It's interesting, because I was introduced to cardinal numbers and alef zero, plus Cantor proof, precisely during highschool mathematics class. In Poland though.

> creeping ubiquity of knowledge.

I'd rather call it "information". Knowledge is one level above that, knowledge is information integrated in a coherent whole. Nowadays it's very easy to find information about anything, but most people still know very little about most things. Confusing information with knowledge and knowing nothing at the same time is why misinformation spreads so easily.

I think it is relatable to the way that Archer has access to mission dossiers. "Yeah, but I never read them."

People have access to limitless information but have little interest in actually looking for and using it.

Don't solve systems of differential equations and drive.

For most of the population, driving while thinking about a physics problem would be considered distracted driving, unless that problem involved avoiding hitting something in the road.

You'd leave calculator physics for later, and focus on the practical physics of steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine, I would hope.

Heh. I was a TA for a grad school engineering course. The professor accidentally assigned a problem he thought would be easy, but he had a typo and it led to very messy integrals. It wasn't hard, just tedious (think multiple pages of derivations, where at each step the expression was multiple lines long - repeated integration by parts).

He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer.

All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere.

Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.

They probably meant electronic calculators. When I asked my prof about using a sliderule, they said that was fine.

(Granted, that was in physics where the graders usually use the final answer as a check and rarely deduct many marks if all of the work leading up to an incorrect numerical answer is correct.)

In my college classes either calculators were permitted (physics and chemistry tests) or were irrelevant (upper division mathematics).

When I taught high school in the 00s, I had to impose rules about what sort of calculators were permitted to avoid cheating, especially as devices which could be used for communication like network-connected palm pilots were available.¹ I also wanted to have the kids avoid buying a $99 TI-89 when a much cheaper calculator was sufficient for the work they were doing.

⸻⸻⸻

1. I remember one cheating technique that my friends in high school AP Chem used where a group of us were sharing a calculator. You would type in the question number you needed an answer for and someone else would type in the letter of the answer (we generally had multiple choice tests).

Do they pay you for playing video games?

That's still true. And before you say "streamers", they aren't exactly being paid to play video games - they're paid to perform in public. You don't even need to be great at video games to carve out a living as a streamer, but you do need a charismatic screen presence. If you wanted to get on the "streamer" career path as a kid, you'd have been much better off spending your time taking public speaking courses and getting involved in amateur dramatics than playing video games.