Latest Posts by chaos3612 - Page 6

could u imagine if ppl talked about catholicism the same way they talked about like… indigenous ppl’s religions….

“You have the burden of proof backwards when you insist that other people need to prove you wrong. You made the claim, therefore you are responsible for providing evidence to support the claim. No one is obligated to discredit the claim or take it seriously until you have provided evidence.”

Can we as millennials and gen-z’s collectively agree that NObody Cares about elbows on the table like Why was that Ever A Problem for Anyone?? We can chill right?

The Fab Five travel through time, space, and genre to help Professor Flitwick get his groove back

The 'witch' who protected a village from genocide

Zura Karuhimbi had only her wits to protect the people she hid during the Rwandan genocide.

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

We’ve lost a legend.

I'm a physics major who works as a tutor with a bunch of math majors, and today I was explaining differentials to a student and I said to convert the dC/dt equation to one with differentials just multiply both sides by dt and that's the only difference and I could feel them all judging me hfgsgskdhdlhd trust me we know we are wrong but we are too lazy and dumb

Okay, okay, look, all is well.

Yeah mathematicians are gonna cringe a little when people say stuff like this because we know it’s not rigorous, but you know what else? We made that dy/dx notation look like fractions for a reason. Certainly what’s going on here is a little more subtle than division and multiplication and if you’re working with some really weird functions that subtlety could get you in trouble. But for most situations, you can treat that stuff like fractions, and we made the notation that way to highlight that fact and make the symbol manipulation more efficient.

We laid the complicated foundations with rigorous analysis so we would have a robust and efficient tool, and we made it user-friendly, and we gripe about its users using it the way we intended? That’s like complaining that I use my phone without understanding its circuitry or complaining that I eat pop tarts without understanding what’s in them. Those things are true, but my phone was designed to be used by someone who doesn’t understand or need to understand its circuitry and pop tarts were designed to be eaten by people who don’t understand or need to understand what’s in them. I know that someone understands my phone’s circuitry and someone knows what’s in pop tarts and I trust them.

You’re not lazy or dumb. Calculus, as mathematicians passed it off to engineers and scientists, was designed to be used by people who don’t understand or need to understand the rigorous analysis that holds it up. Engineers and scientists trust that we gave them a good tool that we built well, and they use it. It’s nice when they understand it more deeply and it serves them well but it’s not always necessary.

I’m not gonna stop joking about how silly treating dy/dx as a fraction is, because it certainly won’t fly in math circles where doing so might actually screw you over, but even more because that’s what everyone does. Every field cringes and giggles when the out-group uses their tools without deference and deep understanding, as is every field’s right, but it should never be taken too seriously, because guess what!

That’s the anthropocene, babey! That’s specialization of labor! We don’t all have time to understand everything, we just have to understand what we can and trust that someone else understands the rest! That’s science! That’s humanity! That’s beautiful! Joke about it all you want, it is a little weird, but anyone properly hating on it? Cut it out or I’ll cut you out and that’s that!

Visionary Brain Genius Elon Musk Has Invented The World's Worst And Most Expensive Subway

If you are anything like me, many times you have been riding the subway and have had the thought, “What is wrong with this dang subway is that it is not exponentially more expensive and slower than this.” Many times you have seethed, through clenched teeth, “Goddammit, it just churns my guts that this subway does not require me to own and bring along—and also to have outfitted with a special set of retractable sideways wheels that serve no other purpose—my own Tesla-brand autonomous electric car.” If you are anything like me, when you get off the accursed normal subway and do not have to then hunt for a place to park your Tesla-brand autonomous electric car, it fucking burns you up inside. It makes you sick! You have had it up to here with these goddamn cheap, fast, mass-transit options that do not require each rider to have brought along an entire specially outfitted self-driving electric car.

Holy shit

A 392 year-old shark found in the Arctic. This guy was wandering the oceans back in 1627.

maybe this was a dumb idea…

notice how “girls mature faster” is never stated as a reason why girls should be given more positions of power and authority? It only works to hold girls to greater accountability than boys and to justify men’s attraction to them.

Littlewood polynomials are polynomials all of whose coefficients are either +1 or −1 (so even 0 is not allowed). If you take all Littlewood polynomials up to a certain degree, calculate all their (complex) roots, and plot those roots in the complex plane, then you get a beautiful fractal-like structure above.

The image is slightly misleading, because the “holes” on the unit circle tend to completely fill in if the degree goes up. Intuitively, the holes mean that complex numbers on the unit circle that are close to low-degree roots of unity are hard to approximate by low-degree Littlewood polynomials (unless they already are roots of unity).

In particular the structure at the edge of the ring is deeply interesting. Notice the familiarity with the dragon curve?

Voyager’s Jupiter and Io

I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go

so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”

nice idea and all

but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.

as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.

observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind

so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable

but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time

(x)

“To dare in life is to make yourself vulnerable to the possibility of failure. Most of us don’t welcome failure. So instead we avoid taking risks. We compromise, taking cold comfort in the assumption that we’ve removed the possibility of failure as we buckle up in the passenger seat and let life take the wheel. The truth is, there’s no avoiding failure. While failure may never feel good, failure in a life of compromise can be twice as devastating.”

— Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method (via kxowledge)

The Universe's Brightest Lights Have Some Dark Origins

Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe. 

One of those satellites is our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies in the 10 years it’s been operating, and there are many more out there!

Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing - not light, not particles, nada - can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers - these are black holes that are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun - but active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) are surrounded by gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.

The disk’s heat gets emitted as light - but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We see light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.

About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes - which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity - somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.

Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.  

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources for 10 years. More than half (57%) of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.

So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.

Fermi’s helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about Fermi and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments all year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

One of my favorite “never thought of that, but makes sense” facts is that the moon looks upside-down if you see it from the other hemisphere. 

When my friend from Brazil landed in the US for the first time, she stepped off the plane and saw an upside-down moon, which is more than a little alarming when you’re jetlagged and nervous about moving to a new country.

you must insist on being curious. curious is what we should be. ask questions, research, know. being ignorant is not cool or trendy. fill your brain with knowledge.

Gravity wells.

i cannot emphasize enough how tremendously proud hannah gadsby should be of what she has created and released into this world. 

real analysis is just applied triangle inequality

of what we haven’t seen

instagram | shop | commission info

Gina Rippon: How Neurononsense Keeps Women in Their Place

The truth is that Pluto was demoted not because we have anything against Pluto, but because if we let Pluto be a planet we’d have to let Ceres be a planet too, and, like, fuck Ceres in particular.