I was not great at math in early school, rote memorization not my strong point but loved algebra, enjoyed calculus and actually work as an accountant. When in elementary school I could always rock word problems in math, better at understanding/applying than the literally calculating. So I don't know, but not likely.

Pretty bad with right and left but honestly very good at moving around in real space - I orient myself (obviously) on north, south, east, west. I have a great sense of direction in the actual world.

Press accelerate until the engine reaches ~1200-1500 rpm and hold this position no matter what. Now release the clutch slowly, until the car just barely starts moving. At this point you might have the urge to let go of the clutch completely, but no - keep holding the clutch in this position for 2-3 seconds more and then let go. Your car won't stall.

Okay so first of all let's talk about short recipes. Which are basically notes to self; like going through my grandmother's old recipe book I found a note card with a recipe for "pecan cookie bars" which was little more than a list of ingredients, an oven temp and a time. Was I supposed to mix the pecans into the batter or scatter them on top? Was I supposed to dollop them onto a cookie sheet, or bake them in a pan? If a pan, what size? Invariably, this note card was written at a baby shower in 1974 by someone who was chewing on one of said cookie bars and had that kind of context, and just jotted down the ingredients.

Those are useless to you unless you're B. Dylan Hollis.

Most other recipes, especially those found in cookbooks which are definitely meant to communicate to people who aren't familiar with the dish yet, ARE in chronological order. The ingredients list is a step you do before the "procedure." There's a concept called Mise En Place, it's a phrase from an obscure, obsolete Earth language called French, it directly translates to "put in place." The process:

1. Read the recipe through, so you have an understanding of the full process and what is needed when.

2. Gather all ingredients, cookware and utensils you will need.

3. Prep the ingredients including washing, peeling, slicing, chopping and pre-measuring into individual bowls.

4. Organize them in the order they are called for. Clean up from the prep process, store unused portions of ingredients, bin scraps, clean and put away measuring and chopping tools so you have a clear, clean and sanitary work space.

5. Cook. Execute the steps of the recipe devoting your full attention to the process.

Some recipes will separate stages, especially if there's a large lull in time between steps. For example, a cake recipe might intend for you to make the icing while the cake is baking. These usually do have ingredients lists and procedures separated into sections, though some don't and you're expected to read and understand the process before you start cooking.

I'm pretty sure it is in 6/8.

Sounds like Death Takes a Holiday

Songs are made from repeating patterns of beats and melody. The time signature tells you what that pattern looks like. If you just memorise all the notes I suppose it matters less. But if you wanted to improvise like with a guitar solo or whatever that's the rhythm you can use to improvise with.

It's the rhythm equivalent of the key/chord progression for the melody. If you know the chord and when/how it changes through a song, and you know the basic rhythm building block you can just make up notes that are guaranteed to sound great with the other instruments playing.

So, the original Mission Impossible theme tune is in 5/4. When U2 re-did it for the 1996 Tom Cruise film, the beginning is in 5/4, and then they transition to a slower 4/4. For most of the "Dee da duuuuuuuuuuuh" sections, as far as I can tell it's just a beat shorter, but the tempo is lower, when they do reprise the Dun! Dun! Da Da! section they use two measures, 8 beats, making it dun dun dun dun da da.

Fun fact: The original dun dun da da was supposed to be "MI" in morse code. --.. dash dash dot dot, with a dash being a beat and a half, a dot being one beat, five beats total. U2 turned it into MMI. ----..

It doesn't help that in math classes all the variables are single letter names. I can tell they never had code reviews on these math books lol

That's funny you say that, because the only way I can hear music is by identifying the structure of the song. It seems to me that you only hear the individual notes. I hear in beats and bars, so figuring out the time signature is easy. I always know when a song isn't in 4/4 instantly.

I found that knowing how the clutch works help me visualize what I needed to do to get the car moving.
I fucked up a transmission back in 2000.putting it in gear without pressing the clutch down enough so I stayed away for a few years. When I got a brand new car years later I went back to manual and practiced on a small slope until I got the clutch balance just right and could do super steep hills without even hitting the brake.

You have a spinning plate on the motor and a non spinning plate on the transmission, you press the clutch to separate the plates temporarily, lock the non moving plate into a gear then slowly push the plates back together slowly enough that the moving plate will speed up. If you don't do it fast the slow plate stalls the spinning plate. Balance the plates then you won't stall, do it on a hill and balance it and you can keep the car in a state of not stalling but not moving either, do it wrong and you cook the clutch.

Ah! I think I see what you mean. Well, I night. You mean you don't have a rough sense of what to expect of your answer without just computing it? I'm not 100% sure I do either 😛

But there's some things we can maybe do. The easiest one, in this case, is that we can temporarily play with orders of magnitude and put on a factor of 100 to get 23/7 = ~3 which means when we take that 100 back off your answer is going to be roughly -0.03. And again, that answer comes from leveraging multiplication insights, to aid division. 23 looks like 21, and I know 21 is a multiple of 7.

Any magnitude we add to our numerator is countered by any magnitude we add to our denominator. So if we had 0.23/73, we could multiply by 100 again to get 23/73, and then multiply by 10 again to get 230/73, but we can also equivalently reduce the denominator by a factor of 10, giving us 23/7 ish. We've actually moved by 3 orders of magnitude to get there, so our new "gut" answer is -0.003 ish.

That's my first guess of what you meant. But you did say you needed "actual" solutions. So maybe you didn't mean you wanted an intuition about approximations, and you actually wanted to do the long division?

Just in case, I'll do another worked example of what you might do on paper if you didn't want to use a calculator.

0.23÷7. 7 goes into 0 zero times, easy, that's our ones place solved. 7 goes into 02 zero times as well, so our answer so far is 0.0 and we're moving on to hundredths. 023 is larger than 7, and as before it is recognizably near to 21, a multiple of 7. 7×3 is 21, so our answer so far is 0.03, and our remainder is 23-21=2 (which is actually 0.02, but we keep multiplying things by 10 during the algorithm so we don't have to worry about that). Okay, we move another order of magnitude down and have 20÷7, which again looks a lot like 21, but smaller so we know it's 2. 0.032 and a remainder of 20-14=6. 60÷7 is 8, so 0.0328 and 60-56=4. 40÷7 is 5, 0.03285 with remainder 40-35=5. 50÷7 is 7, so 0.032857 and remainder 50-49=1. 10÷7 is 1, 0.0328571, with 10-7=3. 30÷7 is 4, 0.03285714, remainder 30-28=2. And now we're in trouble. Because we've already seen 2. 20÷7 is 2, remainder 6 again. So it just loops now!

-0.032857142857142857142.....

And that's less of a division problem and more of a problem with decimal numbers rather than fractions. It's simply a limitation of the way we write things. So there isn't an exact numerical answer for this particular division, you just have to decide where is enough decimal places for your application.

I don't know if any of that helped at all... but it's an attempt!

I managed to fix the routine a bit in the past week or so, and had some great nights of sleep, uninterrupted and unmarred by dreams. Feels pretty nice.

I can do a bit of lucid dreaming, in that after waking up and falling asleep again, I'm often aware that I'm dreaming — but full control and consciousness eluded me so far, it's more like the mind racing with random thoughts in half-sleep. So haven't gained anything from it either (and don't quite think I want to).

it's a good attempt too, because i had completely forgot how to do that (mostly because we were taught something called the "chair method" for long division which tends to take up entire pages) and it reminded me of another thing: times tables.

whet i was in school, we got these arithmetic worksheets with times tables on them once a week, (one meek it was 4×n, then 5, then 6...) and we were supposed to do them while being timed. iirc we had five minutes at the start of maths. i don't think i have to tell you how stressful that is with no intuition as well as fine motor issues. anyway, point being, i don't remember ever doing one for division. we went from pieces of pies, to the chair method, to short division problems. now, i've since learned that apparently the worksheet method isn't a good pedagogical tool, but it still feels like we skipped a step.

I kind of have the same but I taught myself to enjoy the moment to moment gameplay and story progression.

I played through Chrono Trigger and all I remember is that it had an awesome soundtrack, there was a frog dude, cool mechanic visiting the same place in different time period and at one point there was a bridge which probably was important. I spent tens of hours and that's the story synopsis I can muster. I still can tell you that I enjoyed playing the game. Storytelling is only one part of entertainment.

These things really clicked for me when I actually needed to do what they do in various ways.

That's a pretty good idea! Something i can work with!

I haven't heard of those things. I'll check that out tonight!

As long as it's not like duolingo. Thanks!

Yeah a lot of ways to write it, and that’s part of it - depending on the tempo and phrasing it may be easier or harder to read the music in different time signatures, so there’s some flexibility. Like in 3/4 if you have phrasing that would carry a note from beat three across to beat one of the next bar, in a lot of places, that’s messier to write and read than if it’s e.g a quarter note within a 6/8 bar.

And a whole note is always the length of the bar, so in 6/8 a whole note isn’t eight beats, it’s six. The bottom number represents what length note counts as one beat - in 6/8 an 8th note is one beat (and there would be 6 8th notes per bar) a quarter note is two beats, a half note is three and a whole note is six.

I’m betting different composers had preferences as well.

Taking up the theme of not answering your question, Broken Social Scene - Shoreline was my first taste of a really cool nonstandard signature. ✌️

For sure, yeah. I think that honestly division just isn't as intuitive, for people. It's weird. But you're right, maybe none of it is as intuitive as it feels and it was just the school hammering things in 😛

Like, a classic example, it feels intuitive that 1/3 + 2/6 = 3/9. I know those are fractions and not division, but I think it goes together. And it makes sense why it doesn't work that way if you really dig into it, in this particular example all three of those fractions are actually ⅓, so it's a+a=a, which is only true for a=0. You can draw pictures of pies and stuff, but I do agree it doesn't feel quite as "natural" as addition or multiplication. There is also a giant hole in it with division by zero, which isn't the only time the math runs into and edge, but it is the first one people encounter...

Well, it's been fun chatting about math with you anyway!

This seems common for people from dysfunctional households. I come from a similar (though not as extreme) background and I wouldn't consider myself capable of love. Not in a way that matters, at least.

Socialization.

Autism?

likewise, thanks for bedng so helpful!

Time signatures fuck with my head too. I'm not a pianist, but I decided to try and learn Gabriel Faure's Clair de Lune, which has always been one of my favorite pieces. My whole life I've heard it in my head as 4/4 , but to my surprise it's in 3/4 and the left hand are actually 16th notes with the first one missing in each beat.

Muscle memory requires practice. No way around that. Find some friend with a manual car that is close to being replaced/trashed anyway, and try until you get it.

One can be perfectly happy with the concept of beings dying and being eaten, and still feel nothing but disgust about the meat industry.

I tend to eat meat semi-regularly out of convenice and social norms, but I am fully aware of my hypocrisy. Same way as I am typing this on a device that probably contains parts made with essentially slave labour. Doesn't make it better. But at least I can avoid the treadmill of having to have the newest iPhone, or eating as much supermarket steak as possible.

It is just physics. Obviously. Getting the intuition for it is pretty difficult without actually doing it. It requires practice but it's also not just muscle memory. You can figure out a lot of the techniques by thinking about it. It is important to be able to visualise a trick before you have any chance of doing it. It's a constant process of thinking, trying, thinking, trying, and suddenly you just feel it, and only then can you do it.

As for the physics, it's always a battle of opposite forces. Gravity does win, but you can fall with style in the meantime.
I guess most people can juggle a football a few times simply by kicking the ball and then get in the position where the ball lands. A skateboard is the same, only with less room and you being on top of it.
The secret is the Ollie. Your center of gravity is not at your feet, so there's some room to juggle the board underneath you.

Recognizing people.

I live in a city full of tech bros and biotech bimbos. this is all they know from birth to grave.

they find the concept of someone being genuine and non-bullshitty very upsetting and weird. but if you talk to them in bullshit corpo self-branding speak, they are totally into you.

like I've had 'concerned friends' lecture me on how to bullshittify the way I talk so it's more socially acceptable. like using 'pivot' and 'synergize' when talking about myself, and of course constantly referencing my anxiety about my lack of 'productivity'. or to constantly reference 'how expensive' things in casual conservation to let everyone know I'm wealthy and successful... because if you aren't wealthy what is the point of even being alive?

also if you have a hobby, you can only talk about it reference to how it builds your career or it's your side hustle.

those people don't exist in many people's lives.

and even if they do, it's typically only temporary. people who get these lifelong deep authentic friendships... are pretty rare and lucky to have the circumstances in life that allowed for that.

like, a lot of people don't have those kinds of relationships and never seek them either, the concept just doesn't exist for them and they live their entire lives on a very surface level understanding of the world.

I don't know about you, but I don't understand how I can develop a deep authentic relationship with people who obsessed with shallow things like their social status and how expensive their car is compared to other people's cars... and that's what dominates the culture in my city. Or who fly into a long winded speech about their anxiety and despair over the fact they only make 350K last year or their stock portfolio only returned 5.5% instead of the 7% their account manager promised them...

Ya I often do that too, but I wanted to know why people regard this game so highly. Also understanding the story becomes more essential to know which time period to travel to. So I found it hard to figure out where to go.

I mean, technically it is, since it shows how long a bar is compared to one whole note. 4/4 is four fourths of a note.

I'm gonna go meta on this one:

I don't understand how some people just know that they can do things from the get-go. Like from their early teens on.

It took me until age 50 to understand who is holding me back: me.

There's very little I don't think I can grasp now. Anything another human can do, so can I. I could have been a doctor or a musician or a chemical engineer or Michelin starred chef if had believed in myself like other people do.

How??? Why did they know they could do these things???

Those people that seem to do that, how many are they? How many are there that don't/can't do that? Or more specially, what is the share of people that have such a busy live? Do you perhaps simply only see those outliers and all the normal/average people are not like that but you simply don't see it?

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Dancing. And even something like swaying or tapping one's foot to a beat is hard for me unless the song makes it super obvious. Most people seem to just intuitively get all of this. Plus I don't have good coordination or spatial awareness, where I still routinely run into doorways in my home and such. And then add social anxiety on top of all that. A nightclub might as well be a torture chamber.

Same. But I've had a couple breakthroughs: I enjoy it if I'm looking to buy something for someone else. And also when it's random junk: thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales, bin stores, that kind of thing. With those it feels like I'm exploring, not just shopping.

I have a friend who's a skater and when he doing a kickflip I asked how it worked, as in, how do you make sure the board doesn't land upside-down or whatever and he was like, "You just launch off and then deal with it." which was not at all helpful lol. There must be some sort of logic to it!

I work hard to be kind. but sometimes what I think is kind others interpret as mean. I can't always tell the difference.

This is one of those things I'm on the opposite side of lol. I can drive a manual car (I grew up in the UK where most cars are manual) but I can't explain how to do it. I just sort of know it. And I never look at the revs for changing gear, I just sort of feel it. Which I know is super unhelpful also.

Luckily I'm from the UK, where you can pretty much assume 100% of everything being said is sarcastic and get by just fine.

I definitely am. If I'm left to my own devices I almost instantly default to going to bed at 5am-ish and getting up at 11-12. But mostly society won't let me do that, so I feel like I'm on a night shift permanently.

You're confusing a bar with a measure. The measure is the smaller interval.

Also, the bottom number is how many beats are in a whole note. Because there are 8 beats in a whole note, that means an eighth note is one beat. A whole note is 8 beats in 6/8 time. Just like it's 4 beats in 3/4.

The top number is how many beats per measure. i.e., 6 eighth notes in 6/8 time; 3 quarter notes in 3/4 time.

I had a sort-of similar thing that took me ages to figure out, but it turns out my thinking/concentrating face just looks angry. So people would ask me things, I'd be thinking of a response and they'd think they annoyed me. So I'm trying to work on that, but also I just tell people my thinking face looks angry now and that's helped a lot lol.

Math and numbers in general. I have hyperfantasia so the voice in my head is completely self directed and language is otherwise only external, I read whole words I don’t read letters, when I learned to read it was all at once essentially, like flipping a switch. Numbers don’t have anything visual I can attach to them and don’t exist holistically, I have to look at each number not the whole set or problem or algorithm at once so it’s very foreign to how my mind works. Ideally I could just do everything in geometry because I do have something there to translate to my visuals only brain but as is I just really struggle with math and reading numbers.

I don't know if it's a modern skill, or a modern deficiency, I think it is a deficiency. But it's the apparent ability to take nothing seriously, to commit to nothing, to not be able to plan anything, to not be able to follow through on anything, to be completely unreliable... All of this and somehow still have a functioning life and social group.

I had this realization when I decided to rebuild the carburetor on my old mustang. After taking it apart I was absolutely paralyzed by then realized that some schmuck designed it, so surely I could just put it back together

Programming fast.

When I program for my personal projects it takes hours to get very little done.