#efficient math problem solving

[itsnesss]

𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦

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"This is worse than Spa in the rain!" Lando complains, squinting at the paper.

"Why are there letters in the numbers?" Checo asks, completely lost in front of an equation with logarithms.

"Toto said if I don't pass, he’ll make me race in Formula E," Kimi groans, messing up his hair while you and Max watch him with a mix of sympathy and frustration.

"Come on, mini-Mercedes, it can't be that hard," Max says, placing his hands on the table. "Let’s see... 'If x squared minus three x equals two, what’s x?'"

"That’s easy, you solve it by inertia," Carlos says confidently.

"You mean by 'intersection,' right?" Charles corrects him with an arched eyebrow.

"What if we solve it with tire strategy?" Lando suggests, laughing.

"IT’S AN EQUATION, NOT A PIT STOP STRATEGY!" Kimi yells, desperate.

Just then, George walks in, looking impeccable as always, with his water bottle and the aura of a model student.

"What’s going on here? Are you guys trying to build a rocket or what?" he asks.

"No, they're trying to teach Kimi math. It's worse," you reply, making space for him at the table.

George sits down, grabs the paper, and in five minutes, solves the equation more efficiently than a Red Bull pit stop.

"And there it is. x equals 2 and -1," he says with a smile.

Everyone stares at him like he performed magic. Max crosses his arms, pretending to be annoyed.

"Now I get why he always has the best strategies."

"Thanks, George," Kimi whispers, like he’s just seen a god.

"No problem. But now you all owe me dinner," he replies, winking as he walks out like he just won Monaco.

You hug Max from behind and whisper in his ear, "Well, at least we won’t have to adopt him legally if he passes the exam."

"Legally? I already added him to the Verstappen family WhatsApp group."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics/a>

[mrchiipchrome]

Care For Me, I Know You Care For Me

W.C. - 6.1 k

Back with another chapter :()

———————————————

“I’m going to a party, you want to come with?” Looking up at the older girl through heavy lidded eyes, her party dress clinging tight to her body, you can barely even imagine yourself at another party, especially with classes having started the week prior.

A multitude of open books surround you, all displaying different types of equations and explanations of increasingly complex mathematical concepts. You’d already been at it for an hour, and still you had only solved two or three questions.

It was worse than having to run suicides for an hour straight, pure brutality.

“Do I have a choice?” With your fingers buried deep in your hair and your lips turned down in a frown, Em looks you over for a moment before deciding on her answer, shaking her head softly, uncharacteristically.

“I’m really sorry, I've just got so much work already.” Looking back down at the half solved problem, you sigh loudly before writing out another part of the equation, pulling your calculator closer to the edge of the table, the numbered buttons clicking softly under your fingertips.

Going unnoticed by you, Em’s shoes thud against the hardwood floor as she makes her way over to where you're sitting at the kitchen table, placed up against the almost kitchen island looking structure that’s there instead of a full wall to make the space look more open, her hands taking hold of the sides of your face resulting in your cheeks being smushed together when she makes you look up at her.

"You're not sorry, you hate going to parties.” As her sentence comes to an end, she presses a kiss to your forehead before she turns around to leave your apartment, looking back at you to blow you a kiss when she sees you putting your middle finger up at her through the hallway mirror.

But alas, as the door clicks shut behind the older woman, you have to go back to doing the boring work you’d been given by your math teacher, no longer a distraction there for you to blame for not having full focus.

Em was always a nice distraction for you when the work piled up and your usual workaholic self sat for hours upon hours in front of a multitude of books and screens.

At the same time, it was infuriating when she interrupted at the worst times like when you were in the middle of a question or when she inevitably would ask you to do her assignments for her, all while probably eating your food. The girl really is in a league of her own at times.

Rolling your eyes at the thought, it doesn’t take long for you to remove all distractions from your surroundings, putting your phone on do not disturb before burying your head in your work once more, numbers and equations floating together in your mind like they have no substance.

There's no preventing the drooping of your eyelids about 3 hours after Em initially asked you if you wanted to party, and there’s even less you can do about the way the cool pages of your book feel against your hot cheek, the combination of boredom and sleepiness from the late hour mixing together and creating a very tired striker.

It’s only a few hours later when you’re drooling over the written out equations on your paper that you startle awake, a loud ringing coming from the phone placed not too far away from your head, your body jumpstarting way too quickly for your mind to comprehend.

Slapping around for your phone, your fingers grip the cool metal with surprising ease, swiping blindly at the accept button, not even looking at the caller id.

“Y/l/n Manufacturing, how can I help you?” The response is automated, coming out your mouth like it had been practiced a million times before, sometimes your home phone would ring and you’d pick it up before one of your nanny’s could, leaving your childish voice to sound through the speaker, ready to tackle their problems with practiced efficiency only your parents could rival. Sure little helper you were.

There’s a second filled to the brim with an awkward type of silence before sweet giggling fills your ear, leaving you to pull away from the phone for a quick second, looking at the caller id.

‘Emma Whitmore Harvard’ can be seen across the top of your screen, but even though the voice was familiar, it wasn’t Em. That much you knew.

Who could possibly have her phone at this hour? Raising your phone back up to your ear, you don’t bother to lift your head from the papers now sticking uncomfortably to your face, only waiting for the person on the other end to stop giggling and start talking.

“Hey Y/n/n, why so formal? We’re friends right?” Oh. Of course Nika would be the one to call you…from Em’s phone?

“Nika? Why do you have Emma’s phone?” She giggles once again, this time at your sleepy confusion and at the sound of you peeling the paper off your cheek with a small groan, red marks engraved into your skin, not that she could see that.

“Well she took me to the party you didn’t want to go to, obviously she forgot that she had to drive home and we’re stuck here, drunk.” She explains carefully, choosing her words as consciously as she can, the slur of her words indicating that she in fact was a little more than tipsy.

Sighing, you ask the question at the tip of your tongue, already getting up from the chair that’s made your butt numb after sitting on it for hours upon hours.

“You want to bring you both back here?” She hums in response, agreeing quickly, and you can imagine the sly smile on her lips on the other end of the phone. “Alright, I’ll be there in an hour, try to not get yourself in trouble.” With that you hang up on her, sighing once more before making your way to the hall, not even paying your outfit any mind as you slip your beat up sneakers on.

Plucking your car keys off the hook they’re hung on, you’re out the door in record time with your phone in one hand and your keys in the other. Rubbing your eyes as you stand in the elevator, you can only imagine the trouble a drunk Nika and an even drunker Em have gotten into during the evening without you there to calm them down.

You yawn as the ding of the elevator doors indicate their opening, stepping out into the colder air of the entrance in the apartment building, shivering ever so slightly.

Another yawn leaves your mouth as you walk across the parking lot towards the garage that you keep your precious car in, and you slap yourself a few times to wake up a little bit more.

After opening the garage door to see your absolute beauty of a car, it only takes a few seconds for you to unlock the doors and slip into the warmth that it provided, the special made seats infinitely better than any wooden chair you could ever purchase for your kitchen.

Pushing your key into the ignition, you stop only for a moment or two to close your eyes tightly, feeling the sleepiness push at the back of your eyes, eyelids heavy even whilst they’re closed. But alas, you were a woman on a mission, to rescue your two princesses from the monstrosity that is a frat party.

So you pull up the ‘Find My’ app on your phone, clicking on the little icon with Em’s face beside it, showing off her location for you, and as you typed the location in the search bar of the ‘Maps’ app there’s nothing stopping you from letting out that little laugh that was reserved for ridiculous situations like this.

Who other than Emma Whitmore would forget to stay sober so that she could drive home? A real Em thing to do you suppose.

Either way, you turn the car on and pull out of the garage, clicking on the little button on your keys to make the door close behind the back of the car automatically.

Your phone is placed on the dashboard, ready to tell you the instructions to find the location you desire, and you reach out to turn the radio on, a ballad from ages ago floating out of the almost outdated speakers on low volume, covering the piercing silence covering every surface and crevice of your car.

Tapping along to the subtle beat of the song, the empty roads of the early morning almost feel comforting, streetlights lighting up the inside of your car for a second before it’s the next one’s turn, various trees littering the edges of the roads. They’re never grouped together, only single trees in a line, a style choice.

The voice of the AI giving you the instructions quiets down when you’re only a few blocks away from the house that Em’s phone had been in only an hour before, and you’re surprised at how quickly time had passed as you were driving, an hour feeling closer to 20 minutes than an hour.

But it’s only when you start to recognise the clusters of trees and the street signs that you turn off the directions, not needing them to navigate you anymore.

Parking your car a bit away from the frat, once again not wanting it to be stolen by some drunken frat boys, you take your keys out of the ignition and exit the car, locking it quickly before putting the keys in your pocket where they would be safe.

Leaning slightly against the hood of your car, you send a quick text off to Em, well Nika, saying that you’re there and that they should come out to meet you.

When your phone vibrates in your grip you let a small smile creep up on your face, a small ‘come find us’ coming through, the banner covering the bottom of your screensaver, a photo of you with your Arsenal teammates on your last day before leaving for America.

Trudging up the small hill, the thumping music spilling out from the large white house makes a sarcastic smile appear on your face, hands shoved into the pockets of your pajama pants.

More than a few people turn their heads to look at you weirdly but you don't pay them any mind, ready to bring both the older women home so that you could finally finish your homework and then go to bed.

Entering the open door, you’re immediately met with the stench of alcohol and sweat and the sight of various men pushing up against anything with a beating heart, legs and long hair.

Scanning the room, you look for the tall brunette and the shorter blonde, the two of them seemingly being able to keep entirely hidden from your wandering eyes despite their vertically advantaged frames.

Dragging the soles of your shoes along the floor, you’re making sure to be on alert in case you spot them and it doesn’t register in your mind, the music from before now rattling your brain around in your skull.

But as you spot the guy from the party where you first met Nika, you have no choice in turning around and almost sprinting into the kitchen to get away from him and his musty presence.

With Lady Luck on your side, your body bumps into someone else’s, a familiar warmth to the hand wrapping around the back of your shirt to make sure that your lanky body doesn’t thump pathetically against the sticky floor and the foreign accent wrapping around the words coming out of the gorgeous girl’s mouth.

“Found us.” The sentence is short, simple, but still it makes your knees feel like tv static and your heart thump painfully against your ribs, your usual confident but grumpy demeanor turning shy and giddy. That was until a voice sounds above the music and the blood rushing in your ears, a voice that could immediately turn any giddiness back into irritability, no matter how much you loved the girl it belonged to.

“What the actual fuck are you wearing?” Emma asks giggling, looking at the pajamas you had changed into not long after she had left. She was clearly drunk, but sober enough to be a hater.

Nika pulls away from your body, just enough so that she herself could get a peek of the ‘ugly’ attire, bringing her free hand to her lips in order to not laugh out loud at it.

You look down at yourself, a big red Harvard logo printed on your white t-shirt with your number right above it, and a pair of Arsenal themed pajama pants, bright red with the logo printed in white.

A slight red tint creeps up on your face as you roll your eyes at the both of them, ready to drag the both of them out by the ear if you had to. The two women’s giggles fill the space you occupy, leaving you to fight the smile willing itself to creep up on your face, wrapping an arm around each of their shoulders to try to get a move on out the house.

The giggles turn even louder as the guy from before calls out for you as you’re nearing the door, his strange dialect mixing with the alcohol in a mess of words and mumbles.

“Bye bye Brit!” If your hands hadn’t been secured around the shoulders of the girls beside you, you would’ve flipped him off. Luckily for both you and him, you had to keep hold of them both so that they wouldn’t drunkenly wander off.

You feel as they both sway on their feet as they focus solely on putting one foot in front of the other, wanting no drunken accidents to affect them in the morning.

The concrete of the sidewalk wasn’t comfortable to fall on, that much they both knew even in their drunken stupor.

After much fuss and a few close calls, you’ve all made it back to your car in one piece, the infamous car that no one had stolen.

“Em, come on, you go in the backseat.” Your voice holds a tone of finality and Em knows that there’s no room for arguing, instead just grumbling softly to herself as she opens the door and plops down in the seat just behind the passenger, buckling herself in under your watchful gaze.

When she’s done, you close the door softly before turning around, completely forgetting about Nika for a second, your heart jumping out of your chest as you come face to face with the Aphrodite.

Placing your hand over your thumping heart, you gasp sharply at the unexpected presence, a playful smile breaking out of the perpetrators face.

“Boo.” She whispers into the cold night air, a mix of alcohol and mint on her breath that’s pleasant in its own unique way, in a way that strangely leaves you wanting more of her.

“Get in the car Nika, I’ll drive you home.” The smile drops off her face when you mention home, like she wasn’t expecting that to be the word coming out of your mouth, her fingers twisting and turning around themselves in a nervous game. It makes you look at her curiously, wondering why that was her reaction, wondering how and why and everything in between.

But you wait for her to tell you why, how and everything in between in her own time, for the first time in the last week your mind stood still, waiting for whatever was about to come out of Nika’s parted lips.

“I- can you just take me back to yours instead? I mean only if you want to.” She picks at the skin around her nails as she speaks, all rushed like you wouldn’t say yes a thousand times if it meant that you got to spend another second with her.

“Of course I can, no problem really.” Trying your best to be comforting, you slap a smile on your face as you speak, bringing your hand up to rub at her shoulder softly, assuring her that you didn’t have a problem with opening your home up to another guest.

“Thanks.” With her word of gratitude, you turn back around to the car, seeing Emma making rather crude gestures through the window, a peace sign with her tongue between her fingers. Normally you would reprimand the drunk girl’s actions, but you can’t help the small giggle leaving your lips, a shake of your head as you roll your eyes.

You open the door to the passenger seat for Nika, motioning for her to sit down with practiced ease, smiling as she tiptoes towards the car like she's a princess and you're her knight, placing her hand into your outstretched one as she goes to sit down in the passenger seat.

You smile at the playful nature of the interaction, the tiredness hitting you like a ton of bricks once more as you keep a watchful eye over the woman buckling herself into your car, making sure that she does it properly.

Just like you did with Em before, you close the door softly after her, this time not being scared by anyone hiding behind you. Walking around the front of the car, the tips of your fingers trace over the hood as a sort of leading hand, letting you go around to your side with ease.

Not unlike Em, you plop down in your seat sluggishly before putting the key back in the ignition, pausing only to look back at your best friend with a pointed look, warning her not to be all too annoying during the ride back home.

She just puts her hands up, smirking at you playfully, so self assured that she wouldn’t do anything to get her into any trouble with you.

The car awakens with a rumble, the engine almost purring as you pull away from where you��re parked against the curb, tired eyes focused only on getting everybody back to your apartment safely and totally not at all on the beauty sitting in your passenger seat.

It isn't until you’ve hit the open road that you allow yourself to look back at your best friend through the rearview mirror, the girl's head resting on the seat behind her, mouth open with ever so soft snores coming out of her. It makes a wide, teasing smile appear on your lips, a sleepy drunk too apparently.

When you turn your eyes back to the road, you completely miss the enraptured look in the brunette beside you’s eyes, an adoring smile on her soft red lips.

Her eyes trail over the dips and curves of your body under your clothes, over the bridge of your nose and the slight furrow of your brow in concentration, over the curve of your jaw and the locks of your hair.

She lets her eyes trail over your exposed forearms as you grip the steering wheel, your fingers tapping against the leather to the beat of the song she hadn’t even noticed in the background.

Before she can stop herself, the accented words spill out of her mouth like a waterfall, a drunken impulse that maybe wasn't that affected after all.

“You’re really pretty you know.” It’s almost a whisper, just a little bit louder than a normal one would be, but you heard her like she was shouting it across the rooftops, not whispering it in the enclosed space of your car.

You look at her, only for a moment or two, her gaze turned to the road you were driving on, deliberately choosing not to look you in the eye, almost embarrassed by the comment that could easily be interpreted as friendly and not flirtatious.

“You’re awfully pretty as well, Nika.” You decide on your words very carefully, not wanting to seem overly flirtatious with the taken woman, but at the same time wanting to return the compliment. She was really, truly gorgeous though.

Again, before she can stop herself from clarifying, she blurts out another string of words that she hopes you’ll just play off as her being intoxicated and not really truthful.

“No, you don't understand, you're gorgeous.” She hears you laugh slightly under your breath, and she almost breathes a sigh of relief at you not taking her seriously, and waving off her comments under the simple guise of;

“And you're drunk.” With that, all your focus is back on the road, trying to get back to your home as quickly as humanly possible, wanting to crawl down in your bed and snuggle up to your blankets.

And after many twists and turns, you're finally back where you started, at your apartment building, the cold air surrounding you as you exit the vehicle after you’ve parked it back in your garage, Nika following in tandem as she too makes her way out, shivering slightly in the Boston air.

“The code to the door is 6532, you can go whilst I get Em up.” She smiles at you once again, committing the list of numbers to her memory, willing herself not to forget even a single digit. Her shoes clack against the pavement in a sure rhythm, making her way towards the door of the building, repeating the numbers to herself softly.

At the same time, you’re pulling Em’s door open, tapping her cheek to wake her up from the deep slumber she found herself in. Ever the deep sleeper, her snores just continued to fill the car, almost like she was doing it only to spite you.

“Em, Em. Emma, come on, wake up.” By now you’re shaking her harshly, the woman only grumbling at you to leave her alone. “Emma, I will slap you into next week if you don’t get up.” That rouses her, the older brunette quickly unbuckling her seatbelt and getting out of the car, standing next to you and then bringing her hand up to mock salute you.

Rolling your eyes at her antics, you quickly lock the car up before walking out of the garage with your best friend in tow, the garage door going down and covering up your car from the view of the public, safe and sound.

It doesn’t take long for you both to get into your building, seeing Nika standing by the elevator doors, seemingly waiting for the two of you to join her in the lobby before you all collectively went up to your apartment. There’s a certain look in her eye, at least that’s what you think, maybe it was just the lighting. Yeah that’s it.

“Nika, hey girl, what are you doing here?” The girl practically hanging off you speaks, asking her now giggling friend the question of the century. She’s still really drunk, that’s easy to tell, the slurring of her words, the tint to her cheeks and the sway of her body.

“Oh we’re having a sleepover.” She answers nonchalantly, sending you a wink when Em’s not looking, both of you having to stop the giggles bubbling up in your chests. It was your little secret, Em didn’t have to know.

The elevator doors open and you all step in, directing Nika to press the button for the fifth floor with a simple show of fingers. You look on as she leans back against the wall, taking in the exterior of the moving box, bringing you all upstairs in the matter of seconds.

Gesturing for her to exit first, you bring Em with you as you walk out behind the tall brunette, her body almost hanging off yours with her arms tightening themselves around your shoulders. Em stumbles over her own feet a few times even with the help of your guidance, but all in all you both manage to stay upright in the small distance from the elevator to your door.

“Nika, catch!” You whispershout in her direction, plucking your keys out of your pocket and throwing it to her right in time, her hands coming up to catch them skillfully. She nods to the door she’s standing in front of, asking you if it’s the right one silently, pushing the house key on your keychain into the lock and twisting, the door opening with a click.

She takes a few slow steps into the apartment, looking around curiously, spotting a few photos hanging on the walls of the hallway. You enter after her, quickly kicking your shoes off with little to no regard for the overall cleanliness of the space, pulling a now half asleep Em through the open space between your kitchen, the hall and the living room.

Nika can hear the loud groan as you drop Em off on the couch, your back popping loudly as you stretch your muscles out, returning to the hall with heavy steps. You meet her with a tired smile, telling her to follow you.

“You want anything to eat? Drink? Anything?” You ask the beauty as she follows you into the kitchen, head on a swivel as she studies your apartment, looking down at the books laying on your table, wide open for anyone to see. Seeing her eyes widen at the problems, you chuckle quietly, not wanting to disturb Emma sleeping in the next room over.

“Yeah, that was my reaction too.” Crossing your arms across your chest, you lean back against the counter behind you, waiting for the girl in front of you to answer your previous question. “Come on, I’ll make you some tea.”

The woman giggles at your words, the stereotypical brit in you coming out as you push off the counter and saunter over to the kettle, filling it up with enough water for a cup each. You look back with a smile of your own before turning the tap off and returning the kettle to the tray, pushing the on button before turning around.

The sight you see as you turn around is one of Nika, sitting on your countertop with one leg crossed over the other, hands clutching the edge softly.

A comfortable silence covers the room as you stand on opposite sides waiting for the kettle to boil, you moving around the room to fetch two cups out of the cupboard, plopping a teabag in each cup, pouring the now boiling water over the tea, making the once clear water a sheer dark brown.

“There you go.” You say as you hand her one of the cups, a blue mug with small green dinosaurs painted all around, your own just a plain white one.

“Thank you.” The words of gratitude are whispered but you hear them all the same, watching her take a sip before she places the warm mug down on the counter right beside her thigh. She looks up, seeing your intense gaze fixed on her, turning her head down shyly, uncharacteristically. “Hi.”

“Hi.” You respond, smiling softly once more, taking your own sip of your tea. “If you want a shower, the bathroom is at the end of the hall, there are clean towels on the rack in there already, then you can take my bed, first door on the left.” Keeping your eyes locked on her, you see the tiny nod she gives at the information, absentmindedly hopping off the counter and moving towards the hallway leading to the bathroom before she stops suddenly, peeking her head around the corner to look at you.

“What about you?” She questions, her brows furrowed adorably in confusion.

“What about me?” You ask right back, now as confused as she is, not understanding what she meant.

“Where are you sleeping?” She asks as if it’s obvious, rolling her eyes sassily at you.

“Oh, I’ll just cuddle up to dear Em.” You smile almost sarcastically, like you can’t wait to have Em’s sharp elbow digging into your ribs in the near future.

“I don’t mind sharing with you.” Despite the way she says it, you know that Nika is being fully truthful in her confession, especially as she shrugs her shoulders at your questioning look.

“No, I can’t do that.” You say, unsure in the words coming out your own mouth more than anything.

“I don’t mind sharing with you, it can’t be worse than sharing with P anyway.” She doubles down on her previous statement, shaking her head at your stubborn nature.

“Nika, you don’t understand, I have to finish this up and by the time I’m done it’s going to be late…” You try to explain, plopping back down into the chair at your kitchen table, picking your pen up and focusing your eyes back down on the paper, not noticing the woman in question nearing you again until she’s standing right in front of you, her fingers plucking the pen right out of your hand.

“Do it tomorrow.” She says in that captivating tone, making you want to do exactly what she’s suggesting, despite the fact that it was something you so desperately needed to do. Extremely convincing indeed.

“Nika…” You sigh, and she knows that you’re not far from agreeing, just a little more needed to get you over the edge. Nika hums softly, handing you your pen back with a small smirk on her annoyingly pretty face.

“You know you want to.” She says into the tension filled air, physical sparks almost flying between your bodies as she leans in ever so slightly, your faces only inches apart from each other.

“How do you know what I want?” You counter, a blush creeping up your neck at her cocky smirk, trying your hardest not to seem squirmish under her intense look, uncharacteristic for your usual confident self. Still, a curious look creeps up on your face as you wait for her answer, the corners of your lips peeking up ever so slightly.

“Psychic.” She motions around with her hands, putting two fingers to her temple like she’s about to read the aura you emit, and you can’t help but lean back in your chair, snorting at the notion that she could do something like that.

“Yeah, yeah, go take a shower.” You roll your eyes playfully as she walks away, turning back to make the universal ‘I’m keeping my eyes on you’ gesture, a silly smile erupting on your face as her back turns to you fully, shaking your head at the antics.

You can hear the shower starting, the water splashing against the bathroom floor and the metal of Nika’s belt buckle being undone.

Looking back down at the books, you start trying to solve the next problem, your back hunched over the table uncomfortably, eyes straining against the soft lighting just about giving the papers enough visibility. The scratching of your pencil is comforting, repetitive but nice, keeping the light headache just starting to form at bay.

There’s no way to tell how much time that had passed as you sat in your dimly lit kitchen, ears picking up on the shower stopping but you didn't pay it much attention, still stuck on the same problem as before.

Letting out a sigh of relief as you finally get the equation right, you hear your name being called from the open doorway, no door sitting in the space, and you can physically feel your heart speeding up in your chest, banging against your ribs harshly for the thousandth time that day. Your mouth turns dry and your pupils expand exponentially, a rose colored tint on your cheeks.

Nika’s dark brown curls drip water onto your floor, droplets of water running down the top of her chest, stopping only when they come into contact with the absorbent material of the towel tightly wrapped around her body. Her collarbones on full display for your eyes to drink in, looking like they were sculpted in marble by Michelangelo, no not even he could do the goddess standing in front of you any justice.

In the matter of seconds you were fully awake, not even a remnant of the previous exhaustion in your mind, thousands of thoughts running through your mind at the same time making you completely short circuit.

You were, as most called it, gay panicking.

When you come back into ‘consciousness’ Nika is standing right in front of you, looking concerned and waving her hand in front of your eyes, trying to gain your attention.

“Yo, you okay?” She asks, that furrow back in her brow, deepening when you can’t seem to find the right words to reply to her, your mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

“Yea- uh yeah I’m dandy, what did you want to know?” You answer, mouth still dry like the desert but your thoughts are more collected than before. Redirecting your eyes so that you’re looking back at your homework, you don’t see the concern still in her expression, nor as she brushes it off and decides that maybe it didn’t matter.

“Can I borrow some clothes? I don’t have anything to change into.” Nika tells you and you hum, throwing out a simple response.

“Sure, my wardrobe is in my bedroom, take whatever you like.” The only thing you can hear after that is the thudding of her steps against your floor, retreating towards your room, the click of the door opening and closing making you let out the breath you didn’t even know you were holding in, slapping your hand over your face at the fool you were making yourself out to be.

“What the fuck are you doing?” You whisper to yourself, rubbing your eyes harshly before sighing, flipping your books close and starting to tidy up all the papers laying all over your kitchen, yawning softly as you bend down to pick up the last piece of paper on the floor.

It’s unexpected when hands grip your hips, pulling you backwards like you were a dog being dragged by its hind legs. Looking back at Nika, all she does is smile mischievously and continue to pull you back with her.

“Nika, what are you doing?” By now you’re standing up a little more, her hands still situated on your hips, beginning to slide upwards to take hold of your waist instead.

“Getting you to bed.” She answers, not letting you go even as you move to continue cleaning up the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

“Cleaning my kitchen.” You tell her like it’s obvious, even rolling your eyes for the extra effect needed to convey your ‘message’. She hums, deciding on what her next course of action should be as you keep moving around, dragging her along.

“Do it in the morning.” Nika tells you almost sternly, trying to actually pull you towards your bedroom now instead of the half assed way she was doing it before.

“Nika come-” You start off before you’re interrupted, not having much of a choice in following her instructions this time.

“Nope, in the morning.” Letting yourself get dragged to your bedroom, you shut the door behind the two of you after the brunette finally let go of you, instead turning to your bed and slipping under the comfortable covers.

You however, move towards your wardrobe, ready to get out of the clothes that you had been outside in, they weren’t getting in your bed. The clean pair of shorts and the t-shirt you pull out replace the dirty clothes, not even noticing Nika’s steady eyes on you all throughout the process, your tired mind just wanting to go to sleep after the long day.

Shuffling over to the bed, you get under the blanket and go to get more comfortable, tossing for a few seconds before reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp Nika must have turned on when she was in choosing her sleepwear before.

Arms thread around your waist once more, with you laying on your back and her laying on her side, a leg slung over your thighs and her head placed on your chest, surprisingly cuddly and comfortable.

“This okay?” She questions timidly, looking up at you through heavy eyelids, begging for the rest that’s soon to come. Nika can only see the movement of your head, nodding back and forth tiredly, your right hand coming up to lay behind your head.

“Good night Nika.”

“Good night Y/n/n.”

An hour later when Em gets up to go pee, she decides to check on you, taking a little detour and opening your door just a little, seeing you and her brother’s girlfriend snuggled up tightly to each other, asleep face to face.

She chuckles quietly before closing the door back up and making her way to the bathroom, muttering something under her breath in order to not wake you both.

“I’ve seen lesbian porn straighter than that.”

[gin-juice-tonic]

They hate me for the way I can quickly and efficiently solve math problems created for 7th graders

[merrydock]

Some old art of my Owlk engineer, Eris, designing the Stranger's solar sails! Enjoy a big ramble about him and his job because I love this silly man:

Eris works on the design team for the Owlk space program, specialising in energy and propulsion technologies for the ships, satellites, and probes. Having a design philosophy of functionality and beauty, Eris enjoys going all-out with his work. He has received special recognition for his solar panel designs in particular, which borrowed from the unparalleled efficiency found in photosynthesizing plants.

When designing the Stranger's solar sails, Eris took inspiration from plants, but also the opening of insect elytra; the ballooning behaviours of silk-producing invertebrates, in which they sail from tree to tree using electric fields and air currents; and how flying creatures will use thermal updrafts to soar higher while expending less energy. Already familiar with how solar energy impacts technology from his work on solar panels, he proposed the use of this energy to propel the Stranger through space.

As travelling the distance between stars presented the major roadblock in the plan to reach the Eye (regarded as the Interstellar Propulsion Problem), Eris was lauded for his contributions, promoted to being one of the main engineers overseeing the Stranger's design.

More information about his general design process below!

When designing for a project, Eris uses all of the tools at his disposal. His first weapon of choice is always his pencil, and he will sketch out potential sources of inspiration on paper until the design concept begins to take form. Based on the initial project parameters he's been given, he drafts up a blueprint for his components.

Next, he must further conceptualise his designs. This is where the most valuable tool of the trade comes into play—the Vision Torch! Vision Torches serve many purposes for Owlks, from allowing them to nonverbally communicate to creating photographs from memory alone. Owlk engineers LOVE Vision Torches for how easy they make effectively communicating ideas. They allow concepts to be visualised in 3D, basic functionality to be shown through animations, and are even able to interface with computers. Eris might even 3D print a model using a Vision Torch to help him visualise his concepts as he works.

The space program is extremely collaborative, and Eris works on just a small part of the overall project, so being able to easily share ideas with others and see how all the individual components of a satellite or ship interact is vital. When discussing with more than a single other Owlk, Eris can use a Vision Torch linked to a holographic display to present concepts to a crowd. Concepts can also be tweaked in real time this way!

[Here's an example from the game of Owlks building the simulation with Vision Torches and a holographic display!]

With a Vision Torch, concepts can also be directly uploaded to a computer terminal. This is where a lot of the real work gets done - calculating weight, materials needed, stress testing in simulations, calculating trajectories, making precise tweaks to finalize the design, you name it. This also allows other Owlks working closely with Eris to access the most current design for their own tests.

This is an iterative process - as other Owlks finalize their components, as weight limitations are further restrained and material needs are calculated, Eris often has to go back to an earlier step and rework his concept. Fortunately, he thoroughly enjoys getting to be creative in his work (and doing math) and treats every project as a puzzle that needs to be solved! The only time when he's not excited to go back to the drawing board is when a last-minute adjustment from his peers means he needs to work long hours to get his work done in time for launch.

[billy-cockblock]

SWTD Theory

Still Wakes the Deep has been a huge brainworm for me the past few weeks, so I wanted to make a post with one of my takes. Someone’s probably thought of this already, but I can’t find anything about it, so here I go. 

I’m gonna take this time to shout out a little sub theory of mine that plays a bit of a part in my main point. 

For a little background, in populations of organisms, there are limiting factors on their growth and spread. Think of it as a series of funnels of different sizes: the rate of liquid that can flow through is going to be determined by the narrowest funnel. For example. if there’s a population that has ample food, space, and whatever else it needs, but has a restricted access to water, that water is going to limit how large that population could grow.

Before the Shape was dug up by the drill, it was probably dormant in the sea bed, doing its best to survive, the same as any other organism. Down where it was dark, wet, and cold, I think it had one main limiting factor: oxygen.

I don’t think the Shape can efficiently exchange gas underwater. Most of the untouched bodies Caz sees are only underwater, where an organism that thrives in air would struggle to access. Once it gets dug up and brought to air with plenty of organic matter to consume and grow with, its population explodes. When a limiting factor is removed, there’s nothing holding the population back any more until they hit a new limit. The Shape’s old limiting factor was removed, and it would only stop reproducing by running out of space to grow on the rig, running out of organic matter to use, or being killed (like, say, in a giant fiery explosion).

(I could go on and on about how the Shape potentially works, please feel free to ask me about it)

Now, I’ll get to my main theory:

I think Caz was dead the whole time.

Now, I don’t mean that in a “the whole game is in his head, none of it was real” way; I mean it in a “this man got Ethan Winters’ed” way. 

So, I started to do a little research into how tall oil rigs are to know how far Caz would have fallen off the helipad. I quickly learned there are many types of oil rigs and not every oil rig of the same type is the same size. I’m studying marine biology, not petroleum engineering like my brother, so I got tired of trying to guesstimate how tall the Bierra D’s helipad would be and attacked the problem with some simple math. 

Watching a video, I saw he fell for between 4-5 seconds; the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Plugging that in a calculator while not accounting for air resistance to solve for distance gets me ~80-120m, depending on if I used the 4 or 5 second count, so I’ll guess around 100m. I’ve found many conflicting sources on what the tallest heights you can safely fall into water are, but I can safely tell you that 100m is much higher than any of them. 

Now, maybe the devs weren’t going with the mathematical exact timing it would take for a guy to fall off an oil rig, and didn’t mean for it to be implied that he fell from THAT high. Still, we can agree he fell from very high up, high enough to have likely ended in injury. Maybe he’d just fall on and break a leg? Maybe an arm or some ribs?

After falling off the rig, the last frame before Caz blacks out shows the water at the top of the screen, meaning he hits the water head-first. He may be wearing a hard hat (that somehow stays on his head through the whole ordeal since he clips his flashlight to it), but he still should have cracked his skull open or broken his neck. 

When they pull him out of the water, he’s cold and not breathing, which wouldn’t be unusual for a drowning victim in the North Sea in the dead of winter, but it would usually be a death sentence. They never explain how they dragged Caz out of the water, but it would presumably have taken a long time to get him out, and time is key when dealing with someone who isn’t breathing. The fact that he’s able to cough up water and start breathing on his own is a miracle, since it doesn’t sound like Brodie or Douglas do CPR when they bring him inside.

So, fall damage, head and/or spine injury, drowning, and hypothermia. By several different factors, Caz should be a very, very dead man. So why isn’t he?

My theory is that, somehow, somewhy, the infection from The Shape healed and brought him back to life. We know for a fact it has amazing generative properties, basically able to double, triple, quadruple the amount of tissue and organic matter in the crew’s bodies with no regard for conservation of mass, so what’s just a little regeneration of damaged tissues in a single body? Once Caz’s body gets someplace with better conditions suited to life (inside where it’s warm and there’s air), it just jumpstarts his body functions. The Shape’s presumably been dormant in the seafloor for a long time, so it could be able to go dormant and kinda “come back to life” as conditions change, similar to a tardigrade, and potentially pass this ability onto its hosts.

And Caz mentions how his head hurts a lot, especially when he gets close to the Shape. 

Now, this might seem like baseless conjecture, and y’all might say “That’s a good headcanon, but there’s no evidence that The Shape could bring people back to life!” to which I would say “Oh, but there might be!"

After the helicopter on the starboard side, we get a call from Bruce, who is actively drowning. Through his gasps, he tells us that O’Connor hurt his leg and couldn’t swim, presumably drowning. And guess who we see still kicking as we’re passing through the pontoon? My thought is that O’Connor couldn’t swim, drowned, and drifted to the bottom, landing on a part of the shape. Once Caz and Brodie start working in the legs and they drain, it exposes him to air and allows the shape to start growing again, assimilating him and bringing him back to life. 

Obviously, he’s not doing as well as Caz is. My thought was that, if Caz died as he was infected, the infection would’ve had to put a lot of its energy into bringing him back, not leaving much for itself to begin assimilating him into the Shape. Since O’Connor was in direct contact with the Shape, it could hook him up to its network to help supplement that loss. Caz, meanwhile, stays as far away from the stuff as he can and doesn’t even get anything to eat all day; guy's running on empty. He has small things where the Shape affects him, like the colors at the edge of his vision, but most of his hallucinations only happen after the Shape attacks him through O’Connor. Before, I’m pretty sure the largest incident (other than when he’s blacked out) is when we can barely hear Suze’s voice over the speakers when moving through the pontoon. It’s really only after getting attacked that he starts to hear her when he’s awake, near the Shape, or over phone calls. He only hears her clearly over the speakers in administration after he runs into the shape many times when he gets swept away in the flooding.

With my main evidence out of the way, I’ll also mention that Caz sees the “light at the end of the tunnel” from the end of the game in the oil flashes when he blacks out.

But hey, that’s just a theory. 

A GAME TH- I have received a cease and desist.

Man, this became a long read. Thanks for getting this far, and I hope you enjoyed!

[hughungrybear]

In theory, Jiang Tian is not an orphan. Both his parents are alive and well. They are also separated and very busy people with work that takes them to different cities that it's quite easy to regard them as mere acquaintances than his parents.

Some days, he will be sent to his father. Other days, he would be relocated to be with his mother. Most days, none of them can (want to) take him so he is forced to live with his demented grandmother who would forget who he is and lock him out of the house after accusing him of being an intruder.

After years of living like this, things have become clear: Jiang Tian has no place to call home.

So, he learned to live with his suitcase always neatly packed and ready to go. That way, whenever one of his so-called family tells him that he has to move houses, he can do it swiftly and efficiently without making a fuss.

Until his mother told him that she had found a new home and he is welcomed to come and live with her — only it isn't her house and somebody his age is already living there. The adults try to tell him to treat the other boy as his younger brother, but what for? It's not as if he would stay in this house longer. Jiang Tian is ALWAYS LEAVING. There's no need to get attached to anyone in this household and yet...

The boy was fascinating. The boy seems proud but also pouts like a little kid whenever he thinks no one is looking. He keeps everyone at an arm's length but would willingly follow Tian to lunch in the outskirts of their school. He seems selfish but would go out of his way to save Uncle Mute, even though the boy had only met the latter in passing in the convenience store. In short, the boy is more complex than any Maths problem he has yet to solve.

Jiang Tian finally found a compelling reason to stay. So, it has come this — wherever the boy goes, he would have gone too.

[zxxyue]

赤羽業 & 浅野学秀: the Venus de Milo problem

The results of the second semester finals between Gakushū and Karma were a convergence of their respective narratives throughout the school year—two students molded by opposing forces. Their teachers, reflections of each other’s antithesis, shaped their worldviews, while their relationships with those around them sculpted their distinct approaches to solving the final math problem. The infamous image of Venus de Milo was not just an emblem for the question; it was the perfect metaphor for the philosophical gap between the opposing sides in the academics area of Assassination Classroom.

"Atoms" and "body-centered cubic structures"... I can't let those terms throw me. The question itself is quite simple. "You are inside a box surrounded by enemies... calculate the volume of your territory". Since our powers are equal, our attacks nullify each other. In other words, everything on the inside is my territory.

I'm surrounded by eight enemies inside this cube. Which means I need to calculate the volume of eight seals... and deduct that from the entire cube to get the volume of A0!

For Gakushu, the math problem was a test of control, an exercise in subjugating chaos to rationality. His solution was methodical, precise, and insular. To him, the box was a microcosm of his reality: a confined space where the rules are absolute, and success is achieved by bending those rules to one’s will. His focus on the “body-centered cubic structure” was emblematic of his fixation on the quantifiable. Pareto efficiency: Gakushu operates under the assumption that resources (or, in this case, space) must be allocated with optimal precision, leaving no room for inefficiency or external variables.

Yet, his flaw lies in his refusal to acknowledge the world outside the box. His worldview, while brilliant, is fundamentally limited by its rigidity. Gakushu does not look beyond the immediate; his vision, though sharp, is narrow.

Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle suggests that the simplest solution is often the correct one. Gakushu eliminated extraneous elements, breaking the problem into its most essential parts to focus on what can be controlled within the given parameters. This is not to say he was wrong- we know that Gakushu's solution was correct. What decided the exam results was the race against time, which all comes back to how fast they arrive to the answer. Gakushu shaved down the details of the problem to maximize time and efficiency. In his own words: "The question itself is quite simple". Yet in his haste to simplify the problem, he unknowingly complicated it unnecessarily for himself, which ended in his loss.

The animation captures Gakushu’s mindset perfectly: his field of vision narrows, spotlighting only the part of the question he deems essential, with the rest fading into darkness. While his approach is flawless in theory and execution, it leaves no room for alternative interpretations or broader connections, leading to that inadvertent inefficiency. In another context, his approach would have been unbeatable.

I was only looking at this single small cube, but... since this is a crystal structure built from atoms... that means the same structure continues on the outside. In other words... there is more to this world than this single cube.

And if I look around me, I can see that everyone has their own unique talent... their own territory. And everyone else can see that too!

"Everyone has their own unique talent… their own territory," is an example of moral relativism, the idea that no single territory, talent, or solution is inherently superior to another.

Karma initially approached the question with the mental schema that it required extraordinary talent or effort to solve. By rereading and reframing the problem, he adjusted his schema to understand that the solution lay in simplicity and clarity, rather than overthinking or exceptional skill.

In contrast to Gakushu's animation, Karma’s mental process is visually chaotic, the animation mirroring his initial overwhelm. The camera pans dizzyingly across the paper, as if he’s grappling with the sheer surface-level complexity of the problem. But this momentary disorientation sparks something critical: a shift in perspective.

His realization has the essence of metacognition, which is the ability to think about one’s own thinking. He steps back from the problem, recognizing its context within a larger framework. This is the dialectical opposition between them: while Gakushu seeks to rule the box, Karma understands that the box is merely one part of a vast, interconnected world. His solution acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives, valuing the contributions of others as integral to his own success.

Rather than avoiding the problem’s complexity, he embraces it (literally opening his arms lmao) using his own experiences and relationships as a lens to find clarity. Karma’s breakthrough is not his alone. It’s a culmination of the lessons from Korosensei and the camaraderie of Class E. These influences allow him to reframe the problem, breaking through its apparent complexity and arrive at an easy solution. Gakushu just didn't have that luxury from his father and Class A.

The Venus de Milo as a Metaphor

The Venus de Milo is known for its iconic missing arms, which were long gone before the statue was even discovered. Because of this, many interpretations of how the statue of Venus was posing and what the artist was trying to portray arose. In the same way, the final question symbolized a challenge that was both finite in its mathematical boundaries yet infinite in the ways it could be perceived. Here lies the thematic brilliance of the sculpture and the exam question: both demand the solver to confront the known and the unknown simultaneously.

[splatsvilles-fashionista]

Splatoon 3 Version 6.0 Patch Notes Breakdown

Been a little bit since I did one of these, but Nintendo released the Chill Season 2023 patch notes about three hour ago, and while in terms of balance changes this is one of the smallest patches ever, it's got a ton of quality-of-life changes, so let's dig in, shall we?

So let's start from the top. In terms of new content, this patch includes a new catalog, two new stages (Robo ROM-en and Bluefin Depot), two new Specials (Splattercolor Screen and Triple Splashdown), nine new weapons, two new multiplayer songs, the new King Salmonid Megalodontia, and eleven new Tableturf cards.

Additionally, you'll note that they're including a line about giving you one Sheldon License at the end of each season. This is actually really relevant to a change coming down in line, so tuck that in the back of your mind for later.

The balance changes are all buffs, but they're relatively minor, and only six Main weapons and one Special are seeing any changes this time around.

Starting off, .96 Gal is having its ink efficiency buffed by 8%. It currently gets 40 shots on a full ink tank, so I wager this increases that number by about 5-10, but it's 5 AM my time at time of writing and I am bad at math, so I don't know for sure.

Ranged Blaster's explosions get a 15% paint buff. Note that this applies only to the final explosion and not the trail, so it's not a straight 15% paint buff.

Dread Wringer gets a 10% ink efficiency buff, and since it currently has ten sloshes on a full tank, that increases that number to eleven.

And finally, for Main Weapon changes the Heavy Edit Splatling now paints more. Unlike the Ranged Blaster's paint buff this is a lot harder to gauge, but Heavy Edit's paint can be kind of spotty and inefficient, so this is undoubtedly a good thing for it.

After that, we've got only two points-for-Special changes.

Jet Squelcher and L-3 Nozzlenose both get some points shaved off their Specials, taking their Ink Vac and Crab Tank to 180p and 190p respectively. On one hand, I am biased and hate the Jet Squelcher, and I think this buff was completely unwarranted and unnecessary, but on the other hand I love the L-3 and want only good things in life for it, so they balance each other out, in my book.

And, for the final balance change of the entire patch, we've got a Reefslider buff, as it now makes you invulnerable during its startup 13 frames faster. The thing about this change is that like, it's a buff, and that is good, but the problem Reefslider has is not getting the Special off, it's that you very rarely survive the aftermath of using it, and this does nothing to solve that. With Triple Splashdown on the horizon I think things might be rough for this Special in the future.

And that's all of the balance changes! There being so few of them indicate two things to me: That Nintendo is overall happy with the the state of the game, and that they are wary of touching anything unless they have to. And one hand I get it, after all, competitive players are currently saying that there really isn't a meta at the moment, just picking weapons you're good at and playing well, and that's probably not an environment you want to shake up too much. But on the other hand, there are a lot of things like Line Marker, Undercover Brella, and Reefslider to name a few, that could really do with some sprucing up to help them keep up with the just the middle of the pack. I think raising the bottom bar a bit higher would be to everyone's benefit.

But we've got two Specials being added, so I suppose now's not the time to rock the boat too much. We'll see how things have shaken out come the mid-season patch in January.

But the balance changes are a very small part of these patch notes, and nowhere near the most interesting, so let's keep moving on.

Anarchy Series and X Battles are receiving a whole slew of changes, the most prominent of which are some new badge rewards for win streaks and attaining high X Rankings. Additionally, matchmaking in X Battles is being changed to more strictly separate people with high and low X Ranks, as well as allowing more team compositions. To cut a long story short, weapons have a set of internal values that the game uses during matchmaking to try and balance the team compositions. Matchmaking in high-power X Rank infamously takes a very long time, so I have to imagine that this change aims to speed things up by making the matchmaking more lenient on that front.

Salmon Run, in addition to the new King Salmonid, is getting some significant changes, starting with some changes to the Specials:

Kraken Royale and Triple Splashdown are being added to the pool of available Specials. Additionally, Mr. Grizz has finally agreed to always provide at least two workers on every team with a long-range Special to handle all the pesky Stingers and Flyfish. Be sure to thank your local union representative the next chance you get.

This change is particularly spicy. Your Salmon Run stage badges will now boost your starting difficulty on their respective stages, adding more incentive to play beyond the two superbonuses, as well as making the grind for future badges easier. This certainly gives me more motivation to go for those VP 400+ badges.

You'll now be able to tell what King Salmonid is present during each Shift, and the Salmometer will change to match it, as well. Can you believe they didn't change that when they added Horrorboros?

Also I am curious what this means for those Shifts where the King Salmonid was random. Will the Salmometer become a question mark? Are they not gonna do those anymore? We'll have to wait and see.

But this next change, is a big one, and it's for, what else, Big Run:

Big Run trophy requirements will now be set in advance, and no longer scale off top 50%, 20% and 5% player results.

I am in two minds about this change. On one hand, I always thought that people complaining about overfishers in Big Run were kind of petulant and entitled, especially when the rewards were as minor as locker decorations and badges. Maybe that's mean-spirited of me, but there was never a way for me to read it as anything but people demanding to be given the same reward as the people working the hardest without putting in the effort themselves.

But on the other hand, the 5% cutoff has been steadily rising as overall Big Run participation decreased, which is just a natural result of time passing and casual players falling off the game, nothing weird there, but this means that the top becomes more stacked, further disincentivizing casual players as getting even the bronze trophies becomes harder and harder for them. Giving the players much clearer and more achievable goals will likely serve to pull a lot of people back into Big Runs, and that is undoubtedly a good thing.

And hey, I said the rewards weren't worth getting upset over, and by that same metric, I don't think it's worth getting upset over more people getting them, either. All the better, if it makes more folks happy. And as for the people who do want to grind their hearts out, well:

There's still some recognition for that, too.

So that's the gist of the Salmon Run changes, so let's finish up with some miscellaneous changes.

Remember how I told you to keep that bonus Sheldon's License in mind for later?

Players who own every currently available weapon will now be able to trade extra licenses in for Shell-Out Tokens. In other words, that extra license serves as a failsafe so you don't lock yourself out of buying future weapons by spending all your licenses on gacha rolls.

The Splatfest Battle Pro queue is receiving the same matchmaking changes as X, presumably for much the same reasons.

And finally, the most important change of all:

WANDERCRUST IS BACK!!! YEAH BABY!!!! WOO!!!

[yokowan]

re: the orbital mechanics post

orbital mechanics isn't really "simple". the amount of complexity and diversity of the problems you can solve is huge. there's a lot of very complicated math to be done for spacecraft dynamics. but the complexity is all emergent!

so often in engineering you have to bundle all the stuff that's impossible to determine with just pure math into a dimensionless constant or polynomial approximation and then figure it out experimentally. so many things affect pressure losses in an engine or the spanwise efficiency of a wing that you basically don't have an option besides just sticking that shit in a wind tunnel and taking measurements. but not orbital mechanics! that's just gravity!

when you see those animations of super complicated n body simulations, all of that chaos comes entirely from gravitational attraction and the conservation of momentum+energy. you could write down all the fundamental laws of orbital mechanics on a half size sticky note, all the other stuff is just derived from those. you won't always get closed form solutions, but the controlling forces are so simple that numerically integrating them can be very efficient and very accurate.

now, of course, it's not always just gravity. there's atmospheric drag and solar wind and the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect or whatever. additional forces are always there, and these get complicated enough that you do end up needing to put in empirically determined adjustments. but on short timescales, the simpler model holds true! in my experience you tend to treat these as perturbations to the pure gravity model. you take your existing solution and just add the additional stuff on top. when you're doing orbit determination and rendezvous and the like, you're assuming your object is acting only under the influence of gravity and engines. you're probably even assuming its orbit is perfectly elliptical and ignoring gravity from other bodies.

none of this is to say that spacecraft dynamics is like. objectively better than other disciplines within engineering. (it is though.) it just feels nicer to me. there's something very clean about it. there's no jank, it's like solving puzzles. i am literally out here playing touys with my little spaceships. writing out the lagrangian of the circular restricted 3 body problems and seeing the stable points just fall out of it is so neat! and those are real!!!!!!! they're not artifacts of the math that just happen to show up, lagrange points are real and spacecraft use them all the time.

anyways me when i fucking get you

[violettathepiratequeen]

March 19th, 2025

Hello there, gentle viewers! Welcome back to Buffy Slays, where I’ll be going through all 144 episodes of BtVS over the course of a year, highlighting as many of the GOOD moments, lines, character choices, worldbuilding moments, etc. etc. as I think people will have the patience to read. 

So, here we go! 

Season 1, Episode 6, “The Pack.”

A field trip to the zoo turns deadly after Xander and a gang of mean-spirited kids become possessed by hyenas. (Pulled from Hulu.)

If you're reading along and haven't finished the show, consider this your Spoiler Warning for discussion of future episodes and major plot points in any and all of these posts.

Episode Number: #6 Episode Ranking: #141 out of 144. Writer: Matt Kiene

Top 5 Quotes:

“God, this game is brutal. I love it.” —Gym Coach

“It’s devastating. He’s turned into a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course, you’ll have to kill him.” —Giles

“You’re gonna have so much detention, your grandchildren will be staying after school.” —Principal Flutie

“Why couldn’t Xander be possessed by a puppy, or some ducks?” —Willow

“Did I ask you to speak? Okay, I guess I did.” –Principal Flutie

How “The Pack” Slays:

The way Buffy resists getting bullied. The four bullies come up and start taunting her at the zoo, and she replies with a quip and a smile, not lashing out or acting hurt or stooping to their level. She’s just gracious that way.

Willow and Buffy talking about boys. The episode after this raises the question of whether Buffy should have feelings for Angel, so this is a clever and efficient way to assure us of those feelings even existing, without having to actually have an Angel scene in an episode that isn’t about him.

Flutie and the pig. The scene where the pig is running through the halls in a silly little mascot costume, and Buffy picks him up. The pig likes Buffy much better than Flutie, so Flutie asks her to come with him to put the pig back in its cage. And Flutie is going on and on about school spirit to her, in a way that’s… kind of nice, like he’s bonding with her. And she looks adorable holding this not-at-all-scary pig, a pig she thinks is very cute. It’s a fun scene, and introduces the “Buffy likes pigs” lore, as well as showing us that Flutie is on Buffy’s side… finally.

The dodgeball scene. The coach and his deadpan, sinister attitude is such a funny detail to have for two minutes of screen time. The fact that it’s a silent scene except for balls bouncing and kids running is so great, as the bullies pick off everyone weaker than them… which includes everyone except for Buffy. It includes Lance, the kid they were bullying in the beginning, who is on their own team.There’s like… this kind of quiet horror to this scene, but I love that the bullies at their most animalistic recognize Buffy as a predator that they don’t want to mess with. And she swoops in and saves Lance, the prey. 

Xander solving his math problems by throwing the textbook away. He’s possessed at the time, and this is meant to showcase part of his cruel, animal nature, but uhhh as someone who NEVER had a smooth time in math I identify heavily with this moment. Even him lashing out at Willow is relatable, because he wasn’t yelling at her so much as himself and his inability to understand something that made sense a week ago.

Xander has friends outside of Buffy and Willow. When he and the bullies are possessed, they walk up to a table to steal the lunches of some people who I think are meant to be in the nerd/loser category. But one of them immediately asks Xander’s opinion on something, and doesn’t address the other four, so I love to think that Xander gets along with others on the bottom rung like he is. Lance probably falls into that category, too.

Xander does not actually rape Buffy, nor does he get near it. She tackles him first, and after he pins her down, she throws him off, telling him she doesn’t want to hurt him. He throws her against the wall, suckles her neck, and says some gross stuff, but the next scene is her dragging an unconscious Xander towards the library, claiming she hit him with a desk. We know she’s stronger than him, and even if he’d gone further than he did, she would have been able to stop him. As it is, she’s not afraid to hit him with an extremely heavy object, and hurt him if it’s to protect herself. At no point does she seem bothered by his actions, either, she tells Willow he “tried,” not that he actually succeeded, and she attributes his non-traditional wooing to the fact that there’s a hyena spirit in him right now.

When Buffy throws the zookeeper into the hyena pit, she makes it clear that this was an accident by running after him, an obvious attempt to save him, and looks shaken that she isn’t able to do so. And this is an always-present characterization of her. She will fight humans who are hurting people, or doing something violent or stupid. And if they die, she doesn’t beat herself up over it. But she never LETS them die without trying to save them, and she never intentionally deals the killing blow.

The final shot in this episode, after Xander claims to not remember anything and Giles tells him he’ll keep his secret, is Xander walking away, looking downcast. He does feel remorse, and trauma, and guilt for all of this. He may not have had to own up to what he did, but he’s being punished for it all the same.

Xander Harris Is A Bro:

It’s important, in this episode, to remember Xander’s good moments. First up being his and Willow’s excitement at going to the zoo, seeing zebras mating, happy to be on a field trip together, even though Buffy is bored with the whole thing and off wandering by herself.

He saves Lance from the hyena fate. Watches him get dragged off by the bully group, and follows to stand up for him. He succeeds, which works out for everybody, because Buffy and Willow are close enough to notice something is wrong with Xander, and therefore the rest of the group, whereas probably no one would have noticed if something was wrong with Lance, and they would have all succumbed to the possession.

As soon as the hyena is pulled out of Xander, he sees the zookeeper trying to kill Willow, and jumps to her defense. Buffy is also fighting for her life at the moment, but Willow is Xander’s priority.

He hugs Willow in the very end scene. He claims he doesn’t remember what happened, but gives Willow a big squeeze, apologizing the only way he’s able, impressing upon her that she is so very important to him, no matter what the demon in him told her.

The Demon Talking:

This is a tough episode to watch, and obviously Xander’s behavior is so disturbing that it turned many people off his character, in a way that he was never able to recover from in their opinions. Spike had the same problem in late S6, but by then at least he’d had multiple episodes building up what a great guy he was, so those of us who loved him could go on loving him. Especially with the season that came after. I’ll get to that when we get there.

But for now, I need to highlight why this episode does not ruin Xander’s character, and why Buffy and Willow can forgive him and move on, not even making him own up to what he did, not feeling in any way triggered or traumatized or differently about him in episodes to come. Willow continues to want him, and Buffy continues to let him have his unspoken crush until he finally asks her out, and she turns him down.

This show talks a lot about demons, of course, but there are so many different ways that demonic energies are shown. There are people turning into demons, there are people getting aspects of a demon, or becoming half-demon, or all sorts of variables. But there is also demonic possession. And a possession is always going to be a violation. A rape of body and mind.

Xander in this episode is possessed by a demonic spirit; the wording is very clear here, and that makes him a victim. He is only possessed by said spirit because he is defending someone from being tormented by bullies. His assault on Buffy is intermingled with the scene of the other four eating Principal Flutie, highlighting that this is something none of them would have done in their right minds. His first act after being cured is to leap into the fray to save Willow. And he does ask his friends after the fact what he did to them. He may be lying about not remembering, but he does give them the chance to call him out, and make him apologize. It is not the smartest or bravest way out, maybe, but we need to allow for the fact that he is traumatized by this. He doesn’t want to think about the cruel words he spat in Willow’s face, or what he tried to do to Buffy, or the fact that he ate a pig raw and was just all around a total jerk for the past couple days. So he buries it, claims ignorance, but still gives them the chance to make him ‘fess up. 

And they, I think, know that he remembers. Buffy and Willow share a kind of smirk with each other when he asks, not because he did anything so funny and humiliating that they’re being kind by pretending it didn’t happen. But more because they know he’s hiding as a defense mechanism, and they’re willing to let him have it. They know it wasn’t really him. They read the books and watched the tape and saw the whole ritual go down. They don’t hold any of his actions against him, whether he remembers them or not, and they’re willing to forgive and forget and move on, and not make him suffer any more than he already is.

As for Giles, I think he was doing the same. He doesn’t know the nasty stuff Xander did to the girls, all he knows is that Xander ate a pig, and what Buffy told him about his attitude changing. He lets Xander off the hook as well, for something he doesn’t know about.

All four of them may be at fault for this; all four of them are kind of known for repressing how they actually feel, and hiding behind their various strengths (magic, books, jokes, being the Slayer). But even if they don’t air it out, I think all four of them are on the same page that it wasn’t Xander who did any of those things, but a demonic possession twisting his desires of wanting Buffy and not wanting Willow into something evil and harmful. Which is not something that will change their good opinions of him. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And that’s a wrap on Episode 6! Thank you so much for reading this far!

Previous: “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date.”

Next up: “Angel.” 

(Credit for GIFs in this post: @detectivedawnsummers)

[sleepysera]

"The latest research (from Susan Hallam, professor emeritus of education and music psychology at University College London) shows that learning an instrument improves discipline, self-confidence, focus, problem-solving, language, literacy, math, and personal well-being. It increases the capacity of memory, improves time management and organizational skills, enhances coordination, decreases stress, enhances your respiratory system, and promotes happiness in your life and that of those around you. Playing music can be an efficient way to stimulate the brain, establishing and strengthening new and existing connections, cutting across a broad swathe of its regions and cognitive functions, causing ripple effects through the decades (need I go on?)."

-James Rhodes, How to Play the Piano (2016)

[calderasletski]

Bound To Revalidate [ch5]

Chapter list (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ HERE ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

Y/n had her face buried in a diagram, surrounded by a fortress of books. Her pencil hovered above the page as she furiously tried to make sense of the calculations.

“Miss Y/n, it’s time to take a break,” came Carla’s familiar, polite voice.

Kaoru, before leaving the house earlier, had left Carla behind with strict instructions to keep track of Y/n’s study and homework time.

“Ugh, I’m still not done with this part here…” Y/n groaned, running her fingers through her hair in frustration. Suddenly, an idea struck her. She sat up straighter and called out, “Say, Carla... are you good at math?”

Carla’s computer-generated voice responded. “Of course I am, Miss Y/n. Mathematics is a core element of my programming. I possess extensive knowledge and proficiency in various mathematical principles.”

Y/n’s eyes lit up like she’d discovered treasure. “Perfect! Help me solve this—just a few graphs, maybe an equation or two...”

By the time Kaoru stepped back into the house, he was greeted by Y/n barreling toward him, waving a sheet of paper in her hand.

“How could you hide such a perfect baby from me?!” she exclaimed, her voice filled with exaggeration.

Kaoru stopped in his tracks, blinking at her in confusion. “Huh? What baby?”

“Carla!” she declared. “She’s a genius! Did you know she can design infrastructure? She calculated angles and graphed solutions faster than anything I’ve ever used before!”

Kaoru’s brow lifted as realization dawned. Y/n must have roped Carla into solving her homework problems.

Chuckling, Kaoru shook his head at her enthusiasm. “So, you’ve discovered how amazing she is, huh?”

“Amazing doesn’t even cover it,” Y/n declared, arms flailing dramatically. “She’s awesome! Now I get why you’re obsessed with her!”

“I’m not obsessed with her,” Kaoru said, his tone carrying mild annoyance. “Anyway, let me guess—you're using Carla to do your homework now?”

“Well, I asked her for help, and she was happy to oblige,” Y/n said with a shrug, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Kaoru smirked knowingly. “And I’m assuming she’s faster than any of those programs you’ve been using.”

“Exactly!” Y/n beamed. Then, without missing a beat, she added, “So… give her to me.”

Kaoru immediately crossed his arms, his stance firm. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Y/n whined. “She’s my favorite thing in the world!”

“I thought your cat was your favorite thing in the world,” Kaoru said, raising an eyebrow.

“Favorite living thing, yes. But Carla’s Carla. She’s in her own category!”

Kaoru gave her a mock-offended look. “Am I not even on the list?”

Y/n grinned, tilting her head playfully. “Well… you could be, if you let me borrow Carla.” She batted her lashes at him dramatically, knowing full well it wouldn’t work.

Kaoru rolled his eyes, already accustomed to her antics. “You’re a cheeky little thing, aren’t you?”

“If I am, will it change your answer?” she shot back.

“No, Y/n,” Kaoru said firmly. “You can’t rely on her too much.”

Y/n’s shoulders slumped, a pout forming on her lips. “But she’s perfect. She’s faster, more efficient—”

Kaoru cut her off, his tone soft but resolute. “I know she is. But if you rely on her too much, you’ll get too accustomed to it—and that won’t help you in the long run.”

Y/n frowned but knew he was right. That didn’t stop her from grumbling under her breath, though. “She’s still better than my programs...”

Kaoru laughed, ruffling her hair as he walked past. “Come on, stubborn. Let’s see how much of that homework you actually did on your own.”

Giving him an exasperated look she fixed her hair and followed after him. ‘I’ll figure it out later.’

[dat-town]

dilemma of love

Characters: Yonghee & female reader

Setting & genre: college au, academic rivals to lovers

Summary: The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well known game theory concept applied widely but you haven’t seen it applied for love. You might be the first one to try.

Warnings: academic pressure and stress, MC cries at one point, narrative-heavy and a bit cringe ending. i tried to be as realistic with mathematics stuff as i could but it’s been a while since i took advanced math and it shows. good thing is, at least this way it's more understandable (hopefully)

Words: 2.9k

Author’s note: @restlessmaknae it was supposed to be posted 2 weeks ago (which would have made it funnier considering your Taiwanese story) but life happened, anyways <3

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well known game theory concept applied widely in economics, politics, even sports.

It goes like this: there are two criminals captured by the police that offer each of them a deal to either stay silent or testify against the other in order to lessen their own punishment. The criminals have to decide between these two choices but the outcome also depends on what the other does. If both of them stay silent, each of them gets a year of prison time. If they both testify, they get two. If only one of them testifies, he can walk away free while the other is sentenced for three years.

You were in high school when you first heard about this concept and it left you flabbergasted that the best response is to testify and betray the partner in crime because the consequences of choosing to stay silent would have potentially worse payoff. In game theory it’s called a strictly dominant strategy which means that both parties should choose to follow this strategy for their own interest. It’s the only Nash equilibrium in this hypothetical game because if only one of the criminals changes their strategies and the other doesn’t, they would be at disadvantage. Funny, isn’t it? Mutually staying silent would be overall the best choice (or at least the Pareto efficient one in the language of economics) but since it’s not rational for one’s selfish interests, it’s very unlikely to happen.

That said, you have a Prisoner’s Dilemma on your own too and his name is Kim Yonghee.

Yonghee became the bane of your existence during college orientation four years ago.

Not many people majored in Applied Mathematics, your year only had thirty or so freshmen, most of them guys as expected, yet everybody was floored by this one guy who apparently managed to score the highest CSAT score among all. It didn’t matter that you had the exact same score, not when you weren’t like him: charming with his small smile and pretty features, his voice so honeyed you feared cavities. No wonder he easily became the professors’ favorite too and the most seeked out tutor with his gentle explanations and quiet diligence. No matter what you did, you couldn’t catch up to him. You were always only the second best and you hated that satisfied little smirk in the corner of Yonghee’s mouth whenever he managed to best you time and time again in every debate or when he could solve complex problems quicker than you.

You thought (desperately hoped) that you would get rid of him once you graduate but of course he was one of the twelve people who carried on with masters studies and once again, he was a competition. This time, however, you had no plans on backing out, he couldn’t take everything that you wanted. Not when you planned to apply for the PhD program under the care of Professor Ryu who only took one doctorate student per year, so you had to be the best. You had to ace competitions and write publications on top of your classwork to stand out. Basically you just needed to beat Kim Yonghee.

He made it harder than expected though and not for the reason you would have thought so.

It all started when you were pulling all-nighters to do an assignment for extra credit but you were struggling to find ways to prove a theorem. You had already gone through the most common ways to prove something in mathematics including proving the opposite but to no avail. You came to the point that it might not be provable at all but Professor Ryu had never done you so dirty, so you refused to give up and search it up on Naver whether it’s one of those theorems. Especially because you heard that Yonghee had already handed in his paper.

But then what was he doing at the library around midnight if not to just bother you?

“You should get some sleep. I saw you almost fall asleep three times under a minute,” he said and if you didn’t know any better you would have thought it was concern lacing his words.

“Don’t tell me what to do. I need to finish this,” you muttered, not even looking at him as you tried to blink the tiredness out of your eyes.

“Want some pointers?” Yonghee asked, lingering around your table gingerly and that made you look up at him with a frown. He stood there in his knitted sweater, his hair soft-looking and fluffy, eyes kind and not at all tired despite the late hour.

“Don’t you dare!” You snapped because there is nothing more humiliating than getting help from the enemy.

The boy raised his hands in a defensive manner and turned to leave but before he actually took any step further, he put down a plastic cup of tea on your table, then he left before you could have questioned his intentions. You stared at the cup dumbfounded, realizing that it was not only still hot but your favorite brand and wondered how Yonghee knew that but then again you also knew that he was walking around with a ridiculous amount of iced americanos because you had seen it enough times during the last four years. It shouldn’t have made you feel special.

Ever since then you started to notice small things like that. Like the way Yonghee looks up every time you step into a classroom but looks away swiftly whenever your eyes meet. That he is the only one who has his full attention on you when you are in front of class explaining a solution, not even the professor is looking so closely. Or the way he randomly drops science papers in front of you with open for publication news. You used to think all of it is just to mock you, to prove his superiority once again but suddenly you aren’t so sure.

Especially not after that mental breakdown you had after your latest, most well-crafted article was rejected. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, you had been rejected by papers before but the feedback for this called your deduction and reasoning technique mediocre and that was the last drop in the glass before it spilled because that day was already shitty with your stomach hurting after something spoiled in your lunch and your landlord’s notification about raising the rent next semester. No matter how much you willed yourself not to not show it, the indifferent mask came crumbling down the moment you left the study room and re-read the rejection email.

That was how Yonghee found you, sobbing in the corridor more out of frustration than anything else. Of course he couldn’t just ignore you and walk away, no, he had the nerve to walk up to you and hesitate over touching your shoulder or patting your back but in the end he opted for keeping his hands to himself, hiding them in his jeans pockets.

“Uhm… do you need anything?” He asked, strained, almost too gently. You hated how sincere he sounded.

“Leave me alone,” you muttered, short-tempered through your silent tears. Your voice turned desperate though. “Please.”

You could tell Yonghee stalled and you wanted to snap at him once more for making you feel so small, so humiliated. But then he quietly passed you a pack of tissues and said:

“Allergy season is a real pain in the ass, isn’t it?” He asked as if you didn’t know he was smarter than to make such a mistake. It was nowhere near allergy season after all and you wanted to laugh at how ridiculous it was, that he gave you a chance to pretend that it was just allergies acting up and not you breaking down over a rejection letter.

You took a tissue gingerly, soaking your tears, patting your wet cheeks until there was only raw skin there and puffy, red eyes. Yonghee wasn’t looking at you though, he wasn’t making fun of you. He was with his back to you, his broad shoulders blocking you from the corridor’s view. His sudden and unexpected care made you feel conflicted and you suddenly weren’t even sure how to react. You decided to go with acting normal, like you would have done with any other person even if it wasn’t normal with you two.

“Thanks,” you mumbled after poking his shoulder, signaling him that he could turn around.

Yonghee nodded and there was worry in his eyes as he looked over at you.

“Do you… want to talk about it?” He asked tentatively as if he expected harsh words in response which, you had to admit, was a reasonable fear. But you were too sensitive and exhausted to pick another useless argument.

“Just a publication rejection. No big deal,” you shrugged, forcing yourself to be as nonchalant as you wished to feel inside.

“Oh, the Korean Mathematics Gazette?”

“Yeah,” you sighed and glanced at Yonghee sharply. “You don’t have to tell me, I’m sure they loved yours,” you muttered bitterly.

“Actually, they called my writing too prosy for a science paper and said that the topic I chose was unoriginal,” the boy snorted, which honestly stunned you because you never expected him to be someone who failed. Ever. He had always seemed so annoyingly perfect and yet, he took it so easily, as if he was used to it. You couldn’t help your surprise.

“Wow, really?”

“I guess they really hate the idea of publishing something from master’s students. I heard doctorate students get more chances,” Yonghee shrugged, unbothered, and even though you also heard the rumors, you still wanted to try out knowing that it would have had a big accomplishment in your personal statement for the PhD  programme.

“If somebody, I thought you would break that stigma,” you admitted  because even if you hated to admit it, statistically speaking Yonghee was the best out of your year. It shouldn’t have but the fact that even he wasn’t good enough for the Gazette made you feel better. Or well, not exactly the fact itself but that he told you about it. He could have stayed quiet and you wouldn’t have known.

“Come on, I’m not that good,” Yonghee shook his head and at times like this you couldn’t decide whether he was such a good actor to pretend or he was really that humble.

“You’re still better than anyone in our year,” you argued because that much you could admit. He really was the best which is both annoying and motivating. Annoying even more when he started to protest as if he didn’t know he was the best. You rolled your eyes at him. “Don’t act like you don’t enjoy whenever you can rub it in that you’re better than me.”

Your accusation seemed to push Yonghee into defensive mode.

“I just think you look cute when you’re annoyed,” he blurted out and you whipped your head to look at him so quick you might pull a few joints in your neck.

“What?”

“Nothing,” the guy cleared his throat, scratching the back of his neck shyly, redness coloring his skin. It was an unexpectedly cute look on him. “If it helps, it actually motivates me a lot to know that if I slipped up even just a little, you would beat my ass without hesitation,”

Oh. So he didn’t think that you were easy competition, he did think you were competition to begin with. It gave you more satisfaction than what you would have admitted.

The ringing of your phone broke the moment though but those last few words and the look in Yonghee’s eyes haunted you long after. It made you question everything you once thought of as axioms.

Numbers just make sense to you. You like how rational mathematics is, how unswayed and consistent. It has an explanation for everything. For Yonghee, however, it’s fun, he has told you before and you couldn’t get it. What’s so fun about it? Seeing you struggle over problems he can solve with closed eyes? He says he gets a boost of adrenaline whenever he can solve a problem, that it’s rewarding and this way you can understand the spark in his eyes when he gets to the solution first during classes.

You have no idea when exactly your annoyance turned into lowkey fondness and when you started looking forward to seeing him. At first after that conversation in the corridor, you were in denial, like no way you cared about him of all people, like jeez, you were better than falling for just his pretty face and sweet words… but then you had to realize that there was no point in lying to yourself. Not when prolonged eye contact made your skin feel heated and sent your heart into arrhythmia.

So yeah, numbers make sense to you but feelings don’t.

To confess or not, that’s your dilemma now.

Rationally, based on everything you learned about game theory strategies, you know that you shouldn’t say anything due to the possibility of getting rejected. This way the worst thing that could happen is that even though your feelings are mutual you never know because both of you stay silent. But you wouldn’t get humiliated either which is definitely something you would like to avoid. You have to see Yonghee almost every day because you share pretty much all your classes, so it would be terribly uncomfortable afterwards.

Yet, despite all rationality, all of your mathematical knowledge, knowing fully well that it would go against the advised strategy, you can’t help but wonder about the what ifs. What if you confessed? What if he felt the same?

It’s hard not to wonder when you catch Yonghee looking at you with something other than his usual amused smile or judging frown (or what you thought of as it at least). There’s something awed and fond in his eyes nowadays. It makes you hope foolishly, think that maybe he does feel the same. That maybe he also had a change of heart regarding you.

It happens in the most unexpected yet most you way.

Sometime during the semester you started to exchange brain-teasers, puzzles, mathematical equations with Yonghee, expecting the other to solve them. They got progressively harder and thus, more fun. That’s why you were very taken aback when you received the simple task to solve 128 times the square root of e to the power of 980. Other than the fact that e490 was a huge number, especially multiplied with 128, it wasn't difficult to solve, so you were quizzed, trying to figure out where the catch was.

It’s actually your artist roommate who figures it out faster. She looks over your shoulder to see what you are working so hard on and chuckles.

“That’s cute,” she says and your eyes widen, staring up at Yeojin who claims to hate mathematics with a burning passion.

“You know what’s this?” You stare at her and her mischievous smile.

“Oh yeah and you should definitely take a step back and think outside of the box.”

You are seriously starting to lose sleep over it, especially because Yonghee looks more and more nervous whenever you meet and you don’t tell him your answer. It’s driving you crazy what it could be, so eventually you do something you swore not to do, not when it comes to Kim Yonghee: give up.

“I’m done. I have no idea what this is supposed to be,” you throw your open notebook in front of the guy in the library, startling him in the middle of writing a paper or something. You don’t care. If you have to go one more minute without knowing what he wanted with this newest task you will seriously lose it.

“Oh,” Yonghee looks up at you with a sad, kicked puppy look and you seriously don’t get it. Shouldn’t he be happy, over the moon that you can’t present him with an adequate answer? “Are you uhm… sure? Like you aren’t just trying to be nice?”

What? What does this have to do with you being kind or not?

“I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of joke? Or like I missed a major update in the world of algebra?” You question, frustrated, and your classmate lets out a little (endearingly) awkward chuckle before he pulls your notebook in front of him writing down the equation he assigned to you.

“No, it’s… it’s just cringe but in my defense, it was Hyunsuk’s idea,” Yonghee says, clearing his throat as he slides the paper back to you. You stare down at the damned numbers, ready to snicker when the boy covers the top half of his writing with another paper and suddenly a whole different meaning is presented to you. It takes you aback and you look at Yonghee, waiting for him to laugh, to call it a joke but he doesn’t, he just stares back at you with big doe eyes, hopeful and your heart trembles in your chest.

“It is cringe, but…” you agree once you finally find your voice, trailing off. Gosh, you can’t believe you’re doing this. You take the paper back and grab a pen to write i < 3u * 2.

Really, it’s so you: confessing using a mathematical formula. No matter how cliché it is because it doesn’t matter, not when Yonghee’s rewarding smile is brighter than the Sun.

It’s proven then: that sometimes it’s worth going against the dominant strategy because in the dilemma of love, taking risks might lead to happiness you never knew.

[cyberstudious]

what's it like studying CS?? im pretty confused if i should choose CS as my major xx

hi there!

first, two "misconceptions" or maybe somewhat surprising things that I think are worth mentioning:

there really isn't that much "math" in the calculus/arithmetic sense*. I mostly remember doing lots of proofs. don't let not being a math wiz stop you from majoring in CS if you like CS

you can get by with surprisingly little programming - yeah you'll have programming assignments, but a degree program will teach you the theory and concepts for the most part (this is where universities will differ on the scale of theory vs. practice, but you'll always get a mix of both and it's important to learn both!)

*: there are some sub-fields where you actually do a Lot of math - machine learning and graphics programming will have you doing a lot of linear algebra, and I'm sure that there are plenty more that I don't remember at the moment. the point is that 1) if you're a bit afraid of math that's fine, you can still thrive in a CS degree but 2) if you love math or are willing to be brave there are a lot of cool things you can do!

I think the best way to get a good sense of what a major is like is to check out a sample degree plan from a university you're considering! here are some of the basic kinds of classes you'd be taking:

basic programming courses: you'll knock these out in your first year - once you know how to code and you have an in-depth understanding of the concepts, you now have a mental framework for the rest of your degree. and also once you learn one programming language, it's pretty easy to pick up another one, and you'll probably work in a handful of different languages throughout your degree.

discrete math/math for computer science courses: more courses that you'll take early on - this is mostly logic and learning to write proofs, and towards the end it just kind of becomes a bunch of semi-related math concepts that are useful in computing & problem solving. oh also I had to take a stats for CS course & a linear algebra course. oh and also calculus but that was mostly a university core requirement thing, I literally never really used it in my CS classes lol

data structures & algorithms: these are the big boys. stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, graphs, sorting algorithms, more complicated algorithms… if you're interviewing for a programming job, they will ask you data structures & algorithms questions. also this is where you learn to write smart, efficient code and solve problems. also this is where you learn which problems are proven to be unsolvable (or at least unsolvable in a reasonable amount of time) so you don't waste your time lol

courses on specific topics: operating systems, Linux/UNIX, circuits, databases, compilers, software engineering/design patterns, automata theory… some of these will be required, and then you'll get to pick some depending on what your interests are! I took cybersecurity-related courses but there really are so many different options!

In general I think CS is a really cool major that you can do a lot with. I realize this was pretty vague, so if you have any more questions feel free to send them my way! also I'm happy to talk more about specific classes/topics or if you just want an answer to "wtf is automata theory" lol

[beximus-feencog-bonker]

42.3.204

I like cashbot hq. they are nice to me reasonably efficient there. Mr Dolair appreciates my approach to problem solving. He didn't like the expenditures at first, but the long term cost saving projections made him really happy! i just hope he doesn't figure out how lousy I am at quick math.

Mr Campbell and Mr Kuiper are real live genuine team players. the first I think I've ever seen here. They don't really like me, but i think i can earn their admiration like they've earned mine, someday.

I'm not sure how Mr Ruffler has kept his job here for so long, but hes Fun entertaining pleasant.... to be around.