Advice for overcoming social anxiety would be great.
One bit of advice I've been given is to show up early and talk to students in the class on day one. Even if the hallway is completely silent, just say hello to a couple people around you and ask something that think about today relative to the class. The more people you talk to, the more comfortable you are in the setting,
Stop caring what people you don't know think.about you.
>>8040199
its not that easy for some people.
>>8040196
in my experience, it doesn't get better. Rehearsing hypothetical conversations is a waste of time. The best way I've found is to weigh the best-case versus worst-case realistic scenarios I can think of. In particular, in a classroom setting, either I make an ass of myself by answering a question wrong as hell (or I embarrass someone else by answering a question correctly). That's survivable. Best case? I don't have to talk to anyone I don't already know.
I know this only really works because my anxiety is mild as shit, but it DOES work.
How are you getting ready for the megaquake that gonna hit us soon?
lerning calculus.
>>8040193
fapping to chinese cartoon girls
>>8040193
Isn't it just gonna hit California?
The author was fired for writing this slander piece
I thought this article was incredibly stupid. the author talks about masturbating to feynman as a kid, and then hating feynman for being sexist once he learned more and became "more cultured"
science is the study of reality.
and reality is sexist, among other things.
get over it...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions-of-a-scientific-icon/
>science is the study of reality.
>and reality is sexist, among other things.
you've got a little bit of the is-ought problem there, m88
the problem with that column wasn't that it attacked Feynman's character, but rather that it was just one long shitpost, with little to no actual point. quality standards indeed.
Feynman was a biological realist.
Only SJW social pseudo-science types think biological realism and statistical realities are "sexist"; he never stated he thought women were inferior to men, he thought they were less into science, math, etc.
And that is factually true.
The sexes evolved different interests.
This is backed by statistical analysis.
>>8040289
>Why yes I am a sex-realist
>Why yes I am a race-realist
What do physical chemists even do?
>>8040034
physical chemistry
>>8040034
just off the top of my head:
chemical kinetics
modelling various chemical systems
reaction mechanisms
>>8040125
>chemical kinetics
explosives, then?
Is "heat" actually just a cloud of photons around an electron, or are photons some constituent part of the electron itself? It would seem that it must be the latter, as collision with a muon(?) will emit xrays, it seems to be more than a simple conversion. And yet, when a photon is absorbed and re-emitted, some of its energy is lost and turned to a higher state of excitation. Therefore, they do not seem to be so granular of a unit.
What are these things? What is it for a particle to be "excited"? I'm apt to try to take a reductionist approach and describe it in terms of its intrinsic machinery, but something about quantizing the process doesn't seem quite right. I just don't get it. What is "energy", is it a high level illusion for some more basic set of factors?
>>8039955
>it's a "layman tries to get an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics" episode
oh
>>8039968
>Layman who doesn't know makes fun of a layman who wants to know.
A behavior as old as mankind itself.
>>8039971
I have no interest in QM but if I did I'd go and read a book on it instead of making shit up after reading the wikipedia page.
But that would be too illogical for you.
Do you support Boaty McBoatface?
Can the high ranked egghead in science take jokes?
>>8039938
Who the fuck cares about the name?
They never should have had the survey in the first place, whoever came up with that idea wasn't considering what would happen.
If they wanted to gain public support or whatever they should have given the survey to local elementary schools or something like that, have kids write an essay on what they think the name should be, the kids then tell their parents and it'll be good, some nice name
they should just name it whatever they want, nobody will remember or care in a month
>>8039938
Social media is the downfall of humanity.
>>8040028
Yes, thank you.
Lately, I have heard from friends that they know people who have been "brainwashed" by people just blowing this shit in their faces. It's hard for me to imagine how that exactly works since people say you'll get completely docile but I wish there was some video in which someone tried to experiment to either prove or disprove it entirely. But if we're going by the notion that it works completely, how do you counter against it? What do you do if that powder shit gets blown in your face?
>>8039857
Ingest some nerve gas
>>8039857
>Scopolamine
what in the fucking fuck are you talking about? get the shit out and do some research you don't know anything. Get your fucking tabloid bullshit out of here.
>>8039857
From what I understand if someone gets that stuff on you you're pretty much fucked. Advice is to not get too close to strangers if they're asking for directions or something like that. I don't know how effective that advice is, though.
If someone could survive slamming into concrete at mach 1 relatively unharmed, could they survive a free fall from any height?
Could they? Yes.
Will they? The odds are against them.
There are skydivers who have survived failing chutes, but that's considered a goddamn miracle when it happens.
>>8039683
Is your terminal velocity superior to mach 1 ? You've got yourself an answer.
>>8039691
Well, were talking about a theoretical human being whose body is durable enough to survive being slammed into concrete at mach 1 from about 10 feet with almost no damage. A human can't reach that kind of terminal velocity. So does this mean you could drop them from 10 miles and they'd be ok?
I'm wrapping up my mechanical engineering undergraduate degree and all of my professors are pushing me to go to grad school even though I didn't originally plan to. Would it make sense to combine a graduate degree of some sort in condensed matter physics with my undergraduate ME degree? I have a lot of really wide ranging interests from machine learning to manufacturing, but I feel like I might be able to do some interesting stuff with training in CMP.
What do you guys think? I literally had no plans whatsoever for grad school and now everybody wants me to do it.
>>8039667
oh indecision...
why can't youu work yourself out?
I'm sleepy now, time for bed.
>>8039678
Partly because all of this has blown up over the last couple weeks, faster than I can comprehend it all. Also partly because the research I'm doing goes waayy beyond the scope of mechanical engineering and I'm curious what else is out there.
My goal in life is to work on as much awesome technology as possible, and I'm trying to figure out the most effective way to do that.
>>8039682
I was trying to be clever but I guess it didn't work.
Big decisions involving a lot of outside influence and future plans often can leave you at a standstill wondering what could happen. Fortunately, life isn't exactly like ME and you can't live it the most efficient way. If you take your degree now and get a job, who knows where that will take you. If you keep going to school, you could end up teaching or with another job which will take you to who knows what. Take it with a grain of salt, which is hard considering it's your future. If you make a decision and stick with it you will realize it was the right one.
Seems like we're safe.
>>8039567
Vegetation increased in Europe because people decided it maybe wasn't the best idea to cut down all their forests and not plant any more trees. I don't know what other point you're trying to make.
>>8039582
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.html
>Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%).
95% of a tree's bulk is just comes from CO2 absorbed from the air. They're like crystals in a way; its fascinating
The best solution for curbing CO2 content in the atmosphere is to start farming genetically engineered super-algae en-masse and then pulverizing/harvesting it to make fresh, clean crude oil (that has far less pollutants) for our gas energy needs.
Too bad regular crude oil got so cheap and killed all interest in the idea
Can we discuss alcohol and how binge drinking effects the brain.
What are some good studies or articles on the subject?
>Abstract
>Acute and chronic alcohol exposure significantly affect behavior but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are still poorly understood. Here, we used functional connectivity density (FCD) mapping to study alcohol-related changes in resting brain activity and their association with behavior. Heavy drinkers (HD, N=16, 16 males) and normal controls (NM, N=24, 14 males) were tested after placebo and after acute alcohol administration. Group comparisons showed that NM had higher FCD in visual and prefrontal cortices, default mode network regions and thalamus, while HD had higher FCD in cerebellum. Acute alcohol significantly increased FCD within the thalamus, impaired cognitive and motor functions, and affected self-reports of mood/drug effects in both groups. Partial least squares regression showed that alcohol-induced changes in mood/drug effects were associated with changes in thalamic FCD in both groups. Disruptions in motor function were associated with increases in cerebellar FCD in NM and thalamus FCD in HD. Alcohol-induced declines in cognitive performance were associated with connectivity increases in visual cortex and thalamus in NM, but in HD, increases in precuneus FCD were associated with improved cognitive performance. Acute alcohol reduced 'neurocognitive coupling', the association between behavioral performance and FCD (indexing brain activity), an effect that was accentuated in HD compared with NM. Findings suggest that reduced cortical connectivity in HD contribute to decline in cognitive abilities associated with heavy alcohol consumption, whereas increased cerebellar connectivity in HD may have compensatory effects on behavioral performance. The results reveal how drinking history alters the association between brain FCD and individual differences in behavioral performance.
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201625a.html
If I black out 1-3 times a week in college is that gonna make me dumb eventually?
>>8039621
Yikes lol. It can't be good for you. As a general rule of thumb when you start to get really really drunk stop drinking. I personally always know when I'm on the edge of a blackout, sometimes though I like falling off the edge.
Nice animation os Daphnis taken from Cassini spacecraft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKAm5NrcbXU
http://saturnraw.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/raw/
She is still churning pictures out.
Cassini / Huygens has to be one of the greatest robotic exploration missions ever. The amount of stuff we've learned about Saturn from just one launch is completely insane.
>>8040225
You'd think they could have sprung for a color camera at least. My iPhone takes better pictures than that.
What's more valuable to you /sci/? Intelligence or Strength?
>>8039480
what the fuck do you think
wrong place to ask this question, go to /fit/ where some gormless drongos would genuinely consider strength more significant than intelligence.
They're on the same level
He thinks Biofags (which we all know are totally retarded) should know manifold theory, group theory and differential geometry KEK.
Does he overestimate the IQs of biologist?
>I agree to some extent with you, but not totally. Complex numbers clarify trig, Fourier series and oscillations a great deal and it's a shame not to use this. This is the same as the fact that linear algebra and stat are clarified (for some people anyway) by the abstract idea of vector spaces. The basic techniques of PDE theory are being used more and more and involve a lot of analysis. The one more advanced topic in biology that I have encountered is in the modeling of shapes. This theory goes back to the biologist D'Arcy Thompson but recently has brought in manifold theory and differential geometry. And in genomics, some very sophisticated combinatics are used. Groups do enter through groups of symmetries but, as you guessed, this is much more central in physics. Modeling with polynomials is a borderline topic: this is often not useful with degrees higher than two. Splines tend to be more effective.
>My guess is that the main problem for biologists is that being phobic about math may be a big obstacle to mastering some new theoretical approach.
http://www.neverendingbooks.org/can-one-explain-schemes-to-hipsters
http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html
As someone who was already well versed in Differential Geometry&Topology and Algebra at the undergraduate level. I still had study through somewhere between 30-50 pages of statements and proofs of important results in commutative algebra before I could even understand the definition of a Scheme.
Grothendieck's work will never be understood by the public. Just don't even try.
>>8039458
>Differential Geometry&Topology and Algebra at the undergraduate level
Just to clarify, only the Algebra part was at the undergraduate level.
>>8039458
The definition of a scheme shouldn't surprise you anymore if you studied how varieties work, brainlet.
Ever have a professor like this?
>during lecture, really stresses that a handful of topics/concepts is really important and difficult and that we need to know them
>goes out of his way to make sure everyone really understands these few core topics
>a few things are covered rather quickly, not much emphasis placed on them, ehh, not too terribly important, whatever, who cares
>these extra, "trivial" little things are never mentioned or used again
>assigns homework involving, and suggests thoroughly studying, aforementioned "important" concepts
>"those concepts will be on the test! :^)"
>homework is 90% just the super important concepts with maybe 2 or 3 problems on everything else over the course of 5 homeworks
A week or two later...
>TEST DAY
>"So fucking prepared, I'm so glad the professor helped us so much with those core concepts/ideas! Lucky that I spent do much time studying them so hard!"
>100 point test
>20 points worth of questions related to what he told us to prepare really hard for
>fucking 40 points worth of questions on material he only briefly mentioned, that even the book had little information on and next to no practice problems
>another fucking 40 points worth of questions that require using techniques that he either absolutely never told us about or said we don't need to worry about
WHAT THE FUCK
>>8039428
You showed that you have understood the important stuff by solving the homework, of course the other ones are in the exam, or are you a high schooler?
well its okay if your are in high school. Right now, Im thinking about trigonometry. No one really explains what it is but you get the idea how it works.
Oh, also,
>after the test
>"I'm surprised so many of you guys failed. I hope this was a wakeup call and that you start studying the things I tell you to really focus on. :^)"
>ohhhh I know your tricks now, you fucking gypsy sick hole
>prepare for the next test by scouring the book for every obscure little detail he didn't cover in class, getting pro at them, expecting him to pull another fast one on us
>next test is 100% only the topics he focused on in class, just made impossibly hard and overcomplicated
>highest grade was a C-
FFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCKKKK
