Given the fact that a fair price for a real town sign is about 175€ somebody will probably just rob the vending machine, either to get the money or a sign. Maybe a card only vending machine would work but changing the name to "Fugging" was probably simpler.

Fast and painless are not the only criteria. Looking at how america typically kills it's citizens it also clear that it has to look peaceful and respectful. Thats why they put a bag over people getting electrocuted and why they don't just fire a shotgun at your head from a close distance.

But other countries don't "produce" off-site as the US does. https://youtu.be/C7BCZCWlvEc

Standards are as mentioned in the article often extra careful to prevent confusion and thus often stricter than widespread conventions with things they allow and don't allow.

a/b*c is not ambiguous because no widespread convention would treat it any other way than (a/b)*c.

But you can certainly try to proof me wrong by showing me a calculator that would evaluate 6/2*3 to anything but 9.

So if there is not a single calculator out there that would come to a different result, how can it be ambiguous?

Update: Standards are rule-books for real projects to make it simpler to work together. It's a bit like a Scrabble dictionary. If a word is missing in the official Scrabble dictionary, it doesn't automatically mean that it's not a real word, it just means that it wouldn't be allowed to play that word in official Scrabble tournaments.

Same with (ISO) standards. Just because the standard forbids it doesn't mean it's not widespread or forbidden generally. It's only forbidden in a context where all participants agreed to follow the standard.

It's practically impossible to do that because (applied) mathematics is such a diverse field and there is no global authority (and really can't be).

Math notation is very similar to natural languages what you are proposing is a bit like saying we have an ambiguity in english with the word "bat". It can mean the animal or the sport device. To prevent confusion the oxford dictionary editors just decide that from now on "bat" only refers to the animal and not the club. Problem solved globally? Probably not :-)

What you can do/try is to enforce some rules in smaller groups, like various style guides and standards are trying to do. For example it's way simpler for a university to enforce certain conventions and styles for the work they and their students produce. But all engineers in Belgium couldn't care less what a university in India is thinking about math notations.

For real projects that involve many people there are typically industry standards that are followed that work a bit like in the university example and is enforced by the participants of the project.

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This meme is specifically about the implicit multiplication because the article it links to is about that too.

But you are right there are a lot more "viral math" things than just the implicit multiplication problems 🤣

Ooh now I get you, sry. True. But sadly you now know the truth and you have to be careful with the implicit multiplications on your tax forms from now on ;-)

That's the correct answer if you follow one of the conventions. There are actually two conflicting but equally valid conventions. The blog explains the full story but this math problem is really ambiguous.

Oh sry. I'm one of those people who are to stupid to detect sarcasm in text comments, unless it's very obvious. Probably a combination of it actually being a hard problem and me not being a native speaker.

Many sensor are 3:2 or non trivial ratios because of how the color filter pattern is aligned. Why do you think the sensors are 4:3?

WTF, a 26 year old article...