Latest Posts by theidlerhour - Page 4

God’s Own Junkyard exhibition at Lights of Soho 

The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” published in The New Yorker (via bostonpoetryslam)

“Infinity is just an 8 that has gone to sleep.”

Real analysis professor (via mathprofessorquotes)

“When you finish a direct proof, you’ll write QED. When you finish a proof by contraposition, you’ll also write QED but you’ll also write Ta da! Because you’ll feel really great about yourself.”

Discrete math professor (via mathprofessorquotes)

I’m permitted to use terms like ‘clearly,’ 'obviously,’ 'it is self-evident,’ and 'it can be shown’ and skip over vast quantities of information to leave you wondering how it is 'clearly’ the case.

Physical chemistry professor (via mathprofessorquotes)

Terrible! This is stupid math, I hate this!

Complex analysis professor after his spur-of-the-moment example problem turned ugly (via mathprofessorquotes)

Battered Earth

A new study published by NASA researchers seems to confirm that 4-4.5 billion years ago almost the entire planet was showered in an intense bombardment of giant asteroids.

This period would’ve effected the whole planet, essentially melting the surface into molten rock multiple times over, boiling any water oceans into a steam-atmosphere and dramatically altering the geological landscape.

(Image credit: Simone Marchi/SwRI)

It is by logic we prove. It is by intuition we discover.“

Henri Poincaré (via stardust-seedling)

Great physicists and their blackboards. 

Chemistry + Physics

We want to make the world a more sciencey place. We’re doing that. With your help, we can do even more. https://www.patreon.com/FQTQ

Image via http://rainbowkitteh.tumblr.com/

Check out these scientists reacting to the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope after they successfully fixed its wonky mirror.

Then watch our music video celebrating Hubble here.

Then read all about Hubble’s 25 years in space here.

If you keep dividing the line segment infinitely you get something really interesting. It is called Cantor Dust. You get an infinite number of points with a total length of zero’ Fathom the Universe

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

Do math majors graduate with degrees or radians?

What is human existence? It turns out it’s pretty simple: We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky.

Dr. Michelle Thaller, NASA astronomer  (via psych-facts)

Ways I Am Like the Standard Model

Clearly flawed, but with no obvious path to improvement

Can go from a top to a bottom under the right circumstances

I too have a problem with hierarchy

Influenced by Richard Feynman

Too weird to be widely understood

If you froze my body and shattered it down the middle that would arguably be symmetry breaking

Lots of self-coupling

Many of my interactions are weak

Incompatible with gravity (I fell out of bed the other day)

Will break down under extreme conditions

All of my friends describe me as a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)

calculus gothic

-epsilon is negative. epsilon has always been negative. no matter how you struggle, epsilon will stay negative.

-you must write +C at the end of every communication with the entity feeding upon your work. you change your last name to +C, vainly praying that this will appease their ferocious appetite. It does not. +C

-dy/dx is a fraction. dy/dx isn’t a fraction. you can never know when it is. you can never know when it isn’t. it is always there. laughing. it owns a cat. a black cat. she sleeps in a box. plotting.

-there are parts everywhere. dismembered functions lying prone on cold white pages. you are told to integrate by them. everything only gets worse. more parts appear. then more. and more.

Class in session as Planet X starts it off with our favorite dense objects: 

Neutron Stars!

http://www.space.com/22180-neutron-stars.html

I need help. So, you know how when you’re in a bus, or in a car, and you throw something into the air and it basically moves with the bus? It goes straight back down when you throw it up, as if the bus wasn’t moving. But the bus /is/ moving so PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY

Cemetery of Dead Science on our floor this week!

you know those girls that always seem to have unlimited sports related shirts and old camp shirts and work out shorts and their hair is always soft and they’re friends with everyone

NASA Voyager Probe Experiences Three ‘Tsunami Waves’ in Interstellar Space

I honestly don't mean for this to come across as ignorant or anything like that but I just seen your post about learning kanji's and they're Chinese characters? I didn't know Japanese used Chinese characters? I've only started learning mandarin but I never knew that Japanese used the same characters?

It’s not ignorant at all, please don’t feel that way! Years and years ago in Japan there was no comprehension of such characters, but some Japanese people were sent to China as scholars to basically learn everything about Classical Chinese and due to this there was a sudden (but still rather small) increase in Chinese literacy. It still took a while for Kanji to be fully incorporated into the Japanese language, and even the two other alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are said to be based off of the way in which Chinese was written during this time, in attempt to break down the language barriers between the two nations. Until these alphabets were used the Japanese didn’t have a writing system at all! This means that immigration and visitors from China and Korea in particular have had an influence on the way in which the Japanese language has evolved, and this is most likely why there are some similarities between Japanese and other languages you may study. Chinese and Japanese characters still have particular differences, so somebody who speaks Japanese/Chinese may briefly understand a text based on characters from their original tongue, but in general the strokes are sometimes varied and the pronunciation is completely different so they wouldn’t be able to read it fluently like one might expect (even if the character looks nearly identical.) Sorry if any of my information is wrong- this is just some general knowledge that I’ve picked up from my own research and studies!

Our universe is in many respects sublime. It prompts wonder but can be daunting — even frightening — in its complexity. Nonetheless, the components fit together in marvelous ways. Art, science, and religion all aim to channel people’s curiosity and enlighten us by pushing the frontiers of our understanding. They promise, in their different ways, to help transcend the narrow confines of individual experience and allow us to enter into — and comprehend — the realm of the sublime.

Cosmologist and particle physicist Lisa Randall on the sublime and the essential differences in how art, science, and religion make sense of the universe – wonderfully mind-expanding read. (via explore-blog)

“Todd why is the office flooded?”

“Aesthetic.”

Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it—living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

Richard Siken, “Birds Hover the Trampled Field” (via weltenwellen)

MBTI is not:

An excuse to not work on improvement of personal weaknesses. 

A theory with any valid connection to astrology. 

A reason not to befriend someone of a different type. 

An excuse for any action whatsoever. 

A set of rules/stereotypes that limits your career options. 

A personality test based on four letters. 

 MBTI is: 

A method of understanding personal strengths and weaknesses. 

A tool to help understand and get along with others of different personalities. 

Based on cognitive functions, not the four letters alone. 

Something some of us have a lot of fun doing.

I no longer think she’s just being nice. She’s being kind. Which is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.

David Levithan, Every Day (via wordsnquotes)