Math/Sci/Pol/tech nerd and gardener.

Also @ksquared

Last Notes

So, I teach high school math and we use numworks graphing calculators. They've been excellent! However, I recently ran across an issue that shows you can't always trust what your calculator says.
Suppose you want to take the cube root of negative 230. You should get approximately -6.127. It is perfectly fine to take the cube root of a negative number and get a real result. However, if the calculator is in Complex/Cartesian mode for displaying complex numbers, you get approximately 3.063+0.306i. Simply moving the negative sign outside of the radical sign (again, this is just fine to do in high school), you get the correct answer as shown below.
I wonder what causes this?
#math #HighSchool #teaching #calculator #numworks #radicals
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/116/128/080/167/701/161/original/f78d8cfaa1177b0e.png

2025-11-25 20:28:50 UTC

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@nprofile…ud6j Are you no longer offering the Thelio Spark models? They seem to have disappeared on the website.

2025-01-29 17:00:06 UTC

ChatGPT vs Deepseek? A pox on both their houses!
#ai #GenAI #llm

2024-11-16 02:12:58 UTC

I'm all in on Mastodon, but has there been any progress/update on interoperability between us and Bluesky? I don't plan on going there, but I do have a few people I know IRL that post there, which I see through my RSS reader.

2024-11-09 02:17:55 UTC

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@npub1dts…6798 Not surprised. We deserve this. Whatever sense of patriotism that I had went out the window this week. We knew better. I just hope that the rest of the sane world doesn't shun those of us over here who still fight the good fight.