• sheldon (unregistered) in reply to shimon
    shimon:
    That depends. Anyway, can you tell what the actual question to this answer was?
    One of the best comments ever.
  • your name (unregistered) in reply to shimon
    shimon:
    "I mean, it's freaking 42 of all numbers - how could it NOT be correct??."

    That depends. Anyway, can you tell what the actual question to this answer was?

    Yes the actual question was

  • eric76 (unregistered) in reply to LB
    LB:
    Yeah, I remember that. It was really annoying to people good at math. Of course, it made sense on really long complex equations, but my teacher wanted us to show our work for every question, even the simple ones. It was a little like being asked what 1 + 1 is, but being told that 2 isn't a good enough answer. Simple calculus equations were the same way. I'd look at the question, and the answer would be obvious. There was no work to show. Eventually, I figured out that just scribbling some random numbers and letters followed by the right answer would get me full points for the question. Apparently, my teacher wasn't actually checking the work we showed, just that there was something there and that it ended with the right answer.
    Many years ago when I was in grad school, we had a take-home final for a course in Calculus of Variations. It was given out on a Friday and due the following Monday.

    There was an SCCA car race that weekend so I took it with me to work on it in the scoring tower between races. That day in the scoring tower, I was sitting next to a high school math teacher who kept looking over my shoulder but never said a word until I did something that really surprised her.

    On one problem, I made an error early on and ended up after many pages of work with a horrendus equation that took about half a page to write it down with all possible terms combined. Knowing I would never solve it and there must be something wrong, I wrote down something like "The solution of the above equation is left as an exercise to the reader." She just about had a fit over that.

    I had meant to go back and redo that problem, but forgot to do it so it got turned in just like that. Apparently the prof agreed because I made an 'A' on the exam and the course.

  • (cs) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    LB:
    Yeah, I remember that. It was really annoying to people good at math. Of course, it made sense on really long complex equations, but my teacher wanted us to show our work for every question, even the simple ones. It was a little like being asked what 1 + 1 is, but being told that 2 isn't a good enough answer. Simple calculus equations were the same way. I'd look at the question, and the answer would be obvious. There was no work to show. Eventually, I figured out that just scribbling some random numbers and letters followed by the right answer would get me full points for the question. Apparently, my teacher wasn't actually checking the work we showed, just that there was something there and that it ended with the right answer.
    Many years ago when I was in grad school, we had a take-home final for a course in Calculus of Variations. It was given out on a Friday and due the following Monday.

    There was an SCCA car race that weekend so I took it with me to work on it in the scoring tower between races. That day in the scoring tower, I was sitting next to a high school math teacher who kept looking over my shoulder but never said a word until I did something that really surprised her.

    On one problem, I made an error early on and ended up after many pages of work with a horrendus equation that took about half a page to write it down with all possible terms combined. Knowing I would never solve it and there must be something wrong, I wrote down something like "The solution of the above equation is left as an exercise to the reader." She just about had a fit over that.

    I had meant to go back and redo that problem, but forgot to do it so it got turned in just like that. Apparently the prof agreed because I made an 'A' on the exam and the course.

    That's fair enough in an upper-level math class. You should already understand "mathematical rigor". My thesis advisor pretty much told us, "Work on each of the problems until you are satisfied. I already know the answer."

    Of course, the problem in your case was that your error lead to a wrong (and worse yet, bad) representation of the problem. This makes it harder to thread the correct parts of the argument through. It's still possible, and your prof probably just glazed over during the mistake part, and read the rest of the argument based on the "join principle". (A function is a many-to-one join of types)

    This notion of "threading an argument through a construct" is my biggest problem with modern programming practice. Choosing the wrong normal form for computation means having to "thread" an argument through inappropriate constructs. For example, there is absolutely no need to use a factory pattern in a language with functors ("map" functions over arbitrary containers). And you shouldn't even want to. All that boilerplate has to be maintained.

  • Stan (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Really? A good portion of the answers when I took calculus were 0, with a close second being 1; of course, the textbooks would usually give problems which ended with "nice" numbers like that.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    It's been awhile since I took calculus, but I can't remember any problems that the answer was a single integer.

    f(x) = 42x what's f'(x)?

  • John Muller (unregistered) in reply to Valczir

    It dosn't, it's the Notification Area.

    And it can be used to notify the user that a process has exited, a process exiting deleting the notification that a process exited would be a real WTF.

  • Known Unartist (unregistered)
  • 0b1 (unregistered)

    This is not the survey you are looking for

  • undefined (unregistered)

    I think that Windows 7 is the best OS over because of ability of Microsoft programmers to think about such things.

  • Xythar (unregistered)

    Oh hey there DirectVobSub. I've had the same thing happen to me after watching a bunch of videos, although not quite as many icons as that.

  • (cs)

    TRWTF:

    [image]

    (Yes, it's an image. Clicking it will not accomplish anything. Yes, it's really a trackback URL on this article...)

  • Ol' Bob (unregistered)

    Look - 42 is the answer - to the big questions - about Life, the Universe, and Everything..? Of course it can't be an answer to a simple calculus problem!

    Ol' "...as simple as you wanna be..." Bob

  • (cs)

    He'll feel stupid when he's returning his Roku music player for the 653rd time in two years.

  • Wgren (unregistered)

    Hopefully that plane has paradox-absorbing bumpers, or they are going to be in trouble.

  • (cs) in reply to frits
    frits:
    It's been awhile since I took calculus, but I can't remember any problems that the answer was a single integer.

    hey baby, wanna integral from 10 to 13 of 2xdx?

  • Biff (unregistered)

    Am i the only one who would click "disagree" there?

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