Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren’t?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn’t die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I’m not saying physics isn’t important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
Jonas Salk was a household name in his lifetime, and people do know the names Richard Dawkins and Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin. But biology has been demoted to a “soft science” in recent decades, a phenomenon I can explain with a single image:
My prediction is that you will see this happen with chemistry next.
Lately ive been thinking a lot about the phrase “when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case” and how much it frustrates me. Because nothing is actually impossible, so it should be “between two cases, believe the more probable one”. Which like, duh
And I think this is part of a general thing where people who like thinking about reasoning and Logic have a tendency to focus on reasoning from one pure-signak certainty to another, which can be interesting, but almost all of *actual* truth-determining is about dealing with noise and uncertainty! Its like how the gaussian blur is reversible but the inverse is very sensitive to noise so it’s not actually reversible. Everything is about the relationship between signal to noise, the chain of uncertainties, uncertainty about statements and uncertainty about the relationships between them. *that’s* epistemology, it’s probably and statistics! (and their less mathy equivalents)
My usual first reaction to this is the Dirk Gently quote:
“What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
“I reject that entirely,” said Dirk sharply. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that.’”
“Well, it happened to me today, in fact,” replied Kate.
“Ah, yes,” said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. “Your girl in the wheelchair – a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday’s stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality.”
But I think you can save something non-trivial from the principle: it’s a reminder that when you’re doing an update based on an observation, you have to actually condition on the observation.
It doesn’t matter if P(A) is extremely low. The only thing that matters is P(A|B). And that’s easy to forget.
So I assume the US, right? (I’m European and our market is different here).
If I were a student here is how I would do it:
Create a resume and really pump your soft skills like team work and project management;
If your university offers them I’d join a club of an area of your interest such as coding, robotics, hacking… I know it feels like a waste of time, but it’s still experience, regardless of the result (you don’t have to win any competition to show your skills, counterintuitive I know), you will be able to show that you successfully dealt with a complicated project. That’s a thing that when I was doing my rounds of interview were highly considered. You can always learn this or that language of programming but they already want a team player and one that’s not afraid to take the reins when needed. If your university doesn’t offer them there are online teams (or you can set up one by yourself) that do the same thing. For example I do a lot of “capture the flags”, hacking challenges. They are a fun, challenging way to learn something, network with others and show how good you are.
A lot of companies (at least mine and few others in Europe did!) have these paid internships where they will teach you a job. This is a good way to get a foot in the door in cybersecurity since a lot of time even a compsci degree won’t teach you anything about the subject. And training an analyst from scratch is extremely expensive, so you also have leverage for negotiating once your internship is over;
Consider taking a comptia certification! I recommend them for beginners because they are relatively cheap and are widely recognised. Comptia A+ is a good addition to a student’s resume. The “three basics” comptia certifications are: A+ (for general IT), network+ and security+. They are ~300$/each.
I think I’ve covered most of it. You could also do a portfolio if coding is your thing, but I don’t know anything about it.
Also I always suggest sending a resume if you hit 70% of what’s requested, not 100%.
Plus! There are few professional associations that can help you locally! In Europe we have the Women4Cyber initiative. They will give you training, consultations etc about your career. I unfortunately don’t know if there is an American one.
hey, hi, I was just on the former bird app and came across this info from a brand new study and now I cannot stop screaming internally??? what the actual fuckkkk
[simulation] Andromeda galaxy colliding with the Milky Way
The left galaxy is the Milky way, the right one the Andromeda galaxy. This is what will happen within 4 to 5 billion years, our planets will be gone by then_SaltyMikan
Oh hey, I found some of my old math methods homework problem sets. Maybe some of my math mutuals will appreciate seeing what physics undergrads learn.
Cool stuff!
Nope, that was our professor’s handwriting! Someone asked him once how he got so good at calligraphy and he told us that it was important to take your time and write slowly. Which was a joke, because he was notorious for being nigh impossible to keep up with during lecture, he could easily fill a sheet of paper in a minute or two if he didn’t go off on some digression about some specific mathematical esoterica (which he usually did).
He handwrote all of his notes in class on a projector as he was talking, and then, since he didn’t exactly expect us to get everything down that we needed to, scanned them and emailed them to us so we could supplement our own notes with his.
I mean, if my handwriting looked like that I wouldn’t type anything either, I’d take every opportunity to show it off.
a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:
medical workers on the ground are describing finding hundreds of bodies. the current death toll in the media is, unfortunately, only a fraction of the reality
hospital workers are describing injuries and trauma as if survivors had come out of a warzone
thousands are still missing
an apartment complex for the elderly was lost. not everyone could get out. people were saying goodbye to loved ones over the phone
people who did get out of lahaina were leaving with ashes covering their faces and nothing but the clothes on their backs. people are losing everything.
hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.
have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!
who wouldn’t see this and then look deeply into their own emotional playing field to see what improvements could be made purely inspired by the vulnerable earth. this is the face of all literal gods
That’s actually called the Overview Effect- something experienced by some astronauts that makes them see that “from space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both obvious and imperative”.
the rise of AI art isn’t surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that’s not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don’t understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that’s a line a real person wrote.
“i could do that.” sure, but you didn’t. there’s this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - “turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money.”
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren’t really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i’ll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to “prompt and execution.” what we are “solving” isn’t just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn’t just “2 and 2 is 4”, it’s staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it’s rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn’t understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn’t know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn’t know the private rules i keep. it doesn’t know how to keep evolving.
“but i want something to exist that doesn’t exist yet.” great. i’m glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we’re gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there’s actual quiet power in everything we do.
Genuine question (mathheads PLEASE dont get pissy like always when someone asks for an explanation of your fancy numbers). Why does tjis matter? ITS A TRIANGLE. We already knew the triangle dude
which part are you not sure matters? that the proof is no longer relying on circular logic or simply the existence of triangle related proofs?
Why are we proving triangles exist in the first place? I dont really understand that.
We’re doing it for the sake of knowledge and there’s no practical purpose for it. We’re not proving triangles exist, we’re proving a rule of triangles that we assumed to be true. The theorem (rule), the Pythagorean theorem, always worked whenever we applied it, but we couldn’t prove it using trigonometry. Until now.
For most people, it only matters that it works. For academics, they like knowing.
That answers your question but that doesn’t really answer why it matters. What matters is the Pythagorean theorem part. Why is the Pythagorean theorem so important, exactly?
The Pythagorean theorem is a rule that describes the relationship between the lengths of sides of a right angle triangle. It’s the a2 + b2 = c2.
In simpler terms, it means in a right angle triangle, we can figure out the length of any one of the sides as long as we know the length of the other two (usually we’re finding c). But why does this matter?
As it turns out, turning real world problems into right angle triangles is very useful. And we can apply right angle triangles onto any perpendicular set of lines. See the red square in the corner of the triangle sides a and b? It shows sides a and b are perpendicular - they intersect at 90 degrees. Think of a grid. Or a cross. All those lines are perpendicular to each other.
What is a practical use of this?
Measuring distance is the fundamental practical application of the Pythagorean theorem. More specifically, this helps us figure out the distance between two points.
For example: let’s say you want to walk the shortest amount of distance from point A to point B.
If we think of point A as somewhere on a line going from north to south, and point B on a line going from west to east, we can create perpendicular lines.
The shortest distance from point A to point B will be a diagonal line of some kind.
If you connect the perpendicular lines formed from points A and B and add that diagonal line connecting point A and point B, you make a right angle triangle. Re-arrange that formula and calculate that diagonal line (the hypotenuse, c) and bam, that’s the shortest distance.
Fundamentally, the theorem is about distances. Measuring distance isn’t just about PHYSICAL distance, either. It can compare any two measurements (which have a “distance”). Which is…. practically everywhere.
This might be a big leap, so apologies if I lose you here. We can use it in statistics. Any correlation (the relatedness) of any two variables (things) can be turned into numbers and measured as a distance from one another. Let’s say you wanted to find out the relationship between the number of hours people sleep and the grade they get in a class. Does more sleep mean they get a higher grade? You can take a bunch of measurements and put them on a graph. You can measure a ‘distance’ between how well the number of hours of sleep relates to the grade they got in class.
Each of these points has a distance from that line on the graph - and those distances are measured by those right triangles there. If our hypothesis is correct - getting more hours of sleep means you get a higher grade - then the points should be more or less forming a line like that one. The smaller the distances are from that line, the stronger the relationship that more hours of sleep = high grade in class.
—
It’s hard to explain the Pythagorean theorem and why it’s so fundamental in simple, practical terms. I’ve only really scratched the surface.
If none of this made sense or was hard to understand, it’s because math is very abstract. I don’t blame anyone for not getting it or having trouble with it.
uh so i never do this but maui is quite literally on fire and there isn’t nearly enough care or consideration for. you know. Native Hawaiians who live here being displaced and the land (and cultural relevance) that’s being eaten up by the fire. so if ya’ll wanna help, here’s some links:
How do you go from isolated to being apart of a properly connected social circle?? How do I go from that isolated individual to an actually connected person without having to force myself out to be a regular at a club or something??
Pick the most used social media across all your connections (for my this is sadly Facebook but I’m sure you could do this through discord or some other site I’m like 90% sure this is transferable in some formate maybe other ppl could pitch those ideas tho-) and then add everyone you know! And here’s the fun stuff you could do in your group!
Functional ideas Village Group for-
Offer to swap babysitting/chores/errands or even buddies for these things
Offer to exchange sale/coupon/bulk buying info (A good example of this is a have a friend who knows a butcher and so her family once every 2 months bulk orders from him directly and it’d WAY cheaper for everyone)
Holiday organizing
Dinner party ideas/hang outs (know 2 or more ppl who like sewing? Organize a dinner once every few months and watch a movie and sew! Do a book club!)
Trade/swap/leading stuff (ex tools, books, unused snacks, boardgames, clothes, etc..)
Offer to be apart of a shared calander (I use Cozi personally but again use your preferred)
Event spamming (community event sharing bc no one ever gets proper info on them in time)
Plant swaps (I personally know like 3 different plant ppl who specialize in different types of plants ex 1 person does a lot of herbs and another does all succulents and another does super well with berries and they always wanna get rid of the babies or spread the spoils)
Organizing work parties (repair parties ex fences/roofs/, bulk cooking parties ex my families perogie parties, tax prep parties, hair dying get togethers, etc..)
Fun ideas for village-
Make a village badge/crest of some kind (at one point was making badges for dinner parties as gifts so this is an easy one for me)
Funny pet photos/meme dump ground
This allows for a pretty fun way to also make ppl feel connected. If I get to know someone fairly well like my neighbor or another parent from my kiddos school- I’ll just add them to my weird little club thing! Here’s a patch for you. Your family now!!
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![christ-chan-official:
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