Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Well I was going to come in here and say 'having seen Eevee trailing Pikachu in the download charts I ended up throwing some more money at Game Freak' but somehow I feel like I'd be trampling all over a special moment?

I wasn't going to touch them tbh but those charts, positive feedback, a need to play something 'low effort', gen 1 'mons and a niece newly obsessed with 'mons (and specifically Eevee) have all contributed to yet another hole in the wallet.

Now... back to the math?

@JaxonH Mm, I don't think making mistakes more often in algebra is necessarily equal to higher difficulty. I do tend to make mistakes in my algebra more than calculus, but the concept of algebra is inherently simpler to understand than calculus concepts, I feel. What usually matters when it comes to mathematics is understanding the underlying concept of any math topic. That's how I tutored my students when I was still a tutor.

Also, I'll be taking an upper-division statistics class next semester, and I plan to use Minitab alongside Microsoft Excel and Kaleidograph (which allows you to fit a custom curve onto a set of data, pretty neat). I've taken a class that deals with most of the statistics concepts you mentioned (I've forgotten the more advanced ones like hypothesis testing and whatnot, hopefully this class will bring a much needed refresher lol), so hopefully I'm on track to becoming the statistics whiz I think I should be... Minitab looks like a more functional Excel lol, but if you could fit custom curves that would be baller. I don't think you can, though...?

The concept for finding the volume under a surface is inherently similar to that of finding the area under a curve. For the latter, you break up the area under the curve into many (literally infinite) rectangles and sum up the areas of the rectangles by finding the limit as the number of rectangles approaches infinity (so basically the Riemann sum). For the former, you break up the space under the surface into many cuboids and sum up the volumes of the cuboids. Only difference now is that you need to perform a double integral, which takes into account changes in both y and x under the surface. So then you'll need to integrate the equation of the 3D surface, which is usually a function of both x and y, twice with respect to each variable one at a time. It sounds complicated, but it isn't too bad and makes a whole lot of sense once you wrap your head around it. So there's more to it than just integrating the equation of the surface, but at the very least it's easier to understand than triple integrals, which apparently help you find the "hypervolume under a hypersolid" or something like that lolol. At that point, it's no more about areas or volumes, but more of adding up stuff that involves multiple variables.

@HobbitGamer Same. Always been better at data analysis, statistics, economics and management than actual arithmetic.

@JaxonH Don't get me started on the quotient rule

I think a big issue is that student are often told to memorise these "rules" without knowing how and why they work. I remember being stuck on binomial functions for the longest time, and it wasn't until years later I discovered Pascal's triangle, and more importantly, why they relate to each other. Had I known that when I was in high school, it would've been a lot easier.

LOL, never figured you were on an actual budget, seeing that you're buying most of the Switch games both digital and physical

@Octane
I love Pascals Triangle. Its perfect for remembering those numbers. Still have to memorize the Binomial Equation though. I simplify it to P(x)=[n x] p^x q^n-x (n choose x should be vertical). The ones they have in the textbooks are too long. Shorthand does wonders

@Vee_Flames
That makes perfect sense. Like, the 2D slice of the function at Z=0 then changes as Z changes. That's interesting. I'll need to read up on that.

Also, Minitab is great, it's just not really made for fitting curves. But it does have hypothesis testing which is baked into practically every test it does. Excel is kinda needed in conjunction cause it's way better for sorting and prepping data before copying into Minitab. But ya, I love it. Practically speaking, for the job, it does everything we need it to. Although maybe if you work in medical you'd want a more rigorous stat software geared toward blind studies and what not.

@toiletduck
Lol ya even I have a budget (although the math was more for kicks). When I stopped buying (most) games for other platforms that got converted into funding Switch digital (only for the top games tho).

We’re all such wonderfully gifted nerds 😂

Ha! I spent last night trying to resist the hype with the help of Pokemon Art Academy...

The Pokemon game is surprisingly engaging. And trainer battles aren't as easy as I had anticipated. It's still pretty simple especially when you have 2 people, but I have to give it kudos for surprising me. Plus co op is just plain fun even though most of it is just catching the pokemon.

Here's another trailer for Away: Journey to the Unexpected (via nintendoeverything.com)

This looks fun. Definitely one of the indies I'll likely be nabbing at launch, along with Wargroove.

@Ralizah

It's from a compatriot Aurélien Regard, the frenchy behind "The Next Penelope".

@Cobalt Oh man, I have that on Steam! It's another game I've been meaning to get around to. Guess I'll bump it up the list.

@PikPi The trainer AI has been upgraded for the first time since... like gen 3. They actually have Pokemon with powerful moves, and on top of that regular trainers can now use items like Full Restore or the like. It's definitely rather refreshing running into actual difficulty facing normal trainers instead of running them all into the ground like usual.

@link3710 Hah is that why? It seems very apparent. I'm happy to hear they're react less predictably now. I wish more people would give the game a chance, it will do great as a spinoff series. I say this, of course, as a fan that gets very bored of the grinding gameplay of the regular entries.

@PikPi Yeah, I went in this game fully expecting to hate it, but I was pleasantly surprised. Handholding and railroading has been tuned down significantly from SuMo (and while the game is good at making sure you don't miss things, it's never heavy handed), difficulty is up, and Pokemon visible on the field is just as great as I always hoped it would be. If you could choose to fight wild Pokemon, breed, and it had some sort of postgame I'd call it hugely better than FRLG honestly.

At the moment, I'm in Saffron City facing the dojo... and I haven't even beaten Lt. Surge yet. Gotta love the open nature of the old games, I'm very glad to see it's back.

@JaxonH So true, generally in school I was either straight D's hovering near F in math. At that point I cared only about staying above F and therefore passing, and even getting that was more dumb luck than success. I never expected anything but a D. There were two, and only two teachers, that I actually understood a thing they ever said, and I got A's. I just had a horrible string of really horrible teachers, starting with the basics, and math was a total write-off for me. The up-side was it was more advanced math I had the good teachers for and did well. The bad side is then after that I had two of the worst ever, and that was that, one of which simply had no intention of actually teaching, and the other had no ability to

It amazes me that the US is typically last place in the industrial world (and pretty low in the developing world) in math, but nobody seems to think it might be the teachers that are the problem....

@ReaderRagfish Maybe it was Cs then...it was a long time ago, I don't remember the details

But if you don't have a good teacher you have no idea what you're doing which is kind of the point. The weird thing is I should have been good at math, I'm the "mechanically inclined" sort (obviously, wouldn't be much of a gamer if not.) But without any real instruction beyond "repeat after me" and "read the book and figure it out", you're kind of screwed. And if you miss the fundamentals in earlier grades you're missing the building blocks to go beyond there.

The one teach in high school used to scream at people like the Russian Nintendo CEO, throw things across the room, slam things....dump kids out of their desks.... yeah....bad teachers.

I used to be excellent at math and calculus.

Then I graduated and we never met again.

@ReaderRagfish Yeah there were the mix of outright terrible ones, and then the ones that were I'm sure good at math, but not very good educators. "Teaching" consisted of them solving problems themselves and that counted as them teaching you. They knew how to do it, but they didn't know how to show other people how to do it. Math majors, not education majors. Then there's the ones (more than one) who literally told you they're just there to test you or help with specific questions you have, you're supposed to learn yourself from the book. The teacher (that I had twice) that would remind kids how stupid they are (in so many words), Actually two in high school with anger management issues....

Yeah, math was "survive it, make guesses, hope enough are right" not "have any idea what you're doing" But it was weird I had one teacher in high school and then another in college and I aced the math class. It was surreal. I actually understood it all and enjoyed it. Then the worst pair of the bunch followed that. (along with protectionism, politics, etc.) Somehow I even went to good schools, known to be good, not some inner city school.... if that's what "good" schools are, what the heck are bad ones?

And again, then we wonder why kids coming out of mud huts and dirt villages around the equator run circles around US kids in engineering.....

@DarthNocturnal The joys of unions and tenure. Maybe in the modern world they'd be oustered but we're going back decades. Of course I had a terrible French teacher too. She was a very nice person, just amazingly unskilled at teaching and an obsessive sexist for which males in the class simply didn't exist. She reminded me of the math teachers, except happy and less violent.

Pokemon Let's Go is shockingly good. I feel bad for my friend TeeJay (used to be a member here) who was so adamantly against the game and skipped it. I see him online playing Monster Hunter Gen Ult but not Pokemon. And I'm thinking, "but if you would just give it a chance..."

Oh well.

@NEStalgia
For me, I always had to understand why. Once I understood that, it was easy. Why is e the limit of [1 + 1/n] ^n as n-->infinity? Why is pi the same for all circles. Why is i, an imaginary non-existent number in the Real Number system, able to produce real numbers out of thin air in certain calculations? Why does a graph of tangent never touch π/2 or multiples of π before and after it? Etc etc

I'm the type that has to understand it, not just memorize it. But understanding it leads to never forgetting, ever. You need teachers that help you understand why something is what it is, not just tell you how to calculate it.