Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
In Germany, we have a right-wing party en par with the US Republicans: The AfD. Just as Nazi, just as nuts.
Some time ago, someone riled them up with the “Did you know they teach Arabic numerals in school now?”, and quite a few of them blew a lid…
Well, the dihydrogen monoxide that is in your Zuchini is literally an industrial solvent!
Have you seen what dihydrogen monoxide does to pure, strong iron?!? It corrodes iron unbelievably fast! And people just…consume it in most of their “healthy” foods!
Wake up, sheeple! Stop drinking dihydrogen monoxide!
~/s - this message brought to you by Brawndo, the thirst mutilator~
My son just told me there is a complete wiki about DHMO. Something I’ll investigate later…
And stop plants from drinking it too!
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
Next they are going to find out they are learning other Arabic topics like al-Gebra.
Or about Mr. Al Kwarizmi (Algorithm).
How about Brahmagupta’s quadratic equation
No, ain’t no way, how can this be NOT the onion ?! Come on ! 😂
Get me the fuck off this planet.
One of my favourite episodes of Veep had this very thing
My god, the red conservatives and the blue conservatives are so incredibly hysterical.
Newsweek is seriously trying to take a dry and completely humorless approach on this “story”
:-\
And then in astronomy, students are being forced to learn the Arabic names of stars (like Sirius, Deneb and Betelgeuse).
Fortunately, Donald Jesus (republican vesion) Trump will sign executive order banning Arabic numerals nation wide. Thanks to a political contribution from Disney, we will all be forced to use the Predator number system to help movie tickets for Badlands. All computer systems will have 1 month to update.
Jesus Christ, people are fucking idiots.
TL;DR - People are stupid
She must be an ICE supervisor by now
Oh…I didn’t know that’s the point we were at in all this…
It’s worse than that. We’ve passed that point already.
and blow Bubbas?
Again? They do this whenever a nonwhite person is voted into office.
i heard he’ll teach kids the “latin” alphabet instead of Amerian one😡
I dont understand this. When I was in Palestine, they definitely used different numerals.
Like, I guess they invented base 10? Or math? But the characters they use for numbers are absolutely different
Basically, what we call “Arabic Numerals”, including the number 0, have their origin in India. Europe got them from Arabic scholars, and therefore called them “Arabic”.
The main factor is the decimal system of writing and having the concept of a zero in contrast to the odd, additive and subtractive writing of the Roman numerals, which didn’t even know a 0, and made multiplication a pain and division nearly impossible.
What glyph is actually used for a one, be it a 1 or a ١, is absolutely secondary.
I think your confusion is the other side of what the article was discussing.
The problem is, there have been a lot of number systems in the past. The one we currently use is based on the Arabic system. In common usage you would simply call them numbers. But in a technical sense, to distinguish from other numbering systems past and present, they’re also called Arabic Numerals because that’s their origin.
Clearly this ignores the fact Arabic is still around and using real Arabic numbers and that is both confusing and maybe problematic. But I think the technical reason it sticks around is to acknowledge their source and have a more specific term when there is a need
called Arabic Numerals because that’s their origin
While the origin of Arabic numerals is actually Indian.
Arabic Numerals is ambiguous. We don’t use eastern Arabic numerals in our schools.
Looking at Wikipedia, we’re talking about western Arabic numerals in Europe/USA (TIL). Did you use one of the versions listed here as Eastern arabic numerals? Briefly reading the history, eastern is more common across modern Arabic regions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numeralsOk, well, this article is trying to call people dumb for not understanding a concept that is incredibly confusing to everyone
They’re not calling people dumb for not knowing, they’re calling them dumb for not investigating. If you hear a wild claim, you should investigate. This shouldn’t still work because most of us here know it’s been a running joke for at least 20 years in the US with continuous anti-Muslim and anti-middle-easter/Arabic sentiment and bills post 9/11.
It shouldn’t be incredibly confusing, either. It’s fine to not automatically know that Amerocan/English refers to “western Arabic numerals” as simply “Arabic numerals” in shorthand. I didn’t. That’s why I briefly researched it when you said you had a different set of numerals in a region. Since I don’t know exactly what to look for to validate my own searches, I genuinely asked you if what you learned matched what was in the Wikipedia page. I have no direct experience.
People use shorthand all the time. It makes things confusing. I didn’t know a “convection oven” was actually a “forced convection oven” until this year. In my head, it wasn’t something I ever questioned because all my ovens have had the primary heater at the bottom, meaning convection would carry hot air upwards. Turns out, FCOs have a fan at the top to force better circulation. Surprise, this revolution of air fryers? They’re just countertop [forced] convection ovens. Similarly, I have a gripe with people customizing cars with “coilovers”. The majority of cars already have coil[spring]-over-[shock]s, but what they mean is “adjustable coilovers”. It’s a carryover from when cars did NOT have the various coilover designs as standard. Shocks outside coil springs, leaf springs, torsion springs, etc.
incredibly confusing to everyone
Is it? I think your confusion may come from living or studying abroad, which is understandable. But only the ignorant ones who passed school while asleep on this side of the world would be confused. Everyone is told that these are Arabic numerals as opposed to Roman numerals very early on.
The “everyone” in your sentence does not really fit. A “me” would be more on point.
Name does not check out.
So, there WAS an onion (or similar) article stating exactly this like the day after he won. So it looks like some of these idiots just ate the onion
Whole thing is just media hyping up an obvious prank so that the stupidest people start freaking the fuck out, which gets more media attention, which makes us click on links way out here in backwater Lemmy.
This is the uroboros of media that has wrecked our whole society, where all of our impressions about just about anything are being dictated by the smallest, most ridiculous outlier reactions. Remember the kitty litter boxes in schools?
This is what launched flat-eartherism and trumpism and the whole massive “incel movement” that has become a tidal-wave of depressing idiocy, which get more attention for being so disgusting and stupid, which makes people on the other extreme end of the bell-curve over-react, which gets more attention, which leaves normal, passive readers thinking this is how people are really interacting and treating each other, which leads to them also taking up radical or stupid ideas about the world.
It’s not that The Onion can’t compete with reality, its that The Onion can’t compete the vast media empire built on deliberately turning every possible unusual reaction or hot take from random nobodies into headline news. Before panic was monetized, most outlets ignored pranks.
An easy way to sort out the idiots who probably did not learn Arabic numerals in school, and therefor are so useless they can only be employd as MAGA heads…
I know several ignorant relatives who would seethe with rage seeing that headline…
The Onion really is competing with reality to come up with good headlines.
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