#math and critical thinking

[theimaginationstationpodcast]

The Number Knights: A Math Adventure for Kids! 🦁🐰🦓🐒 | Fun Learning Story for Ages 4-8

Join Leo the Lion, Luna the Rabbit, Zara the Zebra, and Monty the Monkey—the brave Number Knights—on an epic quest to save their magical kingdom, Calculasia! When the evil Lord Oblivion steals the Golden Equation, the source of all math magic, the friends must solve puzzles, crack codes, and use their math skills to restore balance. From counting rivers to shape-swamp rescues, this adventure is…

[ruvigapo]

Hey this is so niche but i did a pentagon based design of the xhorhaus and i low key would pay cr to use a design like this for the animated show bc it is just So Neat i Love shapes ♡♡♡♡♡

(Btw please do immagine that veth and yeza have a ladder down into the laboratory)

[artisticow]

genuinely fuck the people blaming "inbred hillbillies" for this shit..... y'all can't condemn bigotry without being bigoted yourself can you?? first we deserved hurricane helene bc we're all racist rednecks who wanna suck trump's dick and now we're also to blame for his presidency.... as if queers and poc aren't a huge facet of the american south. as if atlanta isn't the gayest fucking place around here. how about we blame the fucking corporations and the outdated government and all the old white men still in power instead of turning on impoverished people and continuing the divide of this country. fuck off

[utilitycaster]

Anyway returning to Lore Stuff but: feels really likely The Crush was due to Ludinus's attempt to contact Ruidus in the late 500s, which is what led to the fall of Molaesmyr. I wonder if he even realized until centuries later, since I don't think he was able to communicate with Ruidus until he started working with Ruidusborn which feels comparatively recent. Imagine unwittingly setting into motion a natural disaster that permitted the final stages of complete imperial takeover on an entirely different celestial body and then finding out 200-odd years later that this is extremely beneficial to your lifelong dreams.

[morangoowada]

I hate people who just because they're good at math and physics they think they're more intelligent than me, like okay you're good with numbers and stuff but whenever you get bad grades at history and sociology you come running back to me for help...... Okay.... But I'm definitely dumber than you just because I don't know basic math

[critical-skeptic]

Does Majority Actually Rule?

If majority truly ruled, we wouldn’t be stuck with the ongoing nightmare that is the orange turd. Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million, and under a system where true majority rule prevailed, she would have taken office. The QMAGA lunacy—those rabid cries of 'Stop the Steal,' conspiracy theories, and violent tantrums—might have been snuffed out in its infancy. Instead, what actually governs this country is a patchwork of archaic and deeply flawed systems—mechanisms explicitly designed to cheat, disenfranchise, and favor the entrenched power of wealthy elites and their obedient base.

Take gerrymandering, for example. Districts are twisted into obscene, nonsensical shapes to ensure that certain votes carry far more weight than others, diluting the influence of dissenting voices and creating the illusion of choice. It’s a grotesque mockery of democracy, all while the charade of 'representative government' carries on for the masses. But let’s not kid ourselves—the Electoral College is the most egregious relic of this system, a rusted cog in the machinery of democratic decay. It's a mechanism so broken that its failures have become a predictable farce, celebrated only when a Republican ekes out a rare popular vote win—such moments are so unusual, they become their own news cycles.

Consider the 2020 election: Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes—a staggering 81.3 million (51.3%) to Donald Trump’s 74.2 million (46.8%). Despite this, Biden's margin of victory in the Electoral College was only 306 to 232. Fast forward to 2024. Trump narrowly won the popular vote with 74.7 million votes (50.5%) against Kamala Harris’s 71 million (48%). And yet, suddenly, he’s awarded 312 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 226. This stark discrepancy—a narrow popular vote lead yielding an outsized electoral win—lays bare the inherent distortion within the system.

Sure, Trump won the popular vote this time around, a rare occurrence for Republicans, who have routinely lost it for decades. But when the popular vote handed Biden a decisive win in 2020, many on the right simply couldn’t handle it. Cue the insurrectionist tantrums at the Capitol, an embarrassing display of fragility masquerading as patriotism. All because they couldn’t accept that both the flawed Electoral College system and the popular vote had gone against them. Spare us the sanctimonious civics lessons and cries of "majority rules." Your hypocrisy is glaring when you invoke majority rule only when it serves your narrative. The reality? Any criticism, dissent, or inconvenient fact is dismissed with cries of fraud—introspection be damned.

The truth is, for many who scream about democracy and freedom, genuine democratic rule is their worst nightmare. It’s not about representing the majority’s will; it’s about maintaining power through any means necessary. Twisting rules, exploiting systemic rot, and gerrymandering their way to victory, all while claiming moral superiority. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Electoral College are tools wielded to amplify minority rule and silence opposition. When it works in your favor, you celebrate. When it doesn’t, you rage against the system and pretend to be its victim. It’s all part of the grotesque machinery, and the numbers don’t lie: a 7 million popular vote lead netted Democrats a fragile 306-232 Electoral College win, while a 3.7 million vote lead for Republicans in 2024 inflated to 312-226. That grotesque imbalance isn’t a triumph; it’s a stark reminder of how deeply broken and manipulable the system is.

So, by all means, celebrate your so-called 'win' in 2024. The clock is ticking toward 2026, and every second that passes exposes the hollow victory for what it is—a testament to a system rigged to distort and magnify small victories while disregarding the broader will of the people. Don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s a triumph of majority rule. It’s a masterclass in gaming a decaying system, a desperate clinging to power that betrays just how terrified you are of genuine democracy.

[ashes-in-a-jar]

My most evil supervillain plan is to pull a miss frizzle and pretend to be a teacher of any odd subject but instead of teaching it I would actually teach kids how to be financially smart

School trips to the bank, the supermarket, the tax agency, a second hand store

Projects will be budgeting different types of profiles with all sorts of debt

Write me an essay to convince me why this seemingly useless expenditure was actually smart

Teach. Kids. About. Accrued. Interest

Teach kids to cook so they don't buy fast food

Have some free fun. Show them what free fun looks like

Call it my Magic School Budget

[pocketgalaxies]

they absolutely incorrectly input their heroes' feast hp as temp hp instead of max hp and it's killing me.

[intheeveningsunrise]

i think if there's anything to be said abt my own experience with gen ai in academia, it's that i'm just glad it's almost entirely inapplicable to my specific level of research, and often in maths in general.

during my undergraduate degree i did see people use chatgpt for maths problems in general, and i was actually really reassured by it because the majority of the time, my friends and classmates were actually able to visibly see that the answers chatgpt was spitting out mathematically were totally wrong, and even trying to point out the mistakes to chatgpt did not help. eventually they gave up and used their brains.

students are doing that at my current uni and im trying to emphasise getting them to stop as much as possible, but i know it'll never work because sadly ive become a boring "authority figure" since im the one grading their papers. but in general i'm really glad that, in maths, these students are still coming to me for help, they're asking questions, they're engaging with the material and not just tossing it into chatgpt to explain it, because it just doesn't work. a person is explaining it to them better than the ai could - and that's what im beyond glad for.

it's not predictive, it's not intelligent, it's generative. it makes guess after guess until something is close to right. as a phd student, i did my time learning and understanding both the background for my own project, and the prerequisite knowledge for my students. this is completely useless to me, my cohort, and my students.

maths is maths. it's a language. it's putting stuff together in the right order, getting the right balance, knowing when something applies and using the appropriate skills for it. by their very nature, mathematicians especially have a duty to their own research to verify everything that comes out. the axioms (essential building blocks that all of mathematics is built on) are fundamental, and if you introduce new ones, you must justify why they hold. If you don't, you can still speculate - there are thousands of proofs that begin with "If the Riemann Hypothesis holds..." (which is my area... roughly) or similar, but the results are still rigorous according to the rest of the mathematical axioms we have. if, eventually, the result they hinge on is either proven or disproven, they haven't wasted their time - maths is a thought experiment about why.

and i'm just... very glad for it. chatgpt and its ilk is near obsolete at my level, and part of me wants to stay in academia purely because i know that my work cannot be replaced by an AI. gen ai can't tell me which methods to invent - it can only guess based on what's done before. but so can i, and it doesn't know the rules the way i know them, it just has buttons on a wall and presses them with no comprehension of why.

i earnt my degree. fought tooth and nail for my phd position. if you offered me a perfect ai that could do all my phd for me - well, i would never have had a project to begin with. this is the academic fight against ai that i can do as a mathematician, and i don't intend to stop

[ardentlytrans]

cant reblog that post about reading comprehension anymore but my addition would be: this is still an issue (source: in a teacher preparation program and many of my peers and students cant fucking read) and b) teachers are not taught how to correct these errors. In fact many times we are told /not/ to correct errors directly. Part of this is time— teachers cannot devote individual time to each student to ensure they understand everything they read (in order to avoid the ‘reading doesn’t mean understanding’ / making up a story by skimming issue), and also because many students struggle to handle emotionally being told You’re Wrong, and teachers are not always equipped to handle this. My first observation I was commended extensively by my coach for being able to tell a student she had misread a sentence and waiting until she reread it and told me what it meant (and because I had put the work in to teach these skills, this moment was productive and even empowering for this student, rather than a hit to her confidence). A terrifying amount of kids these days Cannot read in elementary school, go into middle and high school with the same exact struggles, and become adults and even teachers unable to self-correct errors because they have never been taught to recognize them. This is a huge issue of learned helplessness that spans multiple generations of schooling and I honestly have no clue how to fix it, besides pay teachers more and stick kids in front of a screen less (and give them books they actually want to read).

[neveragainfools]

Can I be really very honest for a moment? I think a lot of people's hatred for math stems not from the math itself but a failure of most schools to clearly present real life applications of it's everyday use. Math is often taught in a vacuum without context which makes it this floating, unreal theory that seems pointless. But when I make change on the fly at a retail job, I'm doing algebra. When I'm figuring out seam allowances in sewing, I'm multiplying and dividing fractions of inches. People often speak fondly of physics field trips where they got to go to a theme park and calculate out how the rides work to get the velocity and other factors because they got to ride coasters that day. And calculating that stuff is FUN and relevant to their interests. I remember in grade 11 I struggled with trigonometry because I could not wrap my head around negative angles on a two dimensional circle. I barely scraped by that unit test. You know the questions I got right? The word problems. When people can see a usefulness to something, and how it slots into their life, they value understanding it much more. And when they're given the tool of context, it bolsters their ability to understand the fuller picture. To this day I cannot remember what on god's green earth the quadratic formula is useful for. But I'm sure the people who use it on a regular basis do, and find it fairly simple to grasp. Teaching math without a solid set of real world applications to give it context feels like asking someone to recreate the mona lisa blind by simply describing shapes and formulas to mix colours, but not what paint is or why brushes are important

[princewylder]

Finished up Kaneshiro's palace and overall it's really solid in terms of gameplay and design. Love the money littered all over the place, the guard designs (liked the detail of their masks looking bug like its a nice bit of foreshadowing) and ofc the music. I think the last puzzle is fun but it drags a little at the end tbh (but that could be because I did the palace in one day so)

[woolmasterleel]

I turned off personalized ads a while ago because fuck targeted advertising but god every ad is some ai bullshit and I can’t use the block to skip ads instantly… I am not paying for premium fuck that

[educationaldm]

"D&D is a game that has a ton of educational benefits. At its core, the game can teach you teamwork, math, physics, problem-solving and quick decision-making. I think the two strongest benefits are the roleplaying aspects and creativity. Players can learn communication skills and how to think as someone else or outside the box, while a Dungeon Master can learn how to weave a story and foster teamwork as a leader. I think aspects from this game could easily be used in a classroom to make learning fun and memorable."

[aropride]

[kooki914]

Given that the collection has 151,406 words, if you turned it into one book it wouldn’t be a novel, it would be an epic

Ok so while I'd love to let this blindly stroke my ego, I do have to point out that the Spadesgore collection technically doesn't meet the criteria for an epic novel, I think? Like, not only does an epic require actual high stakes of epic proportions, but the collection was also never technically intended to be one huge thing. If it were turned into a book it'd probably be multiple, like a romance series where each subsequent entry is longer than the last for seemingly no good reason. And the fics themselves wouldn't be individual books, they'd be more like... chapters. This is a really bad analogy let me explain myself-

Since I started expanding the first fic, I planned for the series to be split into Arcs™. Basically, the story is all one continuous thing and belongs in one collection, but by the way the fics are planned/written, they (thus far) follow three major arcs. The first arc, the light world arc, lasts from "A talk by the lake" and concludes with "A series of very, very fortunate events" (about 40,157 words total). The second arc is the dark world arc, which begins with "Sleepy words" and ends with "Surprisingly perfect" (109,904 words in total, thanks in no small part to the beast that is "Royalty"). If turned into books, I'd want those individual arcs to be split into individual books, technically able to stand on their own but following the same overarching story. The third arc (which I don't have a name for yet oops) just got kicked off with "A kind of daydream, but don't call it that" and will encompass the next approx twenty-something fics (whenever I get around to writing them) that I have planned out that (somewhat) neatly wrap up most of the remaining threads I want to explore with these two.

I say most because there's stuff I might want to write for the collection even after that - ideas I left unexplored for the sake of time and cohesion - or even stuff concerning my other Spadesgore AUs that we aren't even factoring into the full word count (yet) that could get their own standalone expansions outside the collection (looking at you, demon AU). All of that is, however, majorly dependent on two factors. 1) how exhausted I feel with the concept of the Spadesgore collection after the third arc is finished, and 2) how I end up feeling about the next chapters of Deltarune. (Though I'll be honest the second point is a LOT less important than the first LMAO)

So, yeah! Thank you for the ask that let me segway into rambling about my godforsaken fic series structure, and I hope you look forward to the next entries in the collection as much as I do!