Maven (famous)How to open a textbook
gibmiserSo… is Goldstein still around or did he…?
Apparently still alive at 85: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein
Patapon EnjoyerThere’s still time
To quote twitch chat: “monkaS”
Weed out the riff-raff who can’t hack it
tateBoltzmann is “riff-raff” now?!? I get what you’re going for, but c’mon.
TroyMy third year thermodynamics course opened with a similar quip by the lecturer. Entropy is actually depressing. You can’t fight it. You can’t not fight it. It just wins.
So… that’s why I never tidy up my room. I’m just too smart!
HupfAll we have to decide is what to do with the entropy that is given us.
oce 🐆Life is a temporary win over it, just enjoy it while you can.
PsychadelligoatMan, you humans are going to be really upset when you find the universal wall…
I mean uh…
Hey, how was the game last night amirite?
ZorsithDid you see that ludicrous display last night?
What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?
Thing about Arsenal is they always try and walk it in
Yeah he played his most popular hit “Move” and people went nuts as usual.
To quote The Star Child, “What, you haven’t planned that far ahead?”
Well I mean yeah. It wasn’t my first existential crisis - you get used to them eventually. Or you do what those guys did I guess.
Meanwhile, a strong contender for the best opening line in fiction is: "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it."
- Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis.
southsamuraiStatistical mechanics is so fucking brutal \m/
…and then we take the partial derivative of the log of this infinite series wrt molar volume to find that–
- Why?
Why what?
- helplessly gestures at the whiteboard
Oh, yeah, it’s so the math works out later! Anyway-
Yeah lol, lots of physics and math was invented by multidisciplinary geniuses who saw equations that seemed to have no answer and said “oh yeah, this looks like a problem from biology that I’ve seen solved with this bit of fluid mechanics, and that problem can be solved with this complex trick from differential calculus. And you know, after we do that the whole system is starting to look like a circuit that uses properties from thermodynamics…”
Then your teacher and the textbook throws it on a white board and says “some smart dude figured out this was the way to solve this problem. It looks like this and it boils down to this equation. Don’t ask questions.”
I dunno, I usually open a textbook by turning over the front cover 🥁
Why do we have a 🌫️ emoji instead of a cymbal? It would compliment the drum emoji so well.
naevaTheRatThere’s a mechanics textbook called “there once was a classical theory” and it opens with:
There once was a classical theory Of which quantum disciples were leery. They said, “Why spend so long On a theory that’s wrong?” Well, it works for your everyday query!
Thank you for this, it was new to me
triplenadirdoes statistical mechanics help explain how often this gets posted here? 🙃
One opening line that’s always stuck with me is:
“The doctor said I was a paranoid schizophrenic. Well, he didn’t actually say it, but we knew he was thinking it.”
☂️-id want to kill myself too. just from the very little i know from computer stuff, imagine doing an entire semester
Physics ≠ Computer Science
Can’t have computer science without physics.
I’m not entirely sure of that. You can’t have comp sci without algebra and potentially calculus. I could see a society that developed all three fields before they codified Physics
How do you have computer science without calculus? Calculus is literally necessary for computer science, otherwise it’d just be like… shitty statistics with a little programming
Care to expand? Things like complexity theory and type theory, for example, have nothing to do with calculus
In general, a lot of the stuff computer science shares with data science uses calculus, a lot of the statistics too, but also visuals and modelling other sciences (e.g. simulations) use calculus heavily. I recall utilising vector calc a decent amount when working with Vulkan, for example
Sounds like programming more than CS, in that case, fair enough. Also the linear algebra in computer graphics is, well, algebra, not calculus.
It would be inelegant as all fuck, but you could get away with just algebra, there are comp sci courses that only need algebra as the foundation.
as far as i can tell, the ones that do that are usually just programming courses with “computer science” slapped onto the title. but i havent exactly gone to many colleges so i don’t have the experience to say so.
LoudWaterHombreDo you really think people could make programmable microchips and processing units before they figured out physics?
No, but mechanical concerns mputwrs existed before microchips. They just weren’t terribly useful
Once I get my mechanical computer to run crysis we’ll see who’s laughing.
What kind of argumentation is this? Are we talking about mechanical engineering or computer science? Please don’t bent reality the way it fits your shape.
I know what mechanical computers are. But computer scientists will not be building them 'nor program them, it’s not what computer science is about when you go to a university to study it.
I presented a hypothetical, and showed how it could work. You’re the one insisting that there’s only one way to do things. You’re being Western Centric.
I’m well aware of what you study when you study computer science, I majored in that and Music Ed at Transylvania University.
computer science teaches you the theories of computation which absolute starts with mechanical computers.
if one didn’t study Turing’s tape machine in their compsci program then they should demand their money back.
Wouldn’t you also need to know physics in order to make a mechanical computer?
Not necessarily. We had the theory before both calculus and physics.
theneverfoxSure you can. Physics is describing what is, computer science is building what could be
The two things require very little overlap. Even physics systems in video games don’t use real physics - it just feels better when you fudge it
LillyPipWe are all gas with slightly denser particles.
🔫
We all are vast collections of harmonic oscillators.
I don’t know. I like Griffith’s Quantum Mechanics which opens saying if you think you’re starting to understand this stuff, you really haven’t.
Light, why do you behave differently when I’m looking at you?
Because you’re touching them with your eyes
My favorite class in grad school. I absolutely loved deriving the laws of thermodynamics from first principles based the random motion of atoms. It was beautiful.
Grad school? This is for 4y bachelor studenat
Bachelor student? I learned this in high school
If you didn’t study this in elementary school, I don’t know what kind of bullshit school you went to.
Umm, this is the first thing we were taught on the first day of kindergarten.