xkcd #2986: Every Scientific Field
xkcd #2986: Every Scientific Field
xkcd.com
Every Scientific Field
Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.
28 comments
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I watched some technical video the other day about a quantum guidance system and for a brief second I thought it might be a flat earther conspiracy because a handful of the field specific jargon in the beginning sounded made up.
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Is that the quantum gravity detection thing? Basically a way to map the entire gravitational field of earth giving each 3D space a unique position without the need for GPS?
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this is especially true in math. everybody’s chilling when it’s just calculus and linear algebra. but then it becomes about manifolds, orbifolds, presheaves, adjoints, limits, modules, homology, etc.
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I'm not chilling. Second try on multivariate analysis in a week. I don't want to fail.
(Yes I'm procrastinating by writing this comment)
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that’s fair. i remember multivariate being a bit rough back in the day. i feel like a lot of the difficulty with it might be due to how many shortcuts are taken when explaining things in singlevariate analysis, since a fair number of core concepts and tools don’t translate super well into the multivariate case.
i think the worst offender is the idea of the derivative as “the slope”, since that makes it quite hard to guess what the multidimensional derivative should be, and it makes the notions of gradient and partial derivatives a bit suspect. but some of the ways they teach integration in singlevariate analysis also don’t translate super well.
i feel like with calculus a bit part of the difficulty is in building up the intuition about how things work and what things mean, but my experience has been that that’s not a huge part of calculus courses. knowing some of the history about differentials and infinitesimals can also help a bit too, since that’s how calculus was first done, and it helps to understand the notation as well.
i hope some of this helps, and feel free to ask if you have any questions about some of the concepts
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small slice: The stuff you can observe with equipment affordable to schools and colleges
big pie: The stuff you can observe with orbital telescopes, particle accelerators, 2-mile-long drills, deep sea submarines, or not at all -
The number one thing I... eh, never mind.
28 comments
My research is so specific that I would doxx myself if I explained what I do.
You grow the Hadrons for the collider?
They hose down the court after the collisions.
No, that's ridiculous!
They encourage the hadrons to climb into the collider.
I know of only one field that is specific enough like that. Carolynne?
Busted. Carolynne will now need to skip town, as she has done several times in the past.
At least you have job security!
It is very secure
ok but like PLEASE I need to know what it is you got me curious I'm begging