Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
... and exempted poor families from paying for them.
Yep. Because they'd be unavailable.
Right.
Good point. It's certainly possible they'd be better at provisioning calculators than food or toilet paper.
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@Vixen said in In other news today...:
Wake me up when the fire department's been by to put the flames out, okay?
We called them, but the
got into a crash with a certain electric car 
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).I think the real driver of calculator homogeny is standardized tests. The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x, everyone recognizes them, and you have a guarantee you have the right thing. A teacher doesn't have to check the website and compare serial numbers to know an 82 is going to be fine on the SAT, because the SAT will never ban the 82, because everyone owns an 82.
The prospect of additional stress or even incorrect confiscation that would torpedo your SAT is horrifying. Parents would pay 30$ for that peace of mind. Imagine: 'well casio's are allowed, but the proctors will probably confiscate it and google around for the official guidelines for a while because they've never seen one before' vs 'TI-82 will be fine, I can guarantee it'
. Not to mention that guarantee lasts five or ten years, which the calculators also do. I last used my 2005-vintage 84 probably five years ago? So they last a long time, and you can have confidence they'll still be permitted on the ACT in four years and the GRE in 8.
In other places where standardized testing isn't so incredibly important, it's probably much easier to break into that market because that fear isn't there.
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@AyGeePlus said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).I think the real driver of calculator homogeny is standardized tests. The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x, everyone recognizes them, and you have a guarantee you have the right thing. A teacher doesn't have to check the website and compare serial numbers to know an 82 is going to be fine on the SAT, because the SAT will never ban the 82, because everyone owns an 82.
The prospect of additional stress or even incorrect confiscation that would torpedo your SAT is horrifying. Parents would pay 30$ for that peace of mind. Imagine: 'well casio's are allowed, but the proctors will probably confiscate it and google around for the official guidelines for a while because they've never seen one before' vs 'TI-82 will be fine, I can guarantee it'
. Not to mention that guarantee lasts five or ten years, which the calculators also do. I last used my 2005-vintage 84 probably five years ago? So they last a long time, and you can have confidence they'll still be permitted on the ACT in four years and the GRE in 8.
In other places where standardized testing isn't so incredibly important, it's probably much easier to break into that market because that fear isn't there.
Back when I went to the high school kind-of-equivalent level of education, the calculators we we're allowed on tests were programmable with some god awful BASIC. Me being myself actually wrote a program that could solve equations and show all the steps.
I obviously had to actually learn the math to do it, and the program was in all probability utter shit and incredibly simplistic... But I didn't have to think during the exams.
My brother got the calculator from me. I don't remember if it still had the math solver, or one of the silly games I wrote when he got it though... But considering he failed all his math courses, probably a game.
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
Back when I went to the high school kind-of-equivalent level of education, the calculators we we're allowed on tests were programmable with some god awful BASIC. Me being myself actually wrote a program that could solve equations and show all the steps.
Ah, writing programs in TI-BASIC, what a way to spend a math class.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
Back when I went to the high school kind-of-equivalent level of education, the calculators we we're allowed on tests were programmable with some god awful BASIC. Me being myself actually wrote a program that could solve equations and show all the steps.
Ah, writing programs in TI-BASIC, what a way to spend a math class.
Well, otherwise I would have had to do math! Can't have that happening!
Teenage me was a quite brilliant idiot.
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Can we please jeff the calculator wars to their own thread?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
Can we please jeff the calculator wars to their own thread?
I poked the mods, but you know....
Filed under: One of these days I'll find out I was a mod all along!
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
(I would have assumed that "approved" meant that it has the "features of TI devices" to which the "curriculum is so tailored", but then again no one seems to know what those features are, nor whether they even exist...)
Yes, I think you need to get the features thing out of your head. It's more about, "This calculator has a slightly different button or menu layout to use that feature and I don't know how to do it on that one so you'll get no teacher support."
This.
My high-school math teacher said in the first math class:
"OK. You're going to need calculators. We're organizing a group purchase of this one Casio model, because
a) I've got one,
b) it's approved for your standardized test at the end of high-school,
c) I've got the overhead projection add-on for it, and
d) Casio actually deigned to offer us group-buy rates some years ago, and they still honor them. Oh, and
e) one of the math courses available is Calculator Usage 101, which also teaches this model, and this model only.
Because I don't know how the others work. You're free to use whatever you like, of course, as long it's in the list of models approved for the finals. But I seriously recommend the one offered now."In my math classes, there were probably 2 students that didn't take the offer. One of them had an older Casio, but almost identical. One had a TI. The older Casio actually had games on it. I was slightly envious of that.
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When I went to high school, no calculators were allowed. During regular classes or exams.
I see we dodged a monopoly problem.
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@AyGeePlus said in In other news today...:
The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x
What's the point of a math test that permits calculators in the first place anyway? Tests are supposed to test that the students understand the topic, not that they can manipulate buttons, and that can be done with only pen and paper.
@MrL said in In other news today...:
When I went to high school, no calculators were allowed. During regular classes or exams.
We had them for some classes, but not at the final exam. And when we did have them, it was non-graphical ones only.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@AyGeePlus said in In other news today...:
The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x
What's the point of a math test that permits calculators in the first place anyway? Tests are supposed to test that the students understand the topic
That's why you're allowed to use calculators. They test your understanding of math, not how well you perform simple arithmetic. If you don't understand anything, the calculator won't help you.
And you can't make every single thing have integer results and use the, like, 4 angles for which you know the symbolic expression of sin/cos/tan.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
And you can't make every single thing have integer results and use the, like, 4 angles for which you know the symbolic expression of sin/cos/tan.
Trig tables.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
And you can't make every single thing have integer results and use the, like, 4 angles for which you know the symbolic expression of sin/cos/tan.
Trig tables.
Or, you know, just use a calculator. That also helps to not have to carry out stupid arithmetic when you end up with unwieldy numbers from your trig tables, so you can focus on actually solving the problem.
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@MrL
jesus ... what are you doing? trying to land a man on the moon or something?
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@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
@MrL
jesus ... what are you doing? trying to land a man on the moon or something?Wouldn't he be using a slide rule in that case, rather than a trig table?
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
And you can't make every single thing have integer results and use the, like, 4 angles for which you know the symbolic expression of sin/cos/tan.
Trig tables.
Or, you know, just use a calculator. That also helps to not have to carry out stupid arithmetic when you end up with unwieldy numbers from your trig tables, so you can focus on actually solving the problem.
When you don't use calculators for everything and instead, you know, count yourself, you're proficient with arithmetic and it's not a problem.
@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
@MrL
jesus ... what are you doing? trying to land a man on the moon or something?Trig tables are still used in polish schools if I'm not mistaken. In good ones at least. Which I think is great.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
And you can't make every single thing have integer results and use the, like, 4 angles for which you know the symbolic expression of sin/cos/tan.
That's exactly what we did all university. Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
Where you do want the numbers is physicsābecause there you need to learn to deal with rounding and errorsābut a non-graphical calculator is plenty for that.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Or, you know, just use a calculator. That also helps to not have to carry out stupid arithmetic when you end up with unwieldy numbers from your trig tables, so you can focus on actually solving the problem.
In mathematics (as opposed to physics), the interesting problems generally require exact solution. Which effectively precludes the use of a calculator, because they only give approximate results once you leave the domain of integers. And you should be able to deal with integers yourself.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
If you are arithmetically illiterate, which calculators make you, sure.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
If you are arithmetically illiterate, which calculators make you, sure.
This is one where I half-disagree and half-agree. The number of students/people who can't find the reciprocal value of 2/3 (written as a fraction) is astounding and annoying.
But at the same time, who cares, really? In the end, the bits of arithmetics are the least interesting part of most problems. Random example: product of a 4x4 matrix and a 4-vector? Perfectly doable your head. But at the same time, why waste brainpower on that when you have more interesting problems to solve.
(Reading this post, I guess I think that first learning basic arithmetics by hand and then switching over to calculators is the right way to go. Whether or not that switch happens too early is debatable.)
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
But at the same time, why waste brainpower on that when you have more interesting problems to solve.
Because lazyness and athropy lurks behind convenience.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from
We usually had 24 to choose from, though I don't think we ever used more than three:
Ī±, Ī², Ī³, Ī“, Īµ, Ī¶, Ī·, Īø, Ī¹, Īŗ, Ī», Ī¼, Ī½, Ī¾, Īæ, Ļ, Ļ, Ļ, Ļ, Ļ , Ļ, Ļ, Ļ, and Ļ
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
If you are arithmetically illiterate, which calculators make you, sure.
What other angles (up to symmetry) besides the ones I listed do you know in symbolic form without looking them up? What's sin(4/15Ļ)?
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@cvi said in In other news today...:
But at the same time, why waste brainpower on that when you have more interesting problems to solve.
Because lazyness and athropy lurks behind convenience.
@error_bot !xkcd real programmers
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
The number of students/people who can't find the reciprocal value of 2/3 (written as a fraction) is astounding and annoying.
Anyone who doesn't get fractions has no chance of understanding percentages. Anyone who doesn't understand percentages is incapable of understanding a wide variety of concepts which are very important in modern life, from taxes and interest rates to economic indicators and statistics.
Also, doing basic arithmetic in your head is essential for getting a quick idea about e. g. the relative magnitudes of numbers, or assessing the plausibility and implications of many news articles etc.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
If you are arithmetically illiterate, which calculators make you, sure.
What other angles (up to symmetry) besides the ones I listed do you know in symbolic form without looking them up? What's sin(4/15Ļ)?
Trig tables.
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
@cvi said in In other news today...:
But at the same time, why waste brainpower on that when you have more interesting problems to solve.
Because lazyness and athropy lurks behind convenience.
@error_bot !xkcd real programmers
ixvedeusi described it very well. You use calculator all the time, because 'solving problems is more important than some stupid counting' and you are content that you can solve them. But the moment you are left without a calculator it turns out that you actually can't.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@AyGeePlus said in In other news today...:
The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x
What's the point of a math test that permits calculators in the first place anyway? Tests are supposed to test that the students understand the topic, not that they can manipulate buttons, and that can be done with only pen and paper.
Counterpoint: Demonstrating that you understand the topic can be done just as well by knowing which buttons to push. Just because you have a calculator doesn't mean you have the necessary mathematical knowledge to use it effectively.
My high school chemistry teacher made this pretty clear to us: the thing that truly matters is understanding the principles of the problem well enough to set up the math correctly. Once you have the equation described properly, you're basically done; actually solving it is, in his words, "just calculator work," with mastery of the problem demonstrated by being able to reach that point.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
If you are arithmetically illiterate, which calculators make you, sure.
What other angles (up to symmetry) besides the ones I listed do you know in symbolic form without looking them up? What's sin(4/15Ļ)?
Trig tables.
I assume those contain numeric values, not symbolic ones.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
But the moment you are left without a calculator it turns out that you actually can't.
I heard that one frequently during university (we weren't allowed calculators in a lot of courses).
I have yet to find somebody pose a reasonable situation where knowing the cosine of 7*pi/4 is useful, and where one cannot get access to a calculator[1]. Not to mention that for most real-life applications, 7*pi/4 radians is a strictly less useful way of saying 7/8ths of a full turn, at which point I probably could figure out a approximate number in a few minutes if I had to.
But, yeah, I guess I would be fucked in the hypothetical situation where my life depended on getting that answer in a blink of an eye.
[1] But ostensibly can get their hands on some trig tables. We weren't allowed those either in the beginning of our studies.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
I heard that one frequently during university (we weren't allowed calculators in a lot of courses).
I have yet to find somebody pose a reasonable situation where knowing the cosine of 7*pi/4 is useful, and where one cannot get access to a calculator[1].In such course, if you get to a point you have cos(7Ļ/4), that should be the expected answer. The skill to punch that into a calculator to get the numeric value is trivial enough that a math test shouldn't be testing it. It should be testing the skill of simplifying whatever complex expression leads to this. And since some calculator may be actually able to do some of the work for you (expression transformations are still mostly mechanical, so they can be done by machine to an extent), it's easier to just avoid them and declare the simplified symbolic expression the sought result.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
I assume those contain numeric values, not symbolic ones.
...yes?
@cvi said in In other news today...:
But, yeah, I guess I would be fucked in the hypothetical situation where my life depended on getting that answer in a blink of an eye.
The point is not to calculate 7*pi/4 in split second, but to be proficient with calculations generally, which has wide application in day to day life.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
have yet to find somebody pose a reasonable situation where knowing the cosine of 7*pi/4 is useful,
I think I must have encountered situations where that could have been useful (and left me frustrated that I can't do it), but that's not the point anyway. The thing is, if you have a calculator, you won't only use it to calculate cos(7/4*pi), but also to calculate 7/4 or 7*8, which are useful much more often. And because you don't have to remember the value of 7/4 any more, you'll purge it from your brain. So doing computations in your head becomes more and more tedious, and you'll do them less and less often, leading into a vicious circle where you end up incapable of doing even the simplest math without a calculator. At that point numbers become virtually meaningless to you because you're incapable of putting them in relation to each other.
And as a side note, I realize it has been said before and met with
, but if there's any bored mods around, a jeffing of this calculator side line would be very much appreciated indeed.E2fix formatting; Yay to the Markdown!
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
In such course, if you get to a point you have cos(7Ļ/4), that should be the expected answer.
Early on, the expected answer was sqrt(2)/2, and leaving it at cos(7*pi/4) would have resulted in a (small) deduction.
Later, people didn't care about specific numbers anyway. You'd maybe plug in some numbers, just to see if your results were reasonable. But that a calculator would do nicely.
@MrL said in In other news today...:
The point is not to calculate 7*pi/4 in split second, but to be proficient with calculations generally, which has wide application in day to day life.
So, where do you draw the line? I don't disagree with your statement in general, but I think we might be drawing our lines in different places.
Actually, I'm not even sure where I would draw mine. I could probably come up with examples on either side (shouldn't need a tool/tool is perfectly reasonable), but there's a pretty large region in between those two.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
So, where do you draw the line? I don't disagree with your statement in general, but I think we might be drawing our lines in different places.
At different places depending on which level of mathematics it is.
First one is learning arithmetic and there the point is being able to do the common calculations in mind or with pen and paper. Which obviously means without a calculator.
While the equations, algebra, analysis etc. are about symbolic calculations, and then either the symbolic result is wanted, and no numbers are involved at all, or the numbers can be simple, because you just need to show you can substitute them in the right places.
It makes sense to learn to use a calculator, but not necessarily an advanced one with graphs. It also makes sense to use it in physics where they make a point that if somebody tells you something has weight 2 kg, you shall round g to 10 m/sĀ², but if it has weight 2.00 kg, you absolutely must use the value 9.81 m/sĀ². But you rarely need trigonometry in physics and definitely shouldn't need plotting in the exam. You should already know the general shapes of the functions and basic arithmetics is enough for most equations.
So the line is at different places depending on the subject, but in all cases so that it avoids needing an advanced calculator.
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In other news, it was proved that people can talk for hours about calculators
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Or, you know, just use a calculator. That also helps to not have to carry out stupid arithmetic when you end up with unwieldy numbers from your trig tables, so you can focus on actually solving the problem.
In mathematics (as opposed to physics), the interesting problems generally require exact solution. Which effectively precludes the use of a calculator, because they only give approximate results once you leave the domain of integers. And you should be able to deal with integers yourself.
The TI-92 (and probably others, but I know this one for sure) is fully capable of returning exact answers for most problems that a student is ever going to throw at it. One of the reasons that a lot of my classes (and the ACT at the time) didn't allow the use of that calculator on the test.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
I assume those contain numeric values, not symbolic ones.
...yes?
Have you actually read the part I was replying to?
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Or we stopped as symbolic reduction like āā ā3ā with small integers and well known constants only.
That's why I said you have only 4 angles to choose from, which significantly reduces the number of problems you can formulate.
Your answer of "trig tables" does not address what I was talking about regarding symbolic values.
Besides, when you do have to deal with numeric approximations like sin(4/15Ļ) = 0.7431448255, that is exactly the point where calculators make sense. There is little use in performing menial arithmetic with that kind of number. Yes, you can do it with pen and paper, but that will take longer and introduce unnecessary sources of error that are besides the point of the lecture. You will spend more time on that, meaning you have less time to do more exercises in general and spend a larger part of exams on things that aren't relevant. With a calculator, more time can be spent on a larger variety of exercises.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
When I went to high school, no calculators were allowed. During regular classes or exams.
This. The teacher said we could use a calculator if everyone in the class had one. A basic 4-function (add, subtract, multiply, divide) calculator cost about $35, which, according to an online inflation calculator, was equivalent to something like $167 today. So not everybody had one.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
you are content that you can solve them.
This really REALLY needs to get Jeffed.
But, it's obvious people are more than content with being unable to solve them, so the point is rather
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@AyGeePlus said in In other news today...:
The SAT and ACT and AP exams permit TI-8x
What's the point of a math test that permits calculators in the first place anyway?
In my day, we had two exams. One prohibited calculators and one required a calculator. They tested different skills in the curriculum, approximately equivalent to having closed- and open-book exams in other subjects.
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@MrL said in In other news today...:
@cvi said in In other news today...:
But at the same time, why waste brainpower on that when you have more interesting problems to solve.
Because lazyness and athropy lurks behind convenience.
I'm not quite sure why you're using a computer then. Off with you and raise some carrier pigeons.
When I was at university, in our classes we had to do the first three problems by hand and, having demonstrated that we were able to solve those, were from then on allowed to use Excel, Maple or whatever else we liked to have a go at the rest.
At some point, insisting on doing everything manually when it doesn't serve an actual purpose save turning people away from math becomes a masturbatory habit by elitists.
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@LaoC said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
What do you think characterizes a monopoly outside a capitalist context?
What do you think characterizes a monopoly inside a capitalist context?
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@boomzilla Capitalism relies on competition to work, because companies are explicitly expected to maximize their profits in any way they can (as long as it's not illegal), and that means charging $100 for a calculator if they can.
Government doesn't, because a (democratic, etc.) government is supposed to have some sort of feedback system and do what the people want it to do, and that means NOT charging $100 for a calculator. So yes, government has monopolies, but that doesn't mean the system has failed like when private entities have them.
In this case however, it seems like the government has directly caused a $100-per-calculator monopoly so that's clearly a case of government not working...
(My point is saying "government sucks because it's a monopoly" is like saying "iPhones suck because they don't have the Google Play Store". They may suck, but that's not a sufficient condition)
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@anonymous234 said in Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?:
(My point is saying "government sucks because it's a monopoly" is like saying "iPhones suck because they don't have the Google Play Store". They may suck, but that's not a sufficient condition)
Uh...OK? That wasn't what I was saying at all, but I also don't agree with this point.
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But what the fuck are American (or even French) schools even doing that require calculators? Back in my day (which is not very long ago) maths classes actually forbade students from using calculators or, if they didn't (usually later on), it was because a calculator, even a scientific one, was basically useless. How is even an advanced scientific calculator going to help when you don't have to simply provide the right answer, but you also have to show how you got there? Where's the need for a calculator when most exercises are designed not to need one (eg. if you need to use a calculator to know that sin Ļ/4 = ā2/2 you're fucked anyway)?
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@admiral_p
I would turn the question around: why wouldn't you use a calculator at school beyond a certain entry level when outside of school situations nobody does calculations by hand.We also used those calculators in other classes besides math, like physics and economics. Think bookkeeping. Even in the 90ties this was mostly done by pc. But there we were learning the basics of bookkeeping on paper like schmucks. Why wouldn't you use a calculator so at least you didn't flunk because you made stupid calculation error while adding VAT.
378: Real Programmers - explain xkcd
