Tag Archives: rant

Rants of Inconsistency

There are just too much of them.

English. Hopefully self-explanatory. Who on earth made irregular verbs and overloaded the words “get”, “set”, “make”, “put”, and several others to the ridiculous point of 50 meanings. On a tangential note, who made the lack of singular unknown-gender pronoun. (Or is it “it” for humans of unknown gender?) Oh wait, there’s also this stupid genders of words. As in “player” is usually female (I think; if false, just change accordingly), so if you call “That player is so smart that [pronoun] won ten times in a row”, you’re supposed to use “she”.

Time. Also hopefully self-explanatory. 365 days aren’t supposed to be divided to 12 months, and leap seconds and 29 February shouldn’t exist at all. If I’m used to it, I might say that today is 2014-269. (Year 2014 day 269; remember that I remove leap days so this is 488 days after 26 May. If I do my computations correctly.) Also, to a lesser extent, the number of hours in a day and the number of minutes in an hour should be equal, so that computing times is as easy as handling a large base for your numbers.

I may edit this later. Meanwhile, I need to have some decent sleep soon for a test for a scholarship tomorrow in Jakarta, and I should get up at 2. In the morning. Derp.

On another very unrelated note, no one has found the sunken treasure yet. Added a hint.

Time Limit

Well, apparently 15 minutes is not enough to complete the practical exam of measuring the acceleration caused by gravity by measuring the period of a pendulum.

Reasons:
– I forgot (read: didn’t think) to bring my calculator. Not that I have one anyway. The reason: I think the calculations are not going to be insane. I WAS WRONG. g = \dfrac{4\pi^2 l}{T^2} is hard to compute. Especially since I’m also asked to compute the frequency f = \dfrac{1}{T} although I very well won’t need it. (Eventually I changed so I compute g = (2\pi f)^2 l.)
– The stopwatch worked only 50% of the time. Imagine working alone, fixating your view to the swinging pendulum, just to find out that the stopwatch didn’t start. 30 seconds wasted.
– Delicate handwork. I took like 3 minutes to tie the nylon string that is weighed to the pivot. Double that, as I need to do the experiment twice with different nylon lengths.
– Stupid misguiding. When you’re told “10 minutes”, you think that there is 10 minutes left. Not too long after that (about 3 minutes), while I was still doing the experiment accurately (but hence slowly), I was told “1.5 minutes left”. Imagine my immediate panic.

Must play more time management games, not rhythm games.

End of World

It’s like this:

stream = open(“World.txt”);
isEOF(stream) {
output “End of World(.txt)”;
}

Seriously though. I’m absolutely sure the world won’t end…I think I should say the world didn’t end. The winter solstice is said to be a minute ago since this post (18.12 UTC+7, 06.12 AM EST), so if you happen to read this post, the prediction has been refuted successfully.

In a very unrelated context, someone wants to draw some sketches to be included in the story-like puzzle pack? I can’t pay though, so only accept this if you’re really bored without any work-in-progresses and you decide to go to a random puzzler’s blog.

Syllogism

A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one conclusion is inferred from two or more premises of a specific form. — Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia (and propositional calculus), all the following are invalid inferences.

All humans are mammals.
No cats are humans.
Hence, no cats are mammals.
(AEE-1)

Some humans are not male.
All fathers of humans are humans.
Hence, all fathers of humans are not male.
(OAE-1)

No humans are reptiles.
No cats are humans.
Hence, all cats are reptiles.
(OOA-1)

A few other resources agree with this.

However, introducing my Indonesian teacher. He believes that all of the above three syllogisms are valid (but wrong), while propositional calculus states that the above three are invalid.

Also, here’s another:
All Indonesians are humans.
All humans are mammals.
Hence, some mammals are Indonesians, given that the set of Indonesians is not empty.
(AAI-4)

Propositional calculus agrees that it’s valid, but my teacher basically rejects everything not in Format 1 (major MP, minor SM, conclusion SP).

I never know that the concept of syllogism is heavily different between Indonesian and math. English and math both agree on the given concept of syllogism as in Wikipedia, right? I’m pretty sure all other languages do the same (at least Greek does). Why Indonesian has an insane syllogism rules is beyond my comprehension. Or maybe not Indonesian, but this Indonesian teacher; after all, all Indonesian sources I’ve read also state the same thing, only my teacher differs.

Sooner or later I might as well ditch Indonesian language. Seriously. Either it’s illogical or my teacher is illogical.