I Had A Random Thought...

[Twig]

When something is intuitively true like that I don't really understand the point of proofs. ):

[eot]

Part of the point of the proof is to gain some insight into why it's true.

[tberton]

Hmmm, still thinking about it, eot.

 

Also, Twig, part of the point is that there are some things in math that seem to be intuitively true, but aren't actually true if you cahnge certain assumptions. Non-Euclidean geometries, for instance, come out of that. Or i.

 

EDIT: Hmm, okay, I looked up the proofs and even though Wikipedia math articles are the worst, I think I get it. It would be easier if I saw somebody draw it out though - I have a tough time visualizing geometry from textual explanations.

[syntheticgerbil]

It's interesting, a lot of people in the US are also getting fed up with tipping, there have been several restaurants that I have heard of doing away with it, and instead paying their employees a living wage.  Like all big changes, I think it's going to take a while before it will be very different, mostly just a few here or there.  The problem that I have always seen is that there is such a huge gap in education between regions here in the states about tipping etiquette.  For most establishments in the US a tip of about 18% is seen as "good service." I usually tip 20% because I have been in the service industry before and I know how hard it is to make ends meet sometimes... also I'm lazy and the math is easier.  However, living in the midwest for several years has taught me that there are a LOT of people who think that a tip of 10-15% is not only acceptable but is a great tip!  I don't have a solution for the problem unfortunately, but I do agree that tipping is an odd practice that we really ought to do away with, and I would very much support paying servers living wages, even if that means paying more for the experience of eating at a restaurant.  Serving is very challenging, especially when working at finer restaurants where your knowledge of cuisine, alcohol, and pairings really matter, and not being compensated for that appropriately is really a shame.

I too hope one day people can do away with that bullshit. A popular pub here in Austin did away with it years back. Couldn't find a copy of their sign but http://www.austinchronicle.com/best-of-austin/year:2011/poll:critics/category:services/black-star-co-op-pub-and-brewery-best-tipping-policy/ Basically they just pay the employees more.

 

Also I really hate hearing server complaints about bad tipping to continue to guilt us all. Like okay, the chef was slow, the food was bad, whatever is out of your control, that's fine, but I am still supposed to tip you 15% because of you as a person for existing? The other thing that is silly is bad waiters who make minimum tips still make more than a lot of others working shitty wage slave jobs because they still get reimbursed up to the minimum wage, should they ever fall below. Plus when they have tips, they usually under report them all anyway, paying less taxes than others with a set W2 who have no choice.

[RyanCConnelly]

I too I hope one day people can do away with that bullshit. A popular pub here in Austin did away with it years back. Couldn't find a copy of their sign but http://www.austinchronicle.com/best-of-austin/year:2011/poll:critics/category:services/black-star-co-op-pub-and-brewery-best-tipping-policy/ Basically they just pay the employees more.

 

Also I really hate hearing server complaints about bad tipping to continue to guilt us all. Like okay, the chef was slow, the food was bad, whatever is out of your control, that's fine, but I am still supposed to tip you 15% because of you as a person for existing? The other thing that is silly is bad waiters who make minimum tips still make more than a lot of others working shitty wage slave jobs because they still get reimbursed up to the minimum wage, should they ever fall below. Plus when they have tips, they usually under report them all anyway, paying less taxes than others with a set W2 who have no choice.

 

I completely agree.  Working at a restaurant is a team effort.  It is really hard when it could be any member of the team that slips up but it ultimately is the server's problem.  I saw an article about the restaurant you mentioned and I really hope it catches on!  Back of house workers make an hourly wage whether they make mistakes or not, because they're working hard, just like the servers.  

 

The whole claiming tips thing is totally a problem, but there are many things changing to make that less possible.  Restaurants know that their servers are doing this stuff and that it is illegal, so they are all trying to take steps to stop it.  One of the places that I worked was very aggressive about getting all tips claimed, and, since it was a higher-priced restaurant, most people payed with cards and those are all automatically claimed.

[Zeusthecat]

At Applebee's we had to claim either 10% of our total sales for that shift or our credit card tips, whichever was higher.

[miffy495]

One recurring theme in this conversation that really makes me sad is all the people who say they're "bad at math" and that's why they don't like tipping. You're not bad at math! You're bad at decimals maybe or mental multiplication! Mathematics is a huge, diverse field that I promise you are good at some facet of.  I'm not good at mental math either, which is why I stick to multiple of 5s & 10s when tipping, but I'm really good at math! I'm great at single variable calculus and I'm a great proof writer!

 

I think about this a lot, especially after spending the year or so after I graduated college tutoring elementary through college kids in math. You have 1 bad math teacher in school and you're convinced that you're bad at all math forever. You might be a geometry or trig whiz, but you'll never know because you carry that with you your entire life after you have a hard time memorizing your 7's in your times tables. You don't get one bad English teacher and decide you're never going to read anything ever again.

 

I got a math degree and am only any good at (slow) mental math because I had to practice times tables with 10 year olds, not because I have a Bachelors!

 

Like I get it, the way we teach math is totally broken and produces huge swaths of the population that think this about themselves. It just disappoints me because it's such a beautiful, rich, interesting field that 95% of people never even scratch the surface of because they think calculus is the end of math, and there's no more math to learn after you do that.

 

As a person who teaches math to ten-year-olds professionally, the backlash from parents is astonishing when you try to teach that problems can have multiple approaches, that there are many things that are still up for debate/unproven in math, or pretty much anything that may actually show that math can be incredibly interesting. The amount of times I have to bite my tongue when my older sister talks about not be able to help her kids with "all this new math nonsense" is very frustrating to me, especially because new math isn't some otherworldly thing that's taught instead of the methods that she learned 30 years ago, it's showing other methods that also work while teaching the way that she learned. She's at least nice to me because I'm a math teacher and her brother, but what I get from the parents of the kids in my class does not get put diplomatically. I have seen little girls who will declare that they will never be good at math and hate the subject in September be beaming with pride at the leaps that they've made and say that it's their favourite thing by the March reporting period, and the parents still hate it because they think that if math class isn't miserable for the kid, it's not rigorous. UGH.

 

...and not to burst your bubble, but I totally know people who gave up reading (at least for a decade or so) because of one terrible English teacher.

 

 

For anyone who genuinely worries about how to get 15%.

 

12.99

Divide by ten (ie. Drop a zero off the amount).

1.29

Then halve that

0.65

Multiply by three

1.95

 

And that's 15%. Hopefully that makes it clearer?

Also just estimate anyway, doesn't need to be exact as long as you don't turn €13 into 13c.

 

It's even easier if you live in Alberta, because sales tax here is 5%. Look at the tax number, multiply by 4 (because 20% is what I tip), call it done.

[syntheticgerbil]

At Applebee's we had to claim either 10% of our total sales for that shift or our credit card tips, whichever was higher.

 

Even that system seems really bizarre. I was trying to get a waiting job at the high rollers lounge and the Sam Houston Race track with my friend in high school and he was showing me around and they had some machine to enter in the numbers and basically he and his coworkers said to just keep the number low enough to not draw suspicion. I didn't get the job, not sure what happened there.

 

My first job I worked at a health food restaurant for $5.15 or whatever minimum wage at the time and was one of those half ass servers who bring the food to your tables, but otherwise stay behind the counter and make the food and don't fetch drinks (though I would if someone asked). It was a tiny place and run really badly. I always laugh thinking about it because whatever tips we had, even if it were like $2.75 over four hours, the owner would include himself in the tip share. I can still imagine the guy diligently breaking up pocket change and paying himself.

 

When I worked at Starbucks earlier this year all my tips got autoreported to 50 cents an hour and I guess I couldn't be bothered to report that sometimes they went up to like 90 cents an hour.

[jennegatron]

...and not to burst your bubble, but I totally know people who gave up reading (at least for a decade or so) because of one terrible English teacher.

 

I know what you mean, but they don't like complain about having to read a menu or something. They may give up reading literature critically, but they don't flat out refuse to read street signs or something. (The difference between doing a thing for the love/enjoyment of it and the utility of it)

[Cleinhun]

I have a math story! For the past couple months I've been taking construction training classes, and we usually spend the first 30 or so minutes of class doing "tape measure math", which is mostly just adding or subtracting fractions. Many of the people in the class were never taught basic math properly, or just assumed from an early age they they were bad at it and so never bothered. But they're almost always able to pick it up pretty quickly once you can explain it in a way that makes them realize it's not beyond their ability.

 

My favorite example was when one day the instructor put a simple algebra problem on the board and the guy next to me had no idea where to even begin. As soon as I explained the concept of algebra to him (I think all I said was "the x is a placeholder for an unknown number, find what x should be to make the equation true") he almost immediately solved it. He then said to me "oh, is that what algebra is?" in a way that sounded like he had always thought of algebra as some kind of sorcery until that day.

[tberton]

I find that problem extends to a lot of other disciplines too. Like how people think that learning history is just memorizing names and dates or learning language is just learning how to spell. It's extremely frustrating.

[osmosisch]

There was a recent episode of You Are Not So Smart about the different approaces to learning, specifically math, that seems relevant to this conversation.

[Akidu]

I am one of those people. Math class became tech-deck class from age 14 and onwards thanks to my lack of interest and a very lenient teacher. A few years ago I went through all the basics at Khan Academy and caught up a little bit. It was crazy how much basic stuff I just didn't know. I learnt enough to learn to code (which I know is pretty basic) but I was really surprised and proud I wasn't a dumbass like I thought. 

 

If anyone can relate I'd definitely recommend Khan Academy though I haven't been there for a few years. 

[clyde]

I'll just go ahead an throw illustration in here as something people attribute to talent even though it's a learnable skill.

[Twig]

Part of the point of the proof is to gain some insight into why it's true.

And I don't get it! It's true because it is. I can picture the configurations of four points on a plane in my head and I know that it's true. From there I can extrapolate that it's true for five and six and etc. I don't need a proof for that.

[Badfinger]

Also I really hate hearing server complaints about bad tipping to continue to guilt us all. Like okay, the chef was slow, the food was bad, whatever is out of your control, that's fine, but I am still supposed to tip you 15% because of you as a person for existing?

Yes.

 

The reason you are supposed to do that is you have entered into a social contract to do that by eating in a waitered restaurant in a society where that's how those employees get paid. If you were in a place where the waitstaff was paid a living wage and you were not tipping, would you complain that they didn't earn their pay if the food was bad? Would you ask the manager to dock their pay for spilling a drink?

 

As for under reporting, 1) yo these people are all getting tax refunds, they may actually be cheating themselves in the long run, I know this is a lame thing to say but it's true and 2) the vast majority of my received tips were on credit card. They were auto-claimed, same as any auto-gratuity was claimed. Even though we were taking home cash every day, basically everything was reported because the restaurant was paying out cash individually for credit received.

[BobbyBesar]

Here's a problem I think you might like if you haven't seen it already:

Show that for any set of n > 3 points in a plane, unless all points are contained on a single line, there always exists a line that only contains two points.

 

It sounds almost trivial, but it's harder than it seems to show. There's a very elegant proof that I like though I'll give the name below but you should give it some thought before looking it up.

 

That sounds conceptually similar to another seemingly obvious proof (and my personal favorite), the proof for the pigeonhole principle (If you have n boxes and n+1 pigeons, there must be at least 1 box with 2 pigeons in it).

[jennegatron]

And I don't get it! It's true because it is. I can picture the configurations of four points on a plane in my head and I know that it's true. From there I can extrapolate that it's true for five and six and etc. I don't need a proof for that.

 

That's induction! You're just using an inductive proof structure (show that it's true for a trivial case, and show that nothing changes when you add in more)

I think that proofs are more interesting when you show something that you might not expect to be true is true. Like the difference between the infinite integers and the infinite real numbers. 

[Twig]

The word induction makes me want to cry. ):

[BobbyBesar]

How about induction cooktops?

[jennegatron]

The word induction makes me want to cry. ):

 

<3 it's gonna be okay Twig. You don't have to do anymore inductive proofs.

[Badfinger]

How about induction cooktops?

 

Yes. I love deciphering through what pots were washed what everyone had for dinner.

[Coods]

let P(n) represent the number of tears shed while doing n inductive proofs 

[Twig]

How about induction cooktops?

I was thinking of those when I made my post and almost included that as a counter-example. Those are cool.

[JonCole]

Induction cooktops are only cool as compared to coils. Otherwise they're garbage.