alexg

@Barmar for what it's worth, and this is now extremely off topic, I was thinking of the (outdoor) ryunkin in Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, although in that case the cat lived in the same household

@JoeStevens This is the distinction in Section 2 mentioned above. A normal cat behaving normally will not entail strict liability, but if a cat (or any animal) is unusually dangerous, either all or some of the time, and the keeper knows about it, then the liability could be engaged. Cats are not immune unconditionally - the cited paragraph is about "quite normal acts on the part of such an animal" (e.g. a cat), which are not covered, but abnormal acts might be.

I don't think "free spirit" is an actual term of law, for all that it seems to crop up online. My understanding as expressed above is that you can be liable for your cat's actions, but if it's a normal cat doing normal cat stuff, and you're not negligent in the way you look after it, then you wouldn't be. As ever, the word "reasonable" is doing a lot of work.

These scenarios are barely sketched out, but in general I don't think cats are exempt from the law of nuisance, which certainly covers similar non-feline examples. People have been found liable when the smell of their thirty cats wafted next door, even when the cats didn't wander, and it seems like the same could apply for a single mobile cat in the right circumstances.

@ZeroTheHero Depends on the place. UCL's rule is at 7.2 in ucl.ac.uk/academic-manual/chapters/…. Oxford's at ox.ac.uk/students/academic/exams/completing-an-exam/… is similar (see "Paper errors"). I think the intention is to avoid issues about invigilators whispering different things to different students, or the fairness of re-writing a question on the fly when some students will have already answered it.

At some universities, like UCL, this is explicitly forbidden: the procedure there is that the invigilator can't give an answer, but the student is expected to fill out a form detailing their concern, which is passed to the examiners alongside their script. But this is in some ways better since it definitively brings the matter to the attention of the graders, and creates a paper trail. In any institution, students could also write in their answer something like "I have no idea what a fortnight is, and have answered on the basis that it means ten days", which a grader would certainly see.

but I think this is all a bit of a distraction from the substance of the question, which is a hypothetical not limited to the specific word. I'm sure we can all think of weird cultural idioms until the cows come home.

I think it's fair to say that someone who is (1) a native British English speaker, (2) an academic, and (3) hasn't particularly directed their mind to the question, would be likely to overestimate how well students would understand words like "fortnight".

See mathoverflow.net/questions/29828/… for a related request for a formula. What you want is $g(n) = n/f(n)$ where $f$ is an answer to that other question. As explained there, if you realllllly want a formula (as opposed to a procedure that gives the right answer), then you will find yourself constructing some truly horrible enormous formulae with infinite sums and whatnot. There is a binary trick at mathoverflow.net/a/29973 but note that converting your number to binary will involve dividing it by 2 several times anyway.

@JasperLoy I am writing a new question in another tab

@JasperLoy hello!