mnl

I'm very adaptable nowadays. It's just that I think I know which things should work, but I'm not fighting society, particularly not on this.

The thing with giving the public what they want and being too much of a pragmatist is that we've seen it before.

Consider Western universities in the 17th century, they were still there churning out degrees, but modern science, mathematics and technology developed elsewhere.

I mentioned peer learning, collaboration is that.

I think everyone should be capable of working alone as well, and that has been the general assumption around as far as I've noticed. Of course collaboration is usually way more productive and also unavoidable.

But we were talking about education. Theses are individual for a reason.

A textbook should be provided for reference. Copying its contents on a blackboard isn't teaching. You still have to design your course. There's goals to meet, you have to evaluate where your students come from and your job is getting them there.

Besides pedagogy (btw, I have a master on that), in college you have to respect your students as studying adults and give them a proper bibliography, emphasizing references for independent study if they don't like your lecture notes.

The idea is becoming intellectually independent, arriving in the stage of self-pedagogy if you like. Peer learning when there's the chance.

You can't realistically expect that there will always be someone up the ladder to explain things to you. I mean, who explains stuff to the professors if it worked like that?

I learnt a lot of physics from Marion's 2nd edition (not SR there though). An older and completely forgotten fine textbook is W. Hauser's Introduction to the Principles of Mechanics. Then you jump into Goldstein (the 1980 one, again not SR there). It's a good idea to buy any Schaum book from Spiegel about this too, also for vector analysis if you can't take a course on that.

I almost wrote above that, to my knowledge and IMVHO, no one has succeeded at writing a book on Thermodynamics yet. I self-censored because that would be too flippant, wouldn't it? Lmao

There are excellent textbooks on Classical Mechanics, probably because it's a crystal clear subject and you can give a detailed account of the essentials in a single volume without handwaving. Of course everything can be improved, but it also can be muddled. If it works think twice before fixing it. Kind of what happens with Rudin and introductory Real Analysis.

On the other hand, there's for instance Optics where you basically have to condense an encyclopaedia and there's always prettier pictures. Or Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics etc that can be taught in different ways depending on the curriculum.

There definitely should be pedagogical considerations in higher education, that's lacking because it's usually an afterthought. And it also should be very clear to people getting into higher education that at some later point pedagogy must end and you have to be capable of working your way through the material.

What's the problem with a good book, age? Baby Rudin's first edition is 70 and the latest one is from 1976. It's still widely used and will be for a while.

Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old.

Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.

I think you're not supposed to share links to personal copies of copyrighted stuff that show up in search engines.

You can absolutely delude yourself with the wrong design and materials that have going for them that they're what you can afford and call it innovation and whatnot. It still is wrong design and materials.

I didn't pay attention to this until the day they were supposedly running out of oxygen. I searched for pictures to find a hollow long cylinder made of carbon fibre with end plates. That and reading their Wikipedia entry made me angry. It was obvious that the reason for losing contact days before was that it had imploded killing them instantly. My background is physics.

Yes, I own fields. No, the ROI isn't there so parishioners keep them for sentimental value mostly. It isn't worth it, it was but it's been decades that it's not.

Of course there's a "we". We depend on supply chains and working societies to even be writing anything here now. No one is willing to support anyone but we're a social species with division of roles, that's the "we".

Yes, but the thing is we have increased productivity tremendously because that's what our species does. So first we didn't need everyone working in the fields, after that we didn't need everyone working in the factories, and we're at this point in which we have to make up more and more absurd necessities and regulations so people have jobs, but we aren't going to need everyone doing that either. The clear socioethical paradigm that made sense after we realized that growing food was easier than hunting and foraging is heading a wall.

It's been done (look up New Math) and it didn't work (see Why Johnny Can't Add). You can find the rationales for the successive fashions in the abundant literature of mathematics education.

Personally my take is that it doesn't work because you need certain analytical maturity for abstraction which isn't common until late adolescence.

I've met students with true dyscalculia, which is quite unusual in my experience. The first time you realise they really can't follow it's shocking.

Let's consider that anecdote. It's obvious that Grothendieck blurted out 57 without testing any kind of divisibility. Not even by 3. If he had applied his primary school mathematics he would have noticed that neither 57 nor 87 are primes for that reason.

But 17, 37, 47, 67 and 97 are primes, so he probably applied a pattern subconsciously because you would never say 27, a drill cube, nor 77, which is divisible by 11 on sight.

I've taught mathematics at assorted levels, I think I can tell the reasoning behind quite a few human mistakes there. I analyse them, they're not usually just whatever, there's a wrong chain of thought behind the interesting ones. That's how I design exercises, tests and generally teach stuff to humans.

So I've been doing this mostly within Skype and the thing doesn't err because it's reasoning wrongly, it errs because it just comes up with stuff, there's nobody home. And that would be my professional assessment of it as a student. And yes, quite often it gives you good answers for the initial base line questions, but if you refine the problem to probe its level of "understanding" it's not difficult to derail it, it elaborates on its previous procedures while it's being steered towards a wall of nonsense.

The old Flintan was a pretty good budget chair, the arms are sturdy and great to handle it. It's kind of surprising because their attachment is just two screws on a steel tube but it's enough and good engineering I guess.

The new Flintan... I was planning to get yet another one of these. I went to the store to test the new design and nope, it's not good enough. I'd rather pay way more for a decent chair, say Interstuhl, than this.

Ikea's USP for me was great budget engineering. If they're competing only in price while increasing it anyway what's the point, anybody can do that.

They used these things: https://125px.com/docs/unsorted/kodak/tg2044_1_02mar99.pdf

It was an automatic process and colours were consistent. I find that reading theories about what might have happened 20 years ago is becoming pretty annoying. I shot some kind of Fujifilm mostly and if it was under/overexposed that was like your problem.

Yeah right, but such "phrase" isn't used in Spanish, just google it. Yet another case of plausible meaningless output.

I fix the more egregious mistakes and question dubious claims. But only if it's absolutely necessary. I might have improved translations on occasion.

If I'm really studying the text that's a different story, I use it if it's easily available and if it isn't I make copies of the relevant chapters.

It was a watershed. I don't know why the Wikipedia doesn't have a decent article about this, but you can look up the charts here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/the-web-at-2...

In 1994 few people had heard of the Internet, by 1998 everybody had it in mind.

On the other hand you don't seem to know anything about Apple. It exists today because Jobs switched from very expensive beige boxes to affordable garish iMacs. Personally, that was unexpected. Then he bet on the iPod and the rest is history.

I don't like the cult of industrialists nor Apple really (I've always wanted a Quadra though), but he was one hell of a product manager.

This is obvious, but for some reason some people want to believe that magically a conceptual framework emerges because animal intelligence has to be something like that anyway.

I don't know how animal intelligence works, I just notice when it understands, and these programs don't. Why should they? They're paraphrasing machines, they have no problem contradicting themselves, they can't define adjectives really, they'll give you synonyms. Again, it's all they have, why should they produce anything else?

It's very impressive, but when I read claims of it being akin to human intelligence that's kind of sad to be honest.

You're absolutely right. I don't understand that attitude either. This is GPL-3.0 software and there's Google to find out what it is for if you need more details. The entitlement of expecting that somebody explains everything to you for free is weird. Mocking a developer you're not paying anything for their work more so.

MacType has been around for ages. It works great without any noticeable performance hit and it makes recent versions of Windows on FWXGA screens tolerable, which is something that Microsoft haven't cared for in a decade. So thank you for this snowie2000!

Look at the binding energy curve: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.htm...

Idk, I like it a lot. I think it's modernist and that's not exactly a novelty.

It reminds me of this one: http://www.logobook.com/logo/ontario-ministry-of-labour/ , lighter though.

There's excellent rubber domes and people have been typing properly on them for 30 years. You don't need mechanical switches, you just like them.

I keep a few nice 90s' ones from HP and IBM. Sun's sucked yet people typed a lot on those. There's been decent ones from Dell and you can still get older IBM/Lenovo Preferred Pros. They're fine. I don't think switching to rubber domes back then was a cost cutting measure, that's peanuts for the prices of those systems. Noise was considered distracting, maybe stressful, actually sustained noise is. If you shared a lab with 30 people banging on Model Ms you'd agree. Mechanicals are great for gaming, I give you that.

Yep, we're getting too impatient and that's not helpful when it comes to think deeply about what we've been taught. Yet that's the most important part of any job IMO. I'll check it out, maybe you're right and he's rambling. That would be surprising to me, which is the reason I replied to your post.

So that's the best appraisal you can give of David Deutsch: "Just an old man seeking attention"?

Well, leaving aside the usual embarrassment I feel when it comes to the impromptu nonsense a fair share of HN commentators think it's worthwhile to contribute here when there's a piece of news involving physics or physicists, that's an ageist take without any content whatsoever.

There's more old people who know what they're talking about than young people. That's just the obvious consequence of having been around reading and thinking about stuff more time. You'll notice it eventually because as the song goes, time waits for no one.

I think you have opinions, on the other hand judgements need argumentation. You've simply stated that you object "to people who freely talk about negative experiences" because some other people you like a lot don't do that. That's not a judgement, it's just you expressing your personal preferences. It's not very interesting per se to be completely honest with you.

[Deleted this as it was obviously unnecessary]

I honestly can't remember about such details, but with IDE drives and 95A you were limited to PIO. You could enable DMA in 95B, it wasn't by default. It was in W98. That should make a drastic difference.