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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • What? Aspartame is classified as a possible carcinogen, but mostly to encourage further research. There’s an old rat study that claimed to show an increase in variois cancers, but it had a weirdly cancer-free control group and used levels far in excess of “a few cans per day”. AFAIK, no human studies have ever shown any significant correlation. It definitely hasn’t been “proven and accepted by the WHO”.


  • You do realise water can fall from the sky, right? 100°C might not be too useful for outside temperatures, but knowing if there might be ice on the road or not seems like a useful thing to know.

    Also, as a maths teacher, having frequent negative temperatures makes working with negative numbers a lot more intuitive for students. The fact that Americans apparently use 1 for the ground floor means I’d lose out on both of my simple real-world examples of negative numbers.




  • No, I agree that independence is necessary, not just because of “always”, but because if, as a crude example, your odds of hitting B halve each time you hit A, an infinite number of tries isn’t guaranteed to give you Shakespeare, even if the odds aren’t technically 0. My problem was that what you originally described wasn’t independence, it’s uniformity, which isn’t a prerequisite. And it’s up to 9 upvotes now so I don’t know what’s going on.


  • What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?