What's one thing your learned at college/university that blew your mind?
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That a diploma doesn't mean shit beside someone being able to say what their teacher want them to say... but that was not really new, it was just a lot more sad to experiment as naive me was hoping for something more.
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In control dynamics u have a transfer function and need to determine the Routh-Hurwitz criterion it will sometimes give u division by 0 errors so u sub in a variable and say its almost zero but not quite and continue on like nothing happened.
Eg determining the stability of a system with characteristic eq of A(s) = 3s^4+6s^3+2s^2+4s+5=0
If u do a RH array u will end up with a zero which then will give u (4*0β30)/0 so u sub in π for 0 giving (4πβ30)/π and continue on. That eq obviously evaluates to negative infinity. U are essentially just saying π is an infinity small positive number ie it is the number next to 0 on the positive side.
EDIT: If the markdown is messed up the eq should be
A(s) = 3s**4+6s**3+2s**2+4s+5=0When using ** as super notation
control dynamics
Well, that's a relief! That's a completely different kind of engineering than I studied, so I can stop being worried that there was something I was supposed to have learned but didn't.
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I learned women actually don't have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people's lives in present day. And that it's about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don't help or silence victims.
I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren't their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don't know people's values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you'd otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don't know before you ask.
I learned that humor isn't always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an "ironically bigoted" joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt "ironic" racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.
None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an "elite" engineering college.
I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.
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I know people's experience varies on this but I absolutely hated high school, and only discovered that I enjoyed learning as a process because of uni. And I'd probably still be small minded and somewhat bigoted if I hadn't gone. Simply because it forced me to critically evaluate my own views and also exposed me to a number of types of people I wouldn't have encountered otherwise.
It's a shame it's so expensive in some countries, because I think it's important to have a well-educated society more broadly.
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"I have proven"
That would be the past participle wouldn't it?
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That would be the past participle wouldn't it?
Yeah, that's what I said earlier.
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Being able to communicate effectively is critical in a public speaking role. Sadly, I learned this in the inverse - class was taught by a TA who didn't speak English, professor was never available, whole class failed, no one cared. Still fills me with rage to this day. But, it did make me a better public speaker, so I guess that's something.
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That teaching isn't the point. It's getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.
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control dynamics
Well, that's a relief! That's a completely different kind of engineering than I studied, so I can stop being worried that there was something I was supposed to have learned but didn't.
Its general mechanical background stuff
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.
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Its general mechanical background stuff
My degree is in civil.
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That Earth was in fact way older than 6000 years.
Did you believe otherwise growing up?
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My degree is in civil.
Ahh. Mechanical before shit starts to move.
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Using physics (mechanic) you can become better at playing billiards and snooker.
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The Twin Paradox (special relativity). Every time I wrap my head around the idea I lose it a few weeks later an it's a mystery all over again.
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What does that mean?
Which part
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I learned women actually don't have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people's lives in present day. And that it's about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don't help or silence victims.
I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren't their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don't know people's values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you'd otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don't know before you ask.
I learned that humor isn't always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an "ironically bigoted" joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt "ironic" racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.
None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an "elite" engineering college.
I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I learned women actually don't have the same access to higher education as men.
You're right - women have significantly better access to higher education than men, and have demonstrably better education outcomes as a result.
For example, women are significantly more likely to receive scholarships and grants than men in undergrad.
Partially as a result of this lack of access, men have dropped to almost 40% of undergrad students, while women make up nearly 60%. Women also receive more doctorates than men, and almost twice as many Master's degrees as men.
I'm not trying to minimize the bigotry that you observed (or faced), but it's objectively false to claim that women have worse access to higher education than men.
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That teaching isn't the point. It's getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.
Students came 2nd.
Right. Yes. At least second. For sure.
There's not like, another kind of research we should save a spot for? No? Okay. 2nd is good.
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Functions on real numbers are incredibly werid.
There are continuous but nowhere differentiable functions.
There are continuous and monotonically increasing function that goes from 0 to 1 (i.e. surjective function [0,1] β[0,1]), that "almost never" increases; specifically, if you pick a point at random, that point will be flat on said function with probablity exactly 1 (not almost 1, but exactly 1, no approximation here).
More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain word, if anyone told you "a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen". They have lied to you.EDIT: the last one (crossed out) is wrong. Intuitively "topologists' sine curve" contains two parts; you can neither find a distinct seperation for them (i.e. "connected"), nor can you draw a path that connects the two part (i.e. not "path connected"). However, topologist's sine curve is not the graph of a continuous function.
Can you please elaborate on that second one, or drop a name so I can look into it? Sounds very counterintuitive and like something I wanna know
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Functions on real numbers are incredibly werid.
There are continuous but nowhere differentiable functions.
There are continuous and monotonically increasing function that goes from 0 to 1 (i.e. surjective function [0,1] β[0,1]), that "almost never" increases; specifically, if you pick a point at random, that point will be flat on said function with probablity exactly 1 (not almost 1, but exactly 1, no approximation here).
More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain word, if anyone told you "a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen". They have lied to you.EDIT: the last one (crossed out) is wrong. Intuitively "topologists' sine curve" contains two parts; you can neither find a distinct seperation for them (i.e. "connected"), nor can you draw a path that connects the two part (i.e. not "path connected"). However, topologist's sine curve is not the graph of a continuous function.
wrote last edited by [email protected]More impressively, you can have function that is continuous, but you cannot find a connected path on it (i.e. not path connected). In plain words, if anyone told you "a function is continuous when you can draw it without lifting your pen". They have lied to you.
You are misrepresenting an analogy as a lie. Besides that, in the context where the claim is typically made, the analogy is still pretty reasonable and your example is just plain wrong.
People are talking about continuous maps on subsets of R into R with this analogy basically always (i.e., during a typical calc 1 or precalc class). The only real issue are domain requirements in such a context. You need connectedness in the domain or else you're just always forced into lifting your pen.
There are a couple other requirements you could add as well. You might also want to avoid unbounded domains since you can't physically draw an infinitely long curve. Likewise you might want to avoid open endpoints or else things like 1/x on (0,1] become a similar kind of problem. But this is all trivial to avoid by saying "on a closed and bounded interval" and the analogy is still fairly reasonable without them so long as you keep the connectedness requirement.
For why your example is just wrong in such a context, say we're only dealing with continuous maps on a connected subset of R into R. Recall the connected sets in R are just intervals. Recall the graph of a function f with domain X is the set {(x,f(x)) : x is in X}. Do you see why the graph of such a function is always path connected? Hint: Pick any pair of points on this graph. Do you see what path connects those two points?
Once you want to talk about continuous maps between more general topological spaces, things become more complicated. But that is not within the context in which this analogy is made.
