Wait… was I the only one that got taught: small number on the small side, big number on the big side?
No cute little metaphor, just deal with the bleakness of the world, kids!
This is like when I found out everybody else got a cute little song to memorize the quadratic equation.
Whaaat?? Gimme the song!
To the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”
X equals the opposite of B Plus or minus square root B squared minus 4 A C All over 2 A!
🤯💃🕺
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOXYMRcWbF8
This is the tune.
Wow. Your school hated you if you didn’t learn about the alligator or crocodile.
Not even a mention of the duck!
The version I was taught starts with the equals sign. There is nothing simpler to depict the concept of equality than two parallel lines of the same length. Now pinch one side to spoil the equalness, the pinched side points to the smaller number in the unequal pair.
I’m so sorry for you that you didn’t have a childhood
I remember learning about these in first grade and the explanation we got was “the beak of the little chick is pointing towards the bigger number” and I can’t stress how much more confusing an explaination that is compared to the crocodile. Picture the following scene:
O> \0/ / \Yes that’s a bird shut up. Observe the beak. Where is it pointing in this case? That’s right, it’s pointing the wrong way. Why did they choose this stupid explaination? Who knooooows
What in the fuck kind of backwards ass logic is that?! CROCO GO NOM NOM ON BIGGY NUMBER BECAUSE HE HUNGY! What is wrong with your teacher, my god
Pretty sure they were going for this, not a baby bird just standing there:
Oh I understand what they were going for, not the issue I have though haha
yes as it turned out in about 10 minutes, but the picture she was trying to paint wasn’t very clear to me until then
My teacher said “Pac-Man wants to eat the number that gives him the highest score” and that sooo stuck with me
I really don’t get why you would need a mnemonic for a symbol that itself already is a mnemonic? How could it ever be confusing that big side is bigger than small side?
She just wants to say she is writing a PhD thesis in theoretical physics.
Because the arrow always points to the bigger number, silly. /S
Because everyone’s brain is different and things that make intuitive sense for one person don’t necessarily make the same sense to someone else.
Yes, and that’s why they made the symbol portray what it means. I mean it’s even more clear than the equal sign, yet I haven’t heard of mnemonic’s for that?
Because there aren’t (in common use) multiple variations. If we used ≠ and ≈ to represent when the sum was arrived at via addition or subtraction, and only used = when you used both in the same equation, people would fuck that shit up all the time.
Also, you use the equal sign a lot more frequently in life. More exposure makes us remember better
in other words:
I learned “L” for Less than
And Г is for greater than?
or _|?
We will never know
That’s co<<ect.
“gгeater than”
I feel this deeply as a 30 year old that has to repeat in my head “Never Eat Soggy Waffles” every time I use a cardinal direction
I am also an idiot who needs mnemonics to remember incredibly basic stuff. In a similar vein to OOP, I did a PhD in chemistry with substantial involvement with chiral structures and still don’t really know left from right… but I never understood this one. Smaller number on the small side, bigger number on the big side always seemed really intuitive.
Also in a theoretical physics context I think of those symbols as Dirac notation more often than inequalities, but then I’m not a physicist.
Bra-Kets are have much shallower angles and inequalities are still used widely in physics
Fair. There’s a reason I barely scraped through introductory quantum.
I used to even draw in the teeth.
In Dutch the word for smaller is kleiner.
So I always think, can it make the letter K
2 < 3 2 smaller than 3 < K
no K
I learnt it the exact same way! 😄
I know someone who did their entire thesis purposely without using effect/affect, because they didn’t know the difference. Instead used “impact” and other similar words.
Affect is an action and effect just exists is how I always remembered it.
that’s a lot better than my method of remembering that effect is not a verb
Effect can be used as a verb though https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/effect
I still hear my kindergarten teacher’s voice every time I look at an analog clock…“little hand points the hour”
