Now THAT’s police-work I can support: SERVE and protect. I like it. Thank you, officer(s).
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Most of this wouldn’t have been necessary if we taught math using prefix/Polish notation.
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The vast majority of cops are awesome, the problem is that they’re screened for performing well in a “structured” environment, so when the bad apples go haywire the good guys just keep following orders, which in most politically-charged situations amount to “duck and cover and pretend like everything’s okay” because that’s the best the PR flacks can come up with on short notice. (Which is then the de-facto position statement “because structure” and it’s shitles all the way up.)
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Agreed.
So what.
Do the right thing.
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Abso-tootin-ly, no argument there!
And I do think it’s changing slowly as the good guys realize it ultimately only hurts them.
But damn is it slow!
Agreed.
Everything starts within me/us/them. I/We initiate everything.
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You don’t have to be “not smart” to not know the order of operations. I’'m sure there are smart people all over the world who, like most people, have simply never had to use the formulas kids are forced to temporarily memorize in school.
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Wasn’t temporary for me.
Math is important. And order of operations is fundamental if you want to plan anything using math.
Besides, that was a dig at cops specifically. And it’s actually a fact that PDs have an intelligence threshold they won’t hire above so it’s easier for them to get away with corruption.
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It’s ambiguous in the sense that PEMDAS (or “Pity Poor My Dear Aunt Sally” as i learned it) is somewhat arbitrary. But it is now the standard order of operations.
Edited to add:
And it’s still slightly problematic as most people don’t realize that the order of multiplication vs. division and addition vs. subtraction doesn’t matter. By which i mean that i think that the memorization of order in this sort of form has the effect of making learners forget that division is a type of multiplication and subtraction is a type of addition, leading to an incomplete understanding (or grokking, really) of arithmetic.
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Order of operations OR full use of brackets.
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You’re not most people, then.
We agree on this. It’s essential.
You can run a successful business, create a retirement plan or yearly budget, or build any number of simple things, all without using order of operations. Like most of algebra, it’s simply not a thing that most people use, otherwise most people would know how to use it.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not useful or even beautiful, but the argument that all kids will need it is faith-based and demonstrably untrue.
It’s true that some departments have that threshold, and that others don’t. I am a staunch critic of the police and policing policies and I know that corruption runs deep, but there’s no evidence that the departments shown to have intelligence thresholds do so to perpetuate corruption.
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Not to mention that as long as you do it wrong consistently, and aren’t trying to convey it to somebody who does it correctly, you’ll tend to be fine anyway as you’ll either structure your formulae to accomodate or the errors will cancel out. (Or you use a spreadsheet app of some sort like the rest of the civilized world and then who gives a flying f…)
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This story just goes to show you need to call the right people to solve a problem. If you would like to have your mentally ill relative or your dog killed, call the police. If you need to solve a math problem, call an engineer or an accountant. Or Microsoft Excel.
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From a purely efficiency-based point of view, your comment is true. However the aim here might be to teach and drill the order of basic operations (which, considering the officer’s mistake, seems sorely needed).
Of course the “left to right” part of the “orders of operations” rules only matters for non-communitive operations like - or ÷ . So 6 - 3 - 2 = 1, not 5. And 8 ÷ 2 ÷ 2 = 2, not 8.
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The correct construction of Excel formulas requires either a knowledge of order of operations or the promiscuous use of parentheses. In my experience, the latter is distressingly common.
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Excel uses its own order of operations.
For example, Microsoft Office Excel evaluates a^b^c as (a^b)^c, which is opposite of normally accepted convention of top-down order of execution for exponentiation. 4^3^2 is evaluated to 4096 in Microsoft Excel 2013, the same as (4^3)^2. The expression 4^(3^2), on the other hand, results in 262144 using the same program
That might explain the brackets/parentheses.
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I’m sometimes tempted to simply draw the expressions as a tree so that you can read off pre-/post-/in-fix notation as the pre-/post-/in-order traversal. Sort of like sentence diagrams used to be taught.
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I’d forgotten about that.
Nonetheless, my comment stands, even in the absence of exponentiation.
When you combine that with multiple nested IF()s, with AND()s, OR()s and VLOOKUP()s added for seasoning, the resulting blatter of brackets makes Lisp code look like a paragon of readability.
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