spreads so easily.

I see it as information being the 1s and 0s, while knowledge is what you do with it.

I think it is relatable to the way that Archer has access to mission dossiers. "Yeah, but I never read them."

People have access to limitless information but have little interest in actually looking for and using it.

Yes, but how do you do some calculations when you are driving and thinking about some physics problem?

You'd leave calculator physics for later, and focus on the practical physics of steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine, I would hope.

>steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine

wow

Don't solve systems of differential equations and drive.

You can't take D out of PID.

For most of the population, driving while thinking about a physics problem would be considered distracted driving, unless that problem involved avoiding hitting something in the road.

I would classify calculating how close you can drive to the vehicle ahead of you while being able to stop within 1.0 mm +/- 0.9 mm as reckless driving, not wreckless driving.

That calculation would probably be wrong anyway, unless you have a lot of practical experience with emergency braking. I constantly underestimate my reaction times.

4.3 * 17 = 731 -- seemingly every kid who challenges that teacher and can't sanity check their calculator math.

Heh. I was a TA for a grad school engineering course. The professor accidentally assigned a problem he thought would be easy, but he had a typo and it led to very messy integrals. It wasn't hard, just tedious (think multiple pages of derivations, where at each step the expression was multiple lines long - repeated integration by parts).

He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer.

All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere.

Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.

To be fair I never got to use a calculator in university tests and I'm glad I learned mental math in years prior to prepare me for that. (Though admittedly that's of course a very artificially constrained school-imposed situation.)

In my college classes either calculators were permitted (physics and chemistry tests) or were irrelevant (upper division mathematics).

When I taught high school in the 00s, I had to impose rules about what sort of calculators were permitted to avoid cheating, especially as devices which could be used for communication like network-connected palm pilots were available.¹ I also wanted to have the kids avoid buying a $99 TI-89 when a much cheaper calculator was sufficient for the work they were doing.

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1. I remember one cheating technique that my friends in high school AP Chem used where a group of us were sharing a calculator. You would type in the question number you needed an answer for and someone else would type in the letter of the answer (we generally had multiple choice tests).

They probably meant electronic calculators. When I asked my prof about using a sliderule, they said that was fine.

(Granted, that was in physics where the graders usually use the final answer as a check and rarely deduct many marks if all of the work leading up to an incorrect numerical answer is correct.)

"Noone will pay you for playing video games" - every parent growing up

That's still true. And before you say "streamers", they aren't exactly being paid to play video games - they're paid to perform in public. You don't even need to be great at video games to carve out a living as a streamer, but you do need a charismatic screen presence. If you wanted to get on the "streamer" career path as a kid, you'd have been much better off spending your time taking public speaking courses and getting involved in amateur dramatics than playing video games.

Note that esports are growing in popularity with paid gamers and real prize money for the top spots (e.g., 2.1 millions for the world champions in league of legends and 1.5 millions for counter strike).

But being good doesn't equate to being in a team. There are plenty of players who are the best in SoloQ who can't play on a team professionally because they lack the teamwork skills or have toxic personalities. Having leadership skills and game knowledge would let you coach a team or analyze without having to be the best in playing the game.

Do they pay you for playing video games?

No. They don't pay me for being a doctor either.