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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzCalculatable
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    11 days ago

    For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.








  • “Luz” is an incredibly common name in Spanish speaking countries. It means light. “Luce” means light in Italian, but seems to be less common as a name. Lucifer means “Light-bringer”, and the myth of the light-bringer is much, much older than Christianity.

    Old religions thought things in the sky were gods. Venus orbits closer to the sun than the Earth, which means light reflecting from it is extremely bright, but that light is only visible near sunrise and sunset. During the rest of the day the brightness of the sun overwhelms the reflected light from Venus, and during the rest of the night it’s not visible because it’s near the sun, so it’s behind the earth. So, old religions talked about the brightest “god” in the sky, who disappeared when it got too bright or too dark. That led to the myth of the god who tried to be the brightest light and was cast down. That, of course, led to Satan, A.K.A. Lucifer.

    I guess the Catholic church was giving its followers too much credit in their understanding of words.





  • It’s pretty interesting how “concentration camp” used to just mean “a camp where people were grouped together”. It wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but in many cases it was effectively a relatively nice prison. Then, it became a euphemism for an extermination camp. The Nazis pretended they were just grouping people together in a camp, when in reality the aim was to kill everyone there. That euphemism tainted the original meaning, so now when people hear “concentration camp” they think of the Nazi extermination camps.

    Technically, Guantanamo Bay probably qualifies as a concentration camp, but I bet they are very careful not to ever use that term.