Because all social platforms and message boards are like living entities:
They have their infancy and grow into something popular (relatively speaking) then your older members either get bored or jaded, often both. The culture of the platform starts to change while more people leave disliking the change than new people discover the platform. Resulting in the platform steadily shrinking in popularity.
Every social network and forum has experienced the same phenomenon.
It's hard to describe the experience now, but Slashdot in the early 2000's was more of a community disguised as a tech blog. Sure the editors selected the stories from the queue, but everyone had a chance to submit something they thought was interesting, and then comment on what got through. Even the site editors would regularly participate in the discussions, and I got the feeling that everyone there (except maybe the trolls) were passionate about technology. It was easy to spend an entire day just going back and forth with someone in the comment sections about whatever the controversy of the day was. It was magical.
Once CmdrTaco sold the site to Dice, they tried to turn it into a business intelligence/job board, which turned off a lot of long-time users (they also tried a site redesign that was functionally useless and had to abandon it after a lot of complaining). Then Dice got tired of it and BizX bought it to add to their trophy case, but haven't done anything meaningful with it. The site has been on autopilot since the acquisition. The 'editors' are faceless interchangeable usernames who just load up a bunch of stories from the queue and let them auto-post throughout the day and almost never show up in the comment threads. The 'community' is barely there, most discussions get less than 50 comments. They turned off anonymous coward posting (unless you're logged in). The user poll hasn't been updated since April. And so on. It also didn't help that Hacker News came along and ate most of their lunch.
Basically, slashdot was hollowed out and the shell is all that's left. But the new owner can put 'COO of Slashdot Media' on his LinkedIn page, which is probably the most important thing.
IMHO people moved to Hacker News. I would guess one of the reasons is better comment system here. Algorithmic ordering of comments based on up/down is important for scaling to thousands of comments. Slashdot had scoring system, but comments were still ordered by time, which makes it less practical.
'headcanon' is jargon within general fandom. The term refers to the application of imagination against the established canon of a body of fiction, to expand upon that body of work.
Example:
- Superman being from Krypton is canon.
- Superman not truly being the son of Jor-El, because his mom slept around, might be one fan's headcanon.
Van Morrison is a world famous musician who has performed on stages since the 1960s. When he last visited my city about a decade ago he played for nearly the entire duration of the show with his back to the crowd as a way of minimizing the performance anxiety that he felt.
No, Tau is fundamental. Pi only exists because someone mistakenly thought the formula for circumference involved diameter, when in fact it involves radius. ("Quit factoring a 2 out of Tau!" I tell them.)
Eh, you can find plenty of cases where tau is just as awkward as pi is elsewhere. Right off the bat, the area of a circle becomes more awkward with tau, becoming (tau*r^2)/2, and in general, the volume of an n-ball gains weird powers and roots of two in its denominator as n increases if you switch to tau. In general, I don't think you can really claim either one is "more fundamental". It's just a matter of framing.
Actually, no: that Tau-centric area formula you gave derives naturally from taking the integral. Your example actually fits the expectation you have from what you learned in Calculus I. You should _expect_ that 1/2 scaling to be there.
If it seems awkward to you, it's only because of a lifetime of seeing it done in terms of pi.
You can argue that having an extra number to juggle around is somehow less awkward because, under specific and subjective criteria, it’s “expected”, but given that the whole hook for tau is “we keep having to put a multiplier of two everywhere”, I don’t find it very compelling.
I can also make arguments that pi/2 would have been a better constant from a teaching perspective. The pi/2 version of the Euler identity, for example, would give you all the tools you need to link complex multiplication to rotation.
But at the end of the day, the choice of multiple used for the constant is a convention. None is going to be ideal in every case, and no math fundamentally changes because of a particular choice. Trying to argue for a change in convention at this point is just silly.
The entire tau manifesto is basically an exercise in how you can come up with rationalizations for just about any aesthetic preference, and the “area of a circle section” is a perfect example of how far you can go with the gymnastics.
It's not really about being awkward (that's a tell not the motivation), it's about basing on a radius or diameter: which is more fundamental? Or the arc length of a unit circle or half a circle, which isn't an arbitray formula it's the definition.
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