It's a noncentral example of the category! We also call them "first names" sometimes.

Also it's not like she took it from anyone.

If you take a test, that doesn't mean you took it from anyone?

...Okay fine we'll stop arguing about a language we don't speak.

Have a retinal scan! It's built into the tablet. (Not a particularly standard feature, but convenient to have at the government office.)

...So Celene's planning to stay with her, for now? Should she put down her address?

Well, she could leave the fields blank, but aside from that it seems the most sensible option?

:3

She puts the info in and passes it back over to Celene.

...what is that wink supposed to signify.

Whatever. She clicks on "► PERSONAL PREFERENCES"

It shows the next page:

Alright, let's see.

She'd prefer them go directly to her rather than through a proxy, although she's not... very on top of things so like, if they need to go through a proxy that's fine? She'll check off "Direct delivery acceptable".

Emergency contact... same thing? She doesn't know what "special instructions" means but she suspects that's for people who have concerns that are Not Hers.

Physical contact. What does "require explicit consent" mean? Like, people need to ask permission before giving her a hug? She'll check off "generally acceptable." She assumes "minimal contact only" means, like, CPR? Although it's weird that it'd be placed below "require explicit consent." Is it one of these things where you can select multiple options?

Deception tolerance. Wow, people can just opt out of being told white lies and such? Hmm... she's pretty used to how things are on Earth and doesn't want people to have to go out of their way to not deceive her. She'll check off "Acceptable for benign purposes."

She's getting the impression that this planet is significantly more consent-minded than Earth. Which makes sense, given the general focus on autonomy.

...And at this point, a little voice in the back of her mind is saying something along the lines of, "You know, you should probably check with Summer and ask her for examples and such before assuming that your initial interpretation of Eifweni cultural norms and what these options signify is correct," but it's not nearly loud enough to get her to actually bother Summer about it in front of the government officer.

...Yeah Celene seems to have severely misunderstood what constitutes a "benign purpose." That's not asking "do you wanna ask everyone to go out of their way, ensuring they mislead you as little as they plausibly could?", it's asking stuff like "should people check whether gaslighting schemes seem to be taking particular advantage of you before intervening?"

Probably Celene will get around to looking at her full preferences page before that actually comes up, though.

(Generally, and especially in Nucleus, a hug is not crossing the point where anyone would be likely to take it as a serious offense if someone does it without explicit permission. Though if someone is really bad at judging implicit permission they will probably at some point have someone get pretty annoyed at them. But Celene does have that part basically correct, this is about the "use your judgment" versus "get explicit permission" standard for touchy stuff.)

Oops! Too bad this is a pseudohypothetical conversation and Real Celene has no way of knowing this information because she told no one about her interpretation and the Eifwenis can't read minds. As far as she knows.

...Wait, does Earth not have electroencephalography or magnetic resonance imaging or anything?

We don't have any way to interpret these signals into a legible stream of thoughts!

As far as she knows, that is.

...it would take a while to get into all the details but Eifwen's made some progress on stuff like that.

But actually you're probably more thinking of cold reading and such? We have some pretty impressive cold readers.

ok fair enough.

for ALL SHE KNOWS they could've been reading her mind and detected her mistaken interpretation.

...did they do that?

I mean this is the kind of job where you'd want to hire someone who is unusually good at piecing together the subtle indications people subconsciously give off...

but no, this particular officer can't nearly pull that trick off.

That's what she thought.

As they, of course, would not know.

An account will be created for her, right? She'll check if that's the case.

Is there any downside to picking continuously? Is it discounted to make up for the interest difference, not that it'd be that significant? Does it strain the system more than the other options?

...sure, Standard Emergency Response seems fine.

Yeah, all citizens are guaranteed at least a public bank account, though most banks aren't really very picky about who they accept as customers unless they're specializing in some way.

There's not any particular downside to continuous money delivery? This isn't a crypto system where each transaction has some notable fixed cost or anything. We don't understand what exactly you mean by "interest difference"? 

If Celene tries to select "cash delivery" and "continuous" at the same time, a warning will pop-up notifying her that Providence will deduct the cost of a cash-dispensing box from her basic income.

Well, like, if she has a bank account with 2% interest compounded daily, getting $1000 a... getting $1000 every 10 days is going to result in less interest than getting $100 every day.

Also yeah wait what how do you have continuous physical cash delivery is there a fucking cash pipe.

Wait are you saying they give you a box which dispenses cash continuously every month. That's... pretty cool.

Ok but finally the most relevant thing: If she selects "monthly" that implies she'll have to wait a month to get her first payment, right? Because otherwise obviously monthly is the optimal choice, if it's upfront.

Well, the public bank doesn't do interest, it's literally just a place to store money.

..."compounded daily"? What on Earth does that mean.

You mean, "what on Tinya?"

Uhhh, ok so, on Earth there's a concept known as an APR, or Annual Percent Rate. Let's say you get 10% APR, compounded daily. That means that you get 10%/365 = 0.027397% interest paid every day (on non-leap-years) into your account, which, since you get interest on your interest, means that your real yearly interest, or APY (Annual Percent Yield) would be 1.00027397^365 - 1 = .1051547 = 10.51547%.

And then of course you can compound continuously which means uhhhhhh she doesn't want to rederive the math for continuous compounding actually but it has something to do with e and exponentials.

And anyways whatever let's say for the sake of the hypothetical that she deposits the money into a place that does do interest every day.

They didn't actually say "what on Tinya", the translation / summarizing process that converts conversation into glowfiction just likes making puns.

They're inferring that "Earth" is the alternate planet Celene has probably-fake-but-suspiciously-detailed memories of?

...But yeah, so, what we do here is give the function of your bank account balance which determines the derivative, usually measured in bits per day? Which will typically be some portion ax of the balance x, where a tells you how many times per day your balance gains a factor of e. (They use an Eifweni word that sounds sort of like "tripling rate" would, except for e instead of 3). And then you can use e^at to determine the factor your balance increases by after t days.

You clearly seem to understand math well, are you... familiar with a banking system... where most people don't know how to calculate the obviously more elegant continuous version???

Celene would not claim "knows how exponents work" to be strong evidence that she understands math well, but she does know a little calculus. Yes, Earth is the planet she remembers living on. Let's see....

Ok, so let's say that dx/dt = ax, where ax is expressed in bits per day, x is how many bits are in your bank account, and a, thus, is uh, frequency. Ok, she can see the reasoning for saying that it's "how many times per day your balance gains a factor of e."

Obviously, you want to integrate this equation with respect to t. The problem is that expressing x in terms of t is, well, exactly what she's trying to do right now. a is a constant, obviously. How does this work again. 

...She can't help but notice that she said something about not wanting to do the continuous compounding math earlier.