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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • X^0 and 0! aren’t actually special cases though, you can reach them logically from things which are obvious.

    For X^0: you can get from X^(n) to X^(n-1) by dividing by X. That works for all n, so we can say for example that 2³ is 2⁴/2, which is 16/2 which is 8. Similarly, 2¹/2 is 2⁰, but it’s also obviously 1.

    The argument for 0! is basically the same. 3! is 1x2x3, and to go to 2! you divide it by 3. You can go from 1! to 0! by dividing 1 by 1.

    In both cases the only thing which is special about 1 is that any number divided by itself is 1, just like any number subtracted from itself is 0









  • MartianSands@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.world"Politics"
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    4 months ago

    It was pointed out to me a while back that the paradox of tolerance is only a paradox if you consider tolerance to be a philosophical position.

    In fact, we don’t treat it like that. We treat it as a social contract, in which context it is no paradox at all to say that if you aren’t tolerant then other people aren’t obliged to tolerate you in turn



  • For once, I don’t think that particular charge is entirely inconsistent with the dictionary definition.

    He’s accused of killing a member of the public in the hope of frightening everyone else in that person’s position into taking some kind of action.

    I think the law says something about killing for a “political purpose”, with the goal of changing some kind of public policy or behaviour. That’s not an unreasonable interpretation of what happened, I think.

    Unfortunately that means they get to use the laws which were written to deal with mass murder and bombing public spaces, which I don’t think is particularly appropriate but doesn’t seem out of line with the law