The Glade 4.0

By and large, I don't find calculus difficult. This one problem, though... Maybe it's just a weird mental block on my part, but I found it particularly brutal to solve.

It's a fairly unassuming looking problem:


Should just be some trivial u-substitution, right?

Ahahahahaha. NO.



FML

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Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

du = 3dx

You have du = 3xdx which is incorrect.

That is actually a fairly simple u-substitution, solvable by first semester calc I students.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I have to confess that while I could have solved that problem when I was taking calculus, it's now far too long in the past.

That said.. is there a joke I'm missing with the holy balls thing, or is it just a problem giving you fits?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yup, same for me. I haven't had to use calc in a long, long, long time. 'bout all I have to do these days are means and %diff. Our software does almost everything else.

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That's just a typo from transcribing my pencil-and-paper work to my tablet. The extraneous x immediately evaporates to (correctly): (1/3)du = dx, and the rest of problem proceeds correctly from that. I think you know that.


Oh, well excuse me for finding one particular first semester calculus problems to be somewhat tedious and difficult. I guess I'm just a drooling moron.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Raise your hand if anything about this post surprises you.

Math is Coro's singular specialty, so his posts about it can come off with an extra hint of douche.

I also tend to hold Stathol to a higher standard than I have for the rest of you.

With all the nitpicking of minor details in one another's posts that goes on here, I find it interesting that pointing out an error in Stathol's work constitutes some unpardonable sin simply because he's claimed he had a difficult math problem. The hypocrisy is rather blatant and as a result, those of you who are not Stathol can promptly go **** yourselves.

Now, for those of you who are Stathol, you do deserve a more detailed response.

You have a strong programming background, and as a result I suspect that you are enrolled in college courses to pursue it further. This means that calculus will not be a terminal course for you. You surely have enough programming experience to know the devil is in the details, and that a minor mistake like this can and will cause everything else to fall apart. This is an error. You can dress it up however you want, justify it however you want, and very likely you can get a professor to buy into it, but you made an error.

There are two ways I can look at this. The first is that you have a minor boner in your first few lines. The hand wrote something it wasn't supposed to, and the brain corrected for it. The second is that the entirety of your work is inconsistent with the derivative of your u-substitution. That error is not reflected in later work. This raises questions as to whether I'm actually looking at your work. In short: You botched a simple derivative, so where did the rest of this come from? I'm looking at a red flag that this came from Cramster, Chegg, a solutions manual, or someplace other than your brain. Does this one little mistake mean you're cheating? Not necessarily. There is a perfectly plausible alternate explanation. But I'm paying more attention, now.

With regards to your final complaint: Bullshit. I will grant you that you understand how to work that out. I'm sure the error was a brain fart. Now that I've made that concession, you have this locked down by your fifth line. It is a simple u-substitution. You know that, and you've demonstrated that. This problem is difficult for someone less intelligent and less capable than you. It's peanuts for you. I don't believe for a minute that you struggled with this.

I believe it was tedious. I believe it was a lot of work. I believe you got part-way through grinding out the arithematic and thought, "**** this! I don't want to do this ****!" I do not believe you struggled. You knew exactly what to do.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

All I'm saying is that with a name like Stat-hole, you better start getting better at math or else change your name.

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The Dude abides.

I think the pertinent point of Coro's post is that the calculus "part" of this problem wasn't particularly difficult.

The algebra and arithmetic that followed was more painful.

My algebra background starting college was much less than it should have been- it was not intuitive to me. And personally, I found it a struggle through everything since. It wasn't that I couldn't get it, it's that I do it so infrequently that I have to go back and re-learn a ton of stuff every time I do, because it was never second nature to me.

And then I ran into Russian theoretical physicists in graduate school, that assumed we'd been doing multivariable calculus since grade school, and that we should be able to do any variation of it that they could in our heads. It was interesting.

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Yeah I could have done that easily when I was still majoring in astrophysics. I'd have to grab a book at home to do that nowadays.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

So, is Stathol's answer correct?

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So there isn't actually a "holy balls" joke going on here?

Also, common sense should tell you, Coro, that its the "solveable by 1st semester calc students" bit, not the pointing out the error that people are taking exception to.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

When Stathol said it was a "particularly brutal" calculus problem, I expected the solution to be at least 5x longer than it was. Honestly, it looks pretty standard for calculus problems. Maybe if it was on a test and you weren't allowed to use a calculator, then I'd say the arithmetic is a bit tedious/annoying. If it was a homework problem, then I think you wrote down too many steps. Plug that **** into your calculator.

That said, calculus blows, and isn't fun to do in general. So rant away...

Hmm, I thought Coro was being helpful. it didn't come off as dbish to me at all.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I agree with Corolinth. It seems like a typical problem I used to have in my high school homework. I don't see what is particularly challenging about it.