People hide this pattern called “loss” in unrelated context to confuse people. And people who recognize it feel smart, or angry, or disappointed. It’s a form of mild trolling, there is not much more to it. The meme originates from a comic but this is completely irrelevant.

Christmas Eve Sarajevo. Here is a YouTube link.

I agree with your core message, that the issue is caused by bad notation. However I don’t really see why you consider implicit multiplication to be the sole reason. In my mind, a/bc is equally as ambiguous as a/b*c. The symbols are not important.

You don’t even consider this in your article, instead you seem to take the position that the operations are resolved from left to right. This idea probably comes from programming languages, as they commonly use this convention, but I haven’t seen this defined in mathematics anywhere. I’m open to being wrong here, so if you can show me such a definition from an authoritative source (maybe ISO) I’d be thankful.

As it stands, you basically claim “the original notation is ambiguous, but with explicit × the answer is obviously nine, because my two calculators agree”, even though you just discounted calculator proofs. By the way, both calculators explicitly define this left-to-right order in their documentation.

The ISO section 7.1.3 you quoted is very reasonable and succinct, and contradicts your claim that explicit multiplication sign removes ambiguity. There would be no need for this section if a left-to-right rule existed.

Why not? If you don’t understand a meme it’s perfectly fine to ask for a context or explanation.