What's one thing your learned at college/university that blew your mind?
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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] →[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] →[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.
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A lot of things from my Philosophy and Literature class:
In the Old Testament (or at least Genesis) a man’s semen is literally a bunch of little hims and thus impregnating a woman with a son is creating a new him, and something went wrong if it’s a daughter. Obviously that’s wrong, but if I pretend to go back in time to when nobody knew anything about biology beyond the super obvious, it makes a very basic sort of sense. More importantly, it has provided me with a lot of context for why Abrahamic religions have (or have had) the views they have on masturbation, abortion, and patriarchy.
Gulliver’s Travels is a bunch of satirical metaphors that go right over the head of someone lacking the cultural context of the time it was written. The Lilliputians are at war with other tiny people because of how they eat their egg delicacies (I think they eat it out of a bowl while the others eat out of a cup or something). This is making fun of the schism between Catholics and Protestants taking communion where one believes the bread they eat becomes the literal body of Christ while it’s more figurative for the other. End of the day, they both eat bread to worship God and cleanse their souls, but they’ll kill each other (at the time anyway) for how the other does it.
Many have heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some men are in a cave and shadows are cast representing real things, but only in an illusory way. They then leave the cave and discover the reality of those things. But what I didn’t know is who was casting the shadows. In ancient Greece around this time there was a group called the Sophists who basically told people what to think/know, ‘soph’ being the root term meaning “knowledge/to know.” Literally the knowers. These Sophists are the ones casting the shadows, claiming to give knowledge while only giving the illusion of it, trapping the men in a cave of falsehoods. What enables them to leave is what Plato calls philosophy, again ‘soph’ but also ‘philo’ meaning “love of/to love.” Essentially to escape the false illusions given by sophists and discover reality one can’t just claim to know things or be told things and take them at face value, they must have a love for knowledge that will lead them to seek it out and try to learn the best ways to seek it out.
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Did you believe otherwise growing up?
Some religious people do.
I was a jehova witness an I believed science class was all wrong and that my job was to just get through it without believing it.
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Did you believe otherwise growing up?
Not the person you asked, but it's commonly taught as science in a lot of Christian themed curriculums, including a lot of homeschool programs.
Source: friends who believed it, and seeing the homeschool program of my step-kids. We had to teach facts on the side and introduce them age appropriately to real science."It" being Creationism.
Here's something fun to learn more:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum -
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At a certain point, you need to be force which pushes you forward. I saw a lot of intelligent people fail because they no longer had the external stimulus to go to class.
Also, it is easier to manipulate people in positions of power, but you have to understand how they think and are rewarded. There is a reason why a lot of liberal arts education is focused on having people understand others.
Also, the liberal arts education of a century ago was basically a degree which was intended to make managers. Along with it, the extra-curricular activities were an important part of the education, but just what happened in class.
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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.
I think this depends entirely on the subject.
I was in a STEM degree and I learned a lot of technical skills. (Super early internet, no YouTube) In the extra classes like marketing, English Lit, I basically learned how to deal with people because of the professors like you describe, group projects, and trying to see the perspectives that didn't make sense to be initially so I could pass the damn class.
It seemed incredibly stupid at times, but making you think in ways that challenge you in ways you hate and think are stupid is actually excellent training for dealing with the myriad of brain-breaking people on this planet.
High School did this too, but less in your interest.
High School was "shut up and do it this way, because that's how it's done." This benefits the Institution.College was "sure, argue, but here's why you're wrong, or if not wrong, you need to be able to see this differing perspective, understand, and navigate it. The world is fucked, there is so much that is morally gray, that you need to learn flexibility. Show me you understand by explaining back to me what I'm teaching you. Don't just entrench your whole being in what you've been taught before coming here."
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That I had to study.
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Whether or not an irregular verb retains its irregularity depends largely on how much it is used in everyday life. If it's a common word, it's more likely to stay irregular, because we're frequently reminded of the "correct" form. If it's a rare word, the irregularity tends to disappear over time because we simply forget. That's why "to be" couldn't be more irregular (it's used enough to retain its forms) and the past participle of "to prove" is slowly becoming regular "proved" (it's rare enough to be forgotten).
yes i like language very much
Edit: typo
It’s also interesting how the past-tense of “to dive” has changed over recent generations. “Dived” is supposed to be standard, yet people turn it into “dove” so frequently, it’s becoming the new normal.
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Computer science students multiple years into the course think I'm a hacker for using the linux terminal
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Computer science students multiple years into the course think I'm a hacker for using the linux terminal
Classmates of mine who moved to Linux in college, 20 years ago, all graduated at least a semester later than I did. To be fair, I got my pirated copy of everything from them.
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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
wrote last edited by [email protected]The second one is the cantor function, also known as devil's staircase; the third one is topologist's sine curve.
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Classmates of mine who moved to Linux in college, 20 years ago, all graduated at least a semester later than I did. To be fair, I got my pirated copy of everything from them.
Granted, linux is probably much more user friendly now. Although I still see mysterious errors on boot and cannot boot into newer kernel versions. How peculiar.
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There is no god. No amount of looking for it would be enough. I was already doubtful beforehand. Having grown up conservatively, I kind of already knew it was all fake, but the deprogramming took a while.
