Taught in Florida. It was an alligator.
…and it was real. It ate all of our numbers and 1 kid.
“How do you know if someone is doing a phd in physics?”
Ehh
- They tend to get the sign wrong, or straight up not know it and end every sentence with “or the other way around”
- their room is a mess
- they have a soldering iron and a box full of Arduinos/Rasberry Pis/ESPs
- they have weird hobbies, (or none, because their work is sufficiently shaped like weird hobbies/obsessions)
- they regularly say “local minimum” and “higher order effects”
What did I forget?
I see nothing wrong with this.
What the bird beak pecks is meek.
I’m a mechanical engineer, and I often have to do a double thumbs up with my hands like b_d. It’s the only way I can remember what comes first in the alphabet. In danish you spell boat båd, and if you mess up the order the b and d will be on the outside of the boat and drown, like dåb. Still works 20 years later
I still have to mentally sing the alphabet song to double check I got the order right.
Am librarian and can confirm: we all do this. It mostly comes up when shelving or retrieving books.
Do you have dyslexia or something like that by chance? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who gets confused between b and d. (No offense, I’m just intrigued)
I don’t have dyslexia. But I did only learn how to read and write in 5th grade.
The version I got taught was gobbledy monster!
Duck!
According the old joke, and with no offence to scholars, the answer is :
“They’ll fucking tell you”
The teacher who first taught me told me “Pac Man wants to get the most points” and that stuck with me
Thanks I finally understood this thread, kept thinking people were viewing the crocodile/duck/whatever from above
Indicative of the fact this approach is counterintuitive to our thinking, but we’re too stupid to adopt a new way to show it.
It’s not. This is schools failing worldwide to teach math in an adequate form.
< is part of a K. The K stands for Kleiner which means smaller in German/Dutch
< is a collapsed L which could be a shortened to “Less than”.
…Not that I’ve ever used this, I always picture a crocodile.
It’s a thing that I’ve always thought that people over-complicate. It’s just there, the small side with the small number the big side with the big number…
Whoever my first teacher who taught me this did over complicate it, because when I wrapped my brain around bigger side equals bigger number and smaller side equals smaller (much later than I should have) it was a revelation and also seemed ridiculous it didn’t start out that simple.
“It’s always pointing to the smaller number” is what my elementary teacher said 2<3
For a while, I’ve seen “<” and “>” as a slanted “=”, which is to say, these numbers are not equal, and the larger side is the larger number and the smaller side is the smaller number.
Works for me, IDK.
But shouldn’t it be 8 < 1 because the eight is heavier and squeezes the bars of the = together?
But shouldn’t it be 8 < 1
That would be a pair of scissors, on its way to cut the number 1.
I’m with you, the croc is an opportunist and will eat the smaller, easier prey.
No, since it’s bigger it stretches the lines apart :)
I agree. It’s totally simple and people overcomplicate.
BTW one nice thing about German is, that you can even use the same logic for Boolean operators: The AND operator ∧ is called UND being the shorter word (when you put the name at the top). The OR operator ∨ is called ODER being the longer word.
You can use the same logic in English if you Place AND/OR at the bottom instead 😁
I always remember those as “knife” and “cup”, but you have to know that I use my cups the wrong way around.
When you have two things AB on a table and you come in with a knife or cup (NB: upside down) from above, the knife will separate them “A or B” while the cup will catch them together like a pair of angry wasps “A and B”.i also think the “etymology” of the boolean symbols is very helpful in remembering which is which. in lattice theory, their use was inspired by similar notation in set theory. so,
A ∨ Bis likeA ∪ B, whileA ∧ Bis likeA ∩ B.generally,
A ∨ Bis “the smallest thing that’s greater than or equal to both A and B”, whileA ∧ Bis “the biggest thing that’s less than or equal to both A and B”. similarly to howA ∪ Bis “the smallest set that contains both A and B”, whileA ∩ Bis “the largest set that’s contained in both A and B”. you can also take things a step further by saying that in the context of sets,A ≤ BmeansA ⊆ B. doing this means thatA ∨ B = A ∪ B, whileA ∧ B = A ∩ B. and from this perspective, the “sharp-edged” symbols (<,∧,∨) are just a generalization of their “curvy” counterparts (⊂,∩,∪).in the context of boolean algebra, you can set
False < True, which at first may seem a bit arbitrary, but it agrees with the convention the thatFalse = 0andTrue = 1, and it also makesA ∨ BandA ∧ Bhave the same meanings as described above.for some reason to remember ∩ and ∪ when I first learned it in school I visualized a mirrored symbol on top. the ∩ looked like a X which represented an intersection, while ∪ looked like an O which represented a whole. for English ∪ already looks like a U which can be thought of as short for union. that would’ve been easier.
ooh the mirror trick is quite handy. i don’t think i’ve heard that one before. i’ll keep that one in my back pocket in case i ever need it some day. i can’t remember exactly how i learned what they meant, but i think it was probably u for union and n for ntersection.
for English the AND sign looks like an A anyway. if you remember that for AND the OR is just the opposite.
Somehow, people don’t teach this interpretation at schools. (Despite it being so obvious that it was clearly the original reasoning behind the symbols.) And then nobody talks about the fact that nobody knows how to read them, forever.
Mine had something about crossing a line through the symbol and seeing if it makes a 4 or a 7. Honestly, “the crocodile wants to eat the big number” is still better than this.
This is only tangentially related but I’ve noticed an increase in people saying backslash instead of slash when speaking an internet address aloud. I think many more people struggle with / vs \ than > vs <.
Just to note, backslash or forward slash refers to the side the slash falls to.
I remember it because I’m old and was into computers before the internet. Local drive was backslash "" as a directory separator and online it was slash “/”.
“The entirety of the small number constitutes a relatively smaller portion of the big number. Thus, the open side of > points to the smaller number to indicate that it’s a magnified view within the larger number.”
I hope this helps overcomplicate things for you. We must all return to crocodile.
Crocodile? Are you guys from Florida? In Europe we learned it as duck beak, it just makes much more sense, where are the teeth? Nowhere it’s not an alligator mouth it’s a beak
A greedy crow is what they told me
Nono, we don’t do math in Florida anymore. Also we’d be more likely to use “alligator” (tho we have plenty of both)
Nah fam, if your bird looks like that it’s probably dead. I also learnt it as the crocodile in Germany
Duck, crocodile, they’re both archosaurs. Which means if it’s either, they should have a premaxillar fenestra on the lower jaw, but I’m not seeing any. Clearly, this must be a possum.
I’m thinking horribly mangled German bank executive with a lisp 🤷
In the pre-digital age when most of this was pencil markings, it was not uncommon to see someone had drawn the teeth in.
Nope, it just sounds odd.
I’ll stick with big side = big number, small side = small number.
Are you a programmer? I’ve never struggled with them either, but I’ve had a lot of exposure to them due to programming since I was like 11
Thinking of an alligator is more fun though.
I don’t think I’ve ever been taught a mnemonic with animals
The small number is on the small side of the symbol, the large number is on the large side, it seems pretty intuitive to me, to be honest.
The Nemo file manager still managed to fuck it up. ‘Triangle pointing down means small filesizes on top, yeah?’
I learned it that way, along with the = sign showing the sides are equal. But by the time I was teaching, we used Pac-Man, drawing the rest of him around the hungry mouth. I still added “another way to look at it is,” and described the spaces:
Big>little same=same little<Big
Because it doesn’t matter how your mind makes the connection, as long as it works for you.
Edit to add:Pac-people are easier to draw than crocodiles
Sooo, does the crocodile face to the left or to the right?
The lines are the crocodiles wide-open mouth… … but yeah, I’m not a fan of this kind of mnemonic. It requires remembering a heap of details, such as which way the crocodile is facing, and does it prefer to attack the larger number or the smaller number - and how the relates to negatives… Which I think is surely more difficult than just remembering that the large end of the wedge is the larger number, and the small edge of the wedge is the smaller number.
That said, having multiple different ways of remembering something is often helpful, particularly when getting started. (I remember having a bunch of different ways to remember which was “left” and which was “right” when I was a child. But now I don’t think about any of those things anymore.)
when you hold your hands with your fingers spread out in front of you the L is on the left
I also have a theoretical degree in physics
You’re theoretically hired!
