-12 weasels per hectare или почему меня зовут Dr Y
A student is in her 4th hour of Ecology exam. Desperately typing parameters into a Maple predator-prey model. I lean over her and see that she has typed in the following initial conditions: 45 voles per hectare and -12 weasels. Trying to imagine negative weasels ask carefully:
- Why minus twelve...
And she immediately corrects herself typing "Y - 12".
After successfully figuring out that "why" was a pronoun and not a letter we went on to find where did she get that minus in the first place... I look into my problem and see this: "On a particular year a census revealed vole density of 45/ha and of weasels - 12/ha". So she just copied that dash into Maple, where it of course became a minus...
- Why minus twelve...
And she immediately corrects herself typing "Y - 12".
After successfully figuring out that "why" was a pronoun and not a letter we went on to find where did she get that minus in the first place... I look into my problem and see this: "On a particular year a census revealed vole density of 45/ha and of weasels - 12/ha". So she just copied that dash into Maple, where it of course became a minus...