HN user
I lick rocks
My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.
In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
Sounds like fun! Do you remember the name of the software?
Phys.org often bumbles headlines (and implications) a bit, but I like to use it as a stepping stone to the original paper (which I likely wouldn't have heard of otherwise).
Sadly the authors paper isn't easily found on the public internet for free but the abstract [1] describes coupling an idealized ophiolite obduction model with a carbon box model, giving δ13C predictions that align with known examples of cooling in rock record. As you rightly point out, this doesn't replace well studied phenomena like Milankovich cycles, but it does suggests there's more the the story. I have to say I'm not terribly surprised though, weathering of (ultra)mafic rocks has been examined as a sequestration method for at least 5 years [2] but it's still kind of neat to see models matching the rock record.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01342-9 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps.
The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.
QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
Look to Google Earth and Caltopo.
These two already dominate more casual mapping
The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Extremely clear and satisfying lectures that covers all of basic physics. Much of it is accessible to anyone with some spare time and first year university!
Are there many bioluminescent creatures in North-Central South Africa?
I love nature documentaries, I'll have a look at that one!
I agree, lots of animals use tools in one way or another. Starting or even just controlling a chemical reaction does seem like a big step above mechanical methods though. I wouldn't really be that surprised overall if we eventually discover that H. Naledi or other hominids had some control of fire. I will be surprised if the Dinaledi site turns out to be the first evidence of it
I'll believe it when they release geochemical data for the soot and plot the locations of the "hearths" on the cave map. Where is the published peer reviewed paper associated with this announcement?
This discovery was made in 2013, in a cave that was believed by the SA caving community to be well understood. Where are the hearths they claim to have found? Why did nobody in the previous 9 years of exploration and decades of caving see this? What makes them certain these are not carbide dumps from humans in the last 50 years? [1] Or organic matter that may have fallen from roof cracks? Also, what has happened to the 1500 bone fragments they have excavated
Baboons in modern times are known to navigate caves without fire [2], the paleoanthropology community should still consider the possibility that H. Naledi had no need for light to place their dead these caves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide_lamp [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9letjf7ZZGA
The systematic teaching of math at some universities doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. Why should linear algebra be taught after calculus? Why is number theory basically ignored by most of engineering and every other science at the undergrad level?
Something important for anyone engaged in technical design work is judgement. Ralph Peck, a famous geotechnical engineer has a good video lecture. It's a bit specific to civil engineering, but the broad strokes of exposure to history of your field, recent developments, a sense of proportion, and commitment to professional development are applicable everywhere.
https://peck.geoengineer.org/resources/videos/singleVideo/41
1) Has the Riemann hypothesis been solved yet?
I'd have to think for a while for the others
The phrase
here's our list of 10 of the best.
seems particularly listicle-y, especially with the full stop rather than a colon or nothing
Interesting suggestion!
It seems there is not a complete english translation available from a single translator, or one affiliated with any university/previous scholarship at least. I couldnt find any in a quick search of a few major city library catalogues and major universities in NA. I did find a few journal articles about the book though, and it was very easy to find other Solzhenitsyn books in grade school and other libraries.
The pdf translation below has a typo in the very first line of the introduction and the first chapter was translated by someone(s) on 8chan {1}. So I'm not terribly surprised that typical public libraries don't have a copy.
{1} https://ia803108.us.archive.org/2/items/200YearsTogether/200...
(side note I love LibGen too, but I think it's good that a physical, public library is making a point of making their e-catalogue available to teens)
real banned books you almost certainly wouldn't find in a public library
Do I dare ask what they are?
From a NAND gate to Tetris was excellent. Informative and obvious
Any chance you could summarize their statements?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-022-00626-2 reports recent advance in the sulphur stabilization.
It seems pretty promising to me!
I like the concept. What happens if a company claims to have removed their recommendations yet has not? Would this even be enough to cause a scandal with real consequences?
In the western world the vast majority of people I know already have zero issues being tracked, advertised to, recommended to, and generally manipulated for "engagement" and profit. A weak law, passed too early and without widespread cultural significance would serve only to give a tighter, more insidious grip on a typical used's view of media, music, and reality in general.
I find I can sketch much quicker than I can CAD. Some of my friends are the opposite. They use CAD with two mice that have buttons on the sides with hotkeys.
I like sketching because what I want is an impression of a scene in my mind. My friends seem to want more of a replication, which I think takes too much time and never looks the same as my mind.
Repetition is the mother of skill. Pick something and practice daily, even 10 min.
I have a pet theory that the features driving men out of higher education entirely are the same driving women in higher education out of CS/phys/eng:
- mistreatment from/conflict with one or two administrators/teachers/profs
- feeling out of place or different from peers
- missing a small bit of foundation knowledge, feeling incompetent but no clear path to follow to catch up
- having obligations outside of education/training (ie family, working to survive)
- being more interested in other aspects of life, but having no way to do both simultaneously
A boy who's a little slow reading hates grade 11 english but likes shop and drops out of high school. He'll quickly realize he can ignore the teachers he hates, never do homework, and still make good money working construction. This isn't so different from a girl who didn't program in high school, fought her way out of a poor neighborhood into university but is sick of feeling different and constantly explaining her interest in strong emotions and slam poetry to upper/middle-class nerds in first year engineering who think that programming Raspberry Pis is a fun way to relax after finishing circuits homework. As soon as she meets some students in the geography department she feels way more included and "normal" and transfers asap. She still thinks computers, software, and circuits are cool and uses them in GIS classes, but electrical eng classes never talked about the social implications of their work. These examples are simplifications of friends of mine from high school, but I still think they're useful.
It would be benefit a lot of people if it were more normal to:
a) take 1-2 years more than normal to finish high school
b) have time between high school and university to work (not just menial jobs)
c) go to a technical/trades school, (work) and then go to university
d) take more then 4 years to complete a bachelors
e) have at least one class/year that forces good group cooperation in a non-technical task
Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker is a fun, accessible, and fascinating explanation of how math can be a big game.
The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold really is great. It comes up a lot on this website but it was a great follow up, a good bridge from the fun almost hack-y math to a more "serious" approach. This led me to:
Computability and Logic by George S Boolos. A standard textbook in universities across North America (and maybe further?).
In the end I didn't become a mathematician. I hardly use advanced math compared to many other engineers and scientists but the ideas have stuck with me for years, and I think my life is richer for knowing them
Sadly it's not that simple.
Trees alone do not absorb much CO2 past the lifetime of the tree. In the vast majority of the world they die, decompose, and release a lot it again. To store this carbon (and energy) long term the material needs to be buried. Mangrove forests are excellent at this because anything that dies is quickly covered by sand into an anoxic environment where it can't be broken down by bacteria that create CO2. Over a few thousand years the sand layers really pile up. Over a million or so it'll turn to sandstone and coal/oil/methane). Hopefully a shale develops overtop or that methane is just gonna escape straight into the atmosphere anyways.
Melting eutectic salt isnt much more useful. Once you have molten salt, now what? Bury it? It will equilibrate with the ground. You might as well have just let the ground absorb the energy and saved the trouble of making panels.
Fun fact: Not all life on earth is a direct result of the sun's radiation! Sulphate reducing bacteria are regularly found in ocean floor vents and deep in caves, completely independent of solar events.
May I suggest Hematite?
Has anyone considered that growing up too slow may also be a problem? PG wrote about the existential pain of spending 4 years of suburban high school doing essentially fake things all the time.
I haven't heard of any studies looking at the continuous removal of teenagers from "real" adult life affecting teenage depression and anxiety (which are apparently rising), but I wouldn't be surprised if a relationship is found
“All models are wrong, but some are useful” - British statistician George E. P. Box. Any model could simply be made badly, and even well designed models are susceptible to garbage data in giving garbagey results.
Lets consider groundwater contaminant models. Do they precisely predict what is seen onsite? Most of the time engineers never have the budget to know how right/wrong it is. They start with sparse data, apply principles that we know are "wrong" but work well enough at the scale of the problem (ie flow over 500m rather than flow around a single sand grain). At the end, typically they only know whether or not the original problem is still a problem for the client. If it's solved, the model is right! (enough)!
It's more important to consider the implications of the model for the most practical questions possible. Colleagues of mine are trying to tune climate change models based on data from ancient lake sediments. Personally, I dont care whether their model predicts 2 degrees of change or 1 degree. The broad strokes of the climate picture are not cheerful, and the mathematical and field specific details of such models are intricate yet simultaneously boring as hell. There is so much to know that arguments are best left to people who care enough to complete a PhD in the subject. Widespread bikeshedding over particular X,Y,or Z model is actively harmful to solving the global problems we'll face. Like whether to build dikes levees or to just displace huge swathes of population to higher ground. How can we develop infrastructure that can move transport food no matter what, or take water from flooded areas to droughted ones? Good climate and sea level rise models could help with specific details (5m dike or 10?), but the fundamental sociopolitical questions don't require much numeric precision. (50 year dike or 10 year dike so everyone can move?)
Fluid mech on the whole has a lot left to solve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30011260 looks at this a bit.
Author confirmed that superradiance, backreaction, and quasi-normal radiance are all observable in the fluid analog. These observations will likely prove useful for fluid mech as well as astrophys
Some might call it the sublime:
"fascinated but also a bit unsettled" "existentially insignificant but strangely exalted" “delightful horror” and a “sort of tranquility tinged with terror.”
from https://erraticus.co/2018/12/04/sublime-experience-kant-scho...
The advantage of a degree in compsci/electrical eng/computer eng/software eng is that really smart people tell you interesting things for 4 years straight. Smart people with a huge amount of subject experience tend to stick to doing their job in the working world, and maybe if you're lucky a couple of them will mentor you over the course of your whole career. In undergrad you'll meet 10+ a year.
When your 4 years (+/- 1) of listening to smart people is over, you've probably learned something. This probably includes things you didn't know you wanted to know. I didn't know linguistics existed until it was the only elective that fit into my timetable. I ended up enjoying it so much I nearly changed majors.
Theres value in a getting a degree to get certain jobs, but msot of it is in the sheer volume and breadth of things you learn. It's also a great excuse to socialize with people who are interested in the same things.