It’s a definition from a well-respected global standards organization. Can you name a source that would provide a more authoritative definition than the ISO?

There’s no universally correct definition for what the ≈ symbol means, and if you write a paper or a proof or whatever, you’re welcome to define it to mean whatever you want in that context, but citing a professional standards organization seems like a pretty reliable way to find a commonly-accepted and understood definition.

Sure! See ISO-80000-2

Here’s a link: https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/64973/329519100abd447ea0d49747258d1094/ISO-80000-2-2019.pdf

“Approximately equal” is just a superset of “equal” that also includes values “acceptably close” (using whatever definition you set for acceptable).

Unless you say something like:

a ≈ b ∧ a ≠ b

which implies a is close to b but not exactly equal to b, it’s safe to presume that a ≈ b includes the possibility that a = b.

I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.

I was once very eagerly awaiting a FedEx package that required a signature. I basically looked out the window every 30 seconds to make sure I didn’t miss him.

5 or 6 o’clock rolls around and I get a notification that the package could not be delivered because “the business was closed”. I lived in a rural area with no businesses for several miles, and I’m certainly not a business. The driver clearly just decided he didn’t want to deliver any more packages that day and just made up bullshit excuses for the remaining packages.

I contacted FedEx support and it was exactly as everyone knows it to be. “I’m so sorry that was your experience! Now go away.”

It was delivered the next day.

The role of a district court judge is to do two things:

1. Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
2. Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don’t align well to existing precedent.

Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.

Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That’s it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.

“Nah, your fingernails don’t need a trim. If she can’t handle your adult man’s untrimmed fingernails inside her, she does not deserve to have sex with you.”

Hair that’s long and overgrown can cause problems just like long fingernails can cause problems. Keeping them trimmed so they don’t is just being considerate of your partner.

If you want to understand how incredible NYC’s water system is, watch this Wendover video. It blew my mind.

Of course, shitty landlords with old pipes ruins it for a lot of people, but the hard part is done.

https://youtu.be/IDLkOWW0_xg

Basically, the writers always envisioned Riker and Troi would marry at the end of the series, but Rick Berman overrode them and forced the Worf romance because he wanted to mix things up.

Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes both hated the Worf romance because they felt their characters were basically destined to end up together from the very beginning.

It was never actually explained canonically, but basically everyone hated it except Rick Berman and Michael Dorn and if they married Deanna and Worf in Generations Nemesis (mixed up which movie they got married in), I guarantee it would’ve led to a lot of very angry fans.

https://screenrant.com/star-trek-next-generation-worf-troi-couple-dating-bad/

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances

I get a lot of people are struggling, but you can’t claim that the average person isn’t doing well when 63% of Americans rate their financial situation as “good” or “very good.”

It definitely is.

If a recipe calls for 3 and 3/4 cups flour, I know right away I need three 1 cup scoops of flour and one 3/4 cup scoop.

If it calls for 15/4 cups, now I need to calculate how many one cup scoops it is and also what the additional remaining fraction is in addition to how much I’ve actually measured out so far.

The more numbers you need to keep in your head when following a recipe, the more likely you are to make a mistake.

Right wing pundits and politicians:

“How can I frame this as a bad thing?”

the other is still made of people who deserve to live their own lives.

But those “people” (i.e., the clones of Tuvok and Neelix) never existed in the first place.

The main issue in this episode is that two sentient beings were effectively destroyed against their will to create a new sentient being. To rectify the issue of two sentient beings being destroyed to create one new sentient being, the one was destroyed against his will.

But a clone of Tuvix would not come into existence at the expense of any sentient beings besides the original Neelix and Tuvok. It doesn’t solve the original “we’re killing a sentient being to bring back our friends” problem the original Tuvix caused, but it doesn’t create new problems either.

We could just transporter-clone and combine Tuvok and Neelix into Tuvix in one shot. The net effect is one new being, Tuvix, at the expense of nobody. Doing it by cloning Tuvix is just an added intermediate step.

I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.

North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They’re all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they’re filthy, selfish capitalists.

Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).

The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There’s definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They’re just all-inclusive resorts with free “cultural lessons” to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn’t consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we’ve heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they’re all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur “resorts” to prove to the world that it’s a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!