Latest Posts by chaos3612 - Page 7

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

the thing about everything is that it all gets easier with practice, so be careful what you practice 

I think schools need to emphasize more that they aren’t teaching specific facts but rather skill sets

are you gonna remember your algebra formulas ten years from now? Probably not. Are you going to be able to use basic logic to solve problems? Well hopefully with some solid logic practice, such as math, yeah!

did Shakespeare really mean that all of the themes of dark and light in his plays indicated internal struggle and opposing forces? Who knows! Is the ability to critically analyze a piece of writing and see larger trends and symbols useful? Hell yes!

Schools should really be upfront with students that no, this isn’t going to be wholly applicable, but any amount of school will develop your self-discipline and  overall versatility- and that’s a good thing 

Things to bring back in books:

Chapter titles

Actually having a synopsis on the back instead of reviews no one will read

People don't stop things they enjoy because they reach a certain age

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more. […] You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have [a system of education using computers], then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.”

— Isaac Asimov  (via 01030104)

Could you imagine?

You’re Charlotte Scott. You’re determined to get your math degree as a woman in the late 1800s. You fight sexism and condescension every day and somehow wrangle your way into a special and prestigious exam. And then this happens:

“In 1880, Scott obtained special permission to take the Cambridge Mathematical TriposExam, as women were not normally allowed to sit for the exam. She came eighth on the Tripos of all students taking them, but due to her sex, the title of “eighth wrangler,” a high honour, went officially to a male student.[1]

At the ceremony, however, after the seventh wrangler had been announced, all the students in the audience shouted her name.

***

The man read out the names and when he came to ‘eighth,’ before he could say the name, all the undergraduates called out ‘Scott of Girton,’ and cheered tremendously, shouting her name over and over again with tremendous cheers and waving of hats.

— contemporary report, “Charlotte Angas Scott (1858–1931)” in Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook[1]

***

Because she could not attend the award ceremony, Scott celebrated her accomplishment at Girton College where there were cheers and clapping at dinner, a special evening ceremony where the students sang “See the Conquering Hero Comes”, received an ode written by a staff member, and was crowned with laurels.[1]

After this incident women were allowed to formally take the exam and their exam scores listed, although separately from the men’s and thus not included in the rankings. Women obtaining the necessary score also received a special certificate instead of the BA degree with honours. In 1922, James Harkness remarked that Scott’s achievement marked “the turning point in England from the theoretical feminism of Mill and others to the practical education and political advances of the present time”.[1]“ — wikipedia

😭♥️

Later on, Charlotte became one of the core mathematics faculty of Bryn Mawr College, and also is seen as one of the key figures in the transition to abstract mathematical proofs, as well as the first female member of the New York Mathematical society, later known as the AMS. What a cool lady.

being honest with each other is underrated …. honesty brings about meaningful connections and lessens the feeling of alienation ….. thinking that we have to present the best versions of ourselves at all times is a result of living in a capitalist society that reduces us to our most “admirable” traits and not the whole spectrum of feeling which is what unites us all as human beings …..

Burn. The evidence.

“Symbolic integration” is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn’t matter because it’s purely symbolic.

Differentiation and Integration [Explained]

Michelle Obama: "I have been at every powerful table you can think of...They are not that smart"

Truth 

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes (Caroline Criado-Perez, The Guardian, Feb 23 2019)

“The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man.

But a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity.

In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. (…)

Over the past 50 years, breast cancer rates in the industrialised world have risen significantly – but a failure to research female bodies, occupations and environments means that the data for exactly what is behind this rise is lacking.

“We know everything about dust disease in miners,” Rory O’Neill, professor of occupational and environmental policy research at the University of Stirling, tells me.

“You can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s work’.” (…)

All Tufekci’s photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and “for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male hands”.

Voice recognition could be one solution to a smartphone that doesn’t fit your hands, but voice-recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. (…)

When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a “comprehensive” health tracker.

It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum and copper intake.

But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker. (…)

When Apple launched their AI, Siri, users in the US found that she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers.

Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’”

From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists, to map apps that fail to account for women who may want to know the “safest” in addition to “fastest” routes; 

to “measure how good you are at sex” apps called “iThrust” and “iBang” the tech industry is rife with other examples.

While there are an increasing number of female-led tech firms that do cater to women’s needs, they are seen as a “niche” concern and often struggle to get funding. (…)

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. 

Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard.

This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have noted. Women are “out of position” drivers.

And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. (…)

Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in.”

| Solitude |

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Almost done with my concentration!

The topologist’s sine curve.

Limts: f(x)=sin(1/x) is a rare example of a function with a non-existent one-sided limit. More technically, f(x)=sin(1/x) is defined for all numbers greater than zero, yet the limit as x approaches zero from the right of f(x)=sin(1/x) does not exist. This can be reasoned by considering the value of f at x-values near zero. Informally, f(near zero) could be 1 f(just a bit closer to zero) could be -1 so f(numbers near zero) does not seem to settle on a single y-value.

Continuity: Note that f is continuous for all numbers greater than zero but not continuous at x=0 since f is undefined there. Even if we were to “fill in the bad point” and let f(0)=0, the function would still not be continuous at zero! (note this is the natural choice as sin(0)=0). We can see that the adjusted f is still not continuous at zero since the sequence x_n=1/(pi/2+npi) converges but f(1/x_n) is the sequence (-1)^n which does not converge. This is similar to the argument above. In other words, closing in on x=0, we can keep finding x values such that f(x)=-1 and f(x)=1.

Topology: In topology, the topologist’s sine curve is a classic example of a space that is connected but not path connected. This space is formed in R^2 by taking the graph of f(x)=sin(1/x) together with its limit points (the line segment on the y-axis [-1,1], the red line on the second image). The graph of f is connected to this line segment as f and the segment cannot be sepearted by an open disc (no matter how small). This can be informally reasoned by the zooming illustration in the second image. But the space is not path connected by the sequence argument above (there is no path to the point (0,0)).

Image credits: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TopologistsSineCurve.html and https://simomaths.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/topology-locally-connected-and-locally-path-connected-spaces/

https://twitter.com/dreugeniacheng/status/1097969617014804480?s=21

my favorite Millennial Thing™ is when a group of us are standing around and talking and someone asks a question that no one knows the answer to and suddenly it’s a race to get out your phone and google it and be the first to know, and then someone starts reading the Wikipedia article about the thing aloud to everyone else, and what started as a casual conversation is now A Learning Opportunity and we all walk away a little more knowledgeable about a random topic

Like, Boomers hate when we do that, but I think it’s one of the best things about us.

So long as we have internet or a cell signal, all of the world’s collective knowledge is at our fingertips, and damned if we aren’t going to use it.

Whale powering up to the surface and breaching

“Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.”

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

People say, don’t give up on your dreams. But sometimes that’s unavoidable. Life throws you the equivalent of an Olympic sharpshooter losing their hands in a tragic beer pong accident every once in a while, and you can’t change that. And sometimes, you just find out your dreams weren’t all that good of an idea in the first place. My dream was always to work in academia and teach medieval literature, and even if everything had gone one hundred percent right for the last decade, I probably still wouldn’t be doing that right now. The job market is… tough in the humanities. It is tougher still if you are interested in something as deeply unfashionable as Old English. But even if that wasn’t the case–well, life comes at you with a sharp knife and it can peel your dreams away one by one, and leave a lot of raw flesh behind.

I am stubborn by nature. I don’t like to give up on the things I want. And just because your future isn’t shaped how you’d like it to be doesn’t mean you have to surrender it forever. What I am struggling to learn, to really internalize, is that there is a big, big difference between giving up on your dreams and giving up on your values. Just because you can’t be an astronaut doesn’t mean you can’t be an astronomer. Just because you can’t fight dragons doesn’t mean you can’t save lives. Identifying what values your aspirations fulfill, and figuring out other ways of achieving that fulfillment is really important.

I’m struggling a lot right now with understanding who I am and what I really want my life to look like. It feels a lot like failure. What I value hasn’t changed, though. I have not surrendered that, and I never will. Perhaps that just means that, when it comes, success will look a little different than I thought it would when I was younger.

“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that.”

— Biance Sparacino (How To Ruin Your Life Without Even Noticing That You Are)

dude seeing these Mega high quality images of the surface of mars that we now have has me fucked up. Like. Mars is a place. mars is a real actual place where one could hypothetically stand. It is a physical place in the universe. ITS JUST OUT THERE LOOKING LIKE UH IDK A REGULAR OLD DESERT WITH LOTS OF ROCKS BUT ITS A WHOLE OTHER PLANET? 

Lissajous curve table

Timelapse of Europa & Io orbiting Jupiter, shot from Cassini during its flyby of Jupiter

Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

The Royal Institution: Eugenia Cheng — “How to Think Like a Mathematician”

“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.” ― Vincent Van Gogh

I often wonder how many more scientists we’d have if we congratulated kids for working hard rather than praising them for being smart. We need to get rid of the myth that science is only accessible to an intellectual elite.