#nerd sniping

[yesterdays-xkcd]

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

Nerd Sniping [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Black Hat is sitting on a chair, Cueball is standing next to him. Across the street, another Guy is coming from a building walking towards the pedestrian crossing across from Black Hat.] Black Hat: There's a certain type of brain that's easily disabled. Black Hat: If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it.

[The Guy across the street is about to enter a crosswalk, which is seen from right behind Black Hat in his chair, holding onto the sign, which is still pointing down. Cueball is looking on.] Black Hat: This has led me to invent a new sport: Nerd Sniping. Black Hat: See that physicist crossing the road?

[Black Hat lifts up the sign when the physicist is in the middle of the street, halfway across the pedestrian crossing.] Black Hat: Hey!

[A close-up of Black Hat's sign is shown in a frameless panel. There is text above and below an image of a four-by-five grid of nodes with resistors (shown as wiggly lines) between every node and also continuing away from the 16 outer nodes. A total of 5 columns with 5 and 4 rows with 6 resistors for a total of 20 nodes and 49 resistors. Two nodes, a knight's move apart, are marked with red circles in the 3rd row 2nd column and the 2nd row 4th column.] Sign: On this infinite grid of ideal one-ohm resistors, Sign: what's the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes?

[The Physicist has stopped pondering the questions, a hand to his chin.] Physicist: It's... Hmm. Interesting. Maybe if you start with... No, wait. Hmm... You could—

[In another frameless panel, a ten-wheeled truck is zooming past from the right, apparently going through the spot where the physicist just stood.] Truck: Foooom

[Cueball looks down on Black Hat, who looks back up from his chair at the curb, again holding the sign down. He lifts one hand up while replying.] Cueball: I will have no part in this. Black Hat: C'mon, make a sign. It's fun! Physicists are two points, mathematicians three.

[nyansequitur]

I recently got hit by an S tier nerd sniping image. I spent a good hour on it before giving up and googling it to find out it's an unsolved problem of mathematics.

it's got similar vibes to the Collatz conjecture where it seems so simple on the surface and it seems pretty apparently solvable.

[bisquid]

This is extremely cruel

[psychuan]

[nerdbrazil]

[ratleyland]

"Some m*th*rf*ck*rs are always trying to ice-skate uphill"

This movie is definitely the best one out of the trilogy.

[fannishstuff]

For the unfamiliar:

Edit: people who are voting "other," I beg you to explain

[yesthatsatumbler]

I personally can think of at least three (possibly four) missing options:

actual non-sex toy that's nice to touch/play with, like a plushie or one of those push-pop square things

some kind of hobby/crafting implement, such as a paint set or a pair of pliers

some kind of weapon, such as a sword or a pistol

blahaj (...really a variant of the first option but common enough to mention explicitly)

Other commenters suggested Lego set and I hadn't thought of that option but that probably counts too!

...while writing the tags, thought of another realistic possibility that wouldn't fit into any of the above: a new item for her collection - obviously depending on what she collects it could be any (or multiple) of the previous eight options*, but it could also be, say, a rare coin.

*) ...OK maybe not the blahaj... though TBH I do wonder if there's enough varieties of blahaj out there for someone to start collecting them

When a trans girl tells you she got a "new toy" you never know if she's talking about a sex toy, a submissive trans person that melts with every word she says, or something extremely nerdy that would require a 15 page essay to explain why she likes it.

[meetthegofer]

"you ever discover something about yourself that makes you question everything you thought you knew?" "is this about your parents again"

[thewertsearch]

Happy new year, everyone! I hope y'all have a fantastic 2023.

I, for one, cannot wait to dive right into the next Act-

Um.

Ok, never mind. I can't wait to dive into the rest of the Act - but not quite yet.

I'm actually still at home, and I have a couple of things to sort out IRL before I can commence regular posting - expect it to resume in the next week or two.

However, there is something I'll be posting a little sooner. It's the answer to a little question I've been getting asks about for months, but which I wanted to delay answering until at least the end of Hivebent. A question I've been asked before, but haven't had the tools to fully understand until recently.

Many are asking this, and after two weeks of pondering the question, I'm almost ready to answer it in full.

The official Wertsearch Shipping Chart will be dropping soon. I haven't quite finished the writeup, and I don't want to spoil everything now, but...

I kind of went full Nepeta.

[furbyfubar]

I feel like this graph of the rate of left-handedness was also (somewhat) relevant here as it’s the go to example to show why the panic over kids “turning” more LGBTQ is ridiculous. When the data for people born in 1942 came in someone could have looked at the data from the (then) past 30 years and concluded that [*pause while I spend way too much time to plot an extended trend line in photoshop*] in 2327 everyone would be left-handed!

It’s possible that I might have gotten a little bit sidetracked by finding the graph from an actual research paper on left-handedness instead of the meme version typically shared. I was about to say that it’s impressive that since left-handedness would only reach 100% by the year 2327 and the LGBTQ gets there by 2047, this implies that the acceptance of LGBTQ people is rising much faster than the acceptance for being left-handed did. But this is of course a nonsense conclusion, even if we’re ignoring the bullshit extrapolation that’s going on in both cases. Because it’s looking at the rise in percentage points, and what we should care about here is the percentage of people in those groups that are (no longer) suppressed from being counted as belonging to those groups. Because both these graphs are really showing both the social acceptance of these groups as well as the real percentage of the population that identify as belonging to these groups. Since left-handedness flattened out and held steady at ~11.5% of the population, this only means that the “real” rate of left-handedness is likely at least 11.5%. (After all, there is somehow still some suppression of letting kids being left-handed going on in the world.) But while the social shift in acceptance of LGBTQ people in the USA has been impressive for the past 10 years, if the “real” rate of LGBTQ folks is higher than 11.5%, then that graph would reach 100% quicker even if the increase in acceptance was (hypothetically) the same as that seen for left-handedness in the middle of the century.

But yeah, this is assuming linear growth of percentage points. Or, wait, that’s at least what I assumed for the left-handedness graph. I just realize I didn’t double-check the calculations of the twitter account “Universal Life Church”. That should clearly be done. OK, so their tweet made the 19th of February of 2022. I’m going to round that down to “2022″. Per their tweet 7.1% of Americans identify as LGBTQ by then. So to reach 100% there would need to be an increase of 92.9 percentage points. 2047 was 25 years in the future from 2022, so again, assuming a linear growth rate of percentage points, we’d need a growth of 92.9/25 =  3.716 percentage points per year. Hang on, 2 * 3.716 > 7.1, so they can’t even have been looking at the data from the past two years for this to make sense, otherwise less than 0% would have identified as LGBTQ two years before? What gives? I’ve googled a bit and I’m pretty sure I’ve found the data reported. The chart below was found here: https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20220216-out-chart/ so the date in the URL matches the date of the tweet, and the source is listed as Gallup.

The linked graph lets you hover to also see the numbers, and they are: 2012: 3.5% 2013: 3.6% 2014:  3.7% 2015: 3.9% 2016: 4.1% 2017: 4.5% [there seems to be a gap in data for 2018 and 2019?] 2020: 5.6% 2021: 7.1% OK, so are they just extrapolating for the growth from 2020 to 2021?? That would be a +1.5 points in a year, so by 2047 we’d get: 2047-2021 = 26 years. With a 1.5 point increase per year would give us 7.1 + (1.5 * 26) = 46.1% of Americans identifying as LGBTQ by 2047. So, unless something has gone very wrong 46.1% is not 100%. So I think we can safely assume that this isn’t a linear growth rate being assumed in the tweet. Or they just can’t do basic calculations. But it of course doesn’t have to be a linear growth, in fact the graph of that decade doesn’t look linear at all. So what other clues to their methodology can we find in the tweet? They say the percentage has doubled over the past 10 years. From 3.5% to 7.1% is indeed roughly a doubling. But from 2012 to 2021 is 9 years, not 10, so this is rounding in favor of the straights surviving longer in both cases. But lets start out by ignoring that rounding and see if the numbers now work out. How many time do we have to double 7.1 to get to 100? I’ve studied enough calculus to know that this is a situation where I’d need calculus to get the exact answer. But it’s also been long enough since I studied calculus that I don’t remember how to do it. But this is napkin math at best anyways, so we can just try plugging in values and see what fits the equation of 7.1 * (2^x) = 100. That is, “x is the number of times we have to double 7.1 to get 100″. Just plugging in some values for x gives us that: 7.1 * (2^3) = 56.8 7.1 * (2^4) = 113.6 So x must be between 3 and 4. A further binary search shows that x = 7.1 * (2^3.81604) = 100.000196497, so x ≈ 3.81604. So we need 3.81604 decades of doubling after 2021 to reach full queer saturation.  (3.81604 * 10) + 2021 = 2059.1604 ≈ 2059. OK, so that still missed their result of 2047, but at least it’s closer. So perhaps they didn’t round in their calculations. If we don’t round 9 years to 10 year that’s (3.81604 * 9) + 2021 =  2055.34436  ≈ 2055, so still not a quick enough growth. So am I going to have to go back and look at that rounding of 3.5 to 7.1 being “about a doubling” as well? Well crap, I guess I will, because now I really want to know if someone at that church church really did calculus to calculate a conclusion that’s still so obviously wrong! OK, so this time let’s look at what yearly (exponential) growth rate gets 3.5 to 7.1 in 9 years. Ie, 3.5 * x^9 = 7.1 Duh, I just remembered that I can of course just plug this equation into Wolfram Alpha. That’s what I should have done above as well! It gives me that x ≈  1.08176, meaning that the USA was getting 8.176% more LGBTQ per year from 2012 to 2021. So, if the current trend holds, and we add in the 26 years of queerification from 2021 until 2047 and get the gayness predicted for 2047 by this bullshit model and we get: 7.1 * 1.08176^26 ≈ 54.785%

So something’s gone wrong here as well. Because 7.1*1.08176^x=100 gives x= 33.6569. With the LGBTQ growth rate 1.08176 that the graph from the Gallup poll shows, and again, if the current trend holds, we wouldn’t reach the 100% LGBTQ utopia until the middle of 2054.

So yeah, not only is the extrapolation in that tweet insane to start with, it also hasn’t done the math correctly when it extrapolated. Or if it has, they have either cherry-picked what years they’ve looked at or somehow assumed some growth rate that’s neither linear nor exponential.  So yeah if you’ve read this far, here’s another xkcd strip relevant to what just happened to me:

That's not how demographics work.

[unnonexistence]

kicking my feet and giggling thinking about vector spaces

[buridans-darkace]

How did Cyclonia become the empire that we know today? 👁👁

The history is a lot more elaborate than that, but there's the condensed version. I'm glad at least someone is willing to pay attention to it.

((Dagr is an OC belonging to @ashe-alter :3 thanks Grimm for letting me include him in this AU, enjoy the surprise cameo.

[here-be-a-dragon]

Nobody warned me how difficult it would be to work in an industry that is cool as shit and have to pretend to be very chill and cool about it or else be judged by your coworkers

[charyou-tree]

I just got followed by what I thought at first was a pornbot, blank bio, default icon, only made today. However when I looked more closely they actually appear to run an Etsy store selling opals.

… I’ll allow it