psycotica0
@psycotica0@lemmy.ca
- Comment on & they keep looking at u to monitor ur reaction😰 2 weeks ago:
I love the timing of this post, being right after the “I just had my first 3some” one. I like to imagine you finish getting plowed and being like “wow, that was amazing”, and then one of the guys being like “oh, you think that was amazing? You know what’s amazing is these pandas with bucket on their heads” and then the other guy being like “yo, after that there’s this great video I’ve got to show you” and squishing you in the middle and you’re like “nooooooooooo…”
- Comment on Forensic Poetry 2 weeks ago:
Maybe I’m confused about the current state of things, but I thought we weren’t 100% sure Will Shakespeare was even a real guy, or a single guy, but now we’re testing residue off the inside of a clay pipe we know was his and attributing plays to that?
- Comment on tuff enuff 2 weeks ago:
Physics tends to treat numbers as inputs, outputs, and sometimes constants which are also inputs, but more like calibration to make the math describe our world. Like,
ccould have any value and the math would be math, but in our universe there’s a particular value that produces useful outputs and all others don’t. So we use that one.As for whether or not it’s worth studying, I think that depends on you. Basically no physicist in the last 50 years does any real calculating in their head. We have tools for that, and they do a fine job. So if you can’t memorize your multiplication tables, who cares. Not important.
But the reasoning part is important. The problem solving part of figuring out how to put pieces together, or how to model something, is important, and also is a skill and mindset. Also, what I didn’t cover is algebra, which is a set of rules for transforming an input into an output, transforming one tool into another, while keeping all the relationships intact. Still not numbers, but again, it is a mindset. Like a language, you have to learn it and become adept at it, and it takes practice to get used to it. And that is very important.
So! The good news is there’s nothing stopping you! You can lookup a list of, like, highschool physics equations and constants, some highschool problems, and see if you can get some answers! Use a calculator, use Excel, whatever! Play around with stuff, get a feel for how it handles. The numbers aren’t the interesting part, the equations are, and how they’re used. For you, the numbers will just be something you punch in at the end to see if you got your reasoning right.
So yeah, give it a shot, there are no rules, and try not to get discouraged! 😛
- Comment on Best Friend 🫂 3 weeks ago:
Man’s leggiest tool.
- Comment on tuff enuff 3 weeks ago:
Math, or at least this part of it, is all about relationships between values. Let’s ignore numbers for a bit. If you take a long stick and put a big rock under it, then when you move your side of the stick down, the other side will move up. And if you were to measure how much you moved your side versus how much the other side moved, you’d notice that unless you put the rock right in the dead middle, the other side would move a different amount. This isn’t because something is magically making this happen, it just a property of the construction of your system. The other side just does move more or less, and it’s different depending on where the pivot point is.
Similarly, if you have two gear wheels with different numbers of teeth, and you mesh them together, and you turn one and count how many times you’ve turned it, and also count how far the other one has turned, you’ll find a relationship there too! And again, this relationship is just built into the way these objects interact. It’s just the way this system works.
Okay, so, stay with me now, saying
y = 2x + 5is the same. It’s defining a relationship, it’s building a system that’s says the value we’re calling “y”, chosen arbitrarily it could be any name, is always twice as big as “x” (also chosen arbitrarily), and then 5 more than that. It’s a system we’ve built, just like the levers or gears, that produces a relationship we want to express for some reason. And you can put them together in any way, and they’ll always describe some relationship, even if it’s not a useful one.Now, people have spent hundreds of years, depending on how you want to count, trying to find relationships that also happen to have predictive power. They’ve built systems where the relationship between “d” and “t” is modeled to be the same as the relationship between “the distance that rock flew from me” and “the time since I threw that rock”. And what’s nice about finding these relationships is that now that you know what the relationship is, now that you’ve built the system of levers and pulleys and gears that turn in just the right way, you can start guessing about the rocks before you even throw them, because this relationship you’ve got on the page is similar to the one you’ve seen in real life with the rock and the stopwatch.
Once you’ve got a bunch of these, picking the right one and combining them because more like a puzzle or a maze. I’ve got these things I know, like the weight of the rock, and the size of the Earth, and how stiff the metal in the spring I’m using to launch this thing is. And I’m trying to figure out its top speed. And I’ve got a bag of relationships I know are battle-tested. So all I have to do now is start finding relationships that depend on stuff I know to get me stuff I don’t know. And if I can link them together like a Rube Goldberg machine, I can figure out something I didn’t know using this one relationship, which is handy because this other relationship I’d quite like to use needed that thing I didn’t know before but do now.
And so I can work through a chain of relating things to things until I can get to the point where I have enough to use one of the relationships I do know that predicts speed. And once I’ve got that, I’m done! I trust the relationships I’ve used, presumably I used them properly and didn’t make any dumb mistakes, and so I followed a chain of things I knew, through tools that used those things, to tools that used the things the other tools produced, until I found a path to my goal.
The only thing stopping you from there is the complexity of the relationship, the accuracy of the relationship to the real situation, and how accurately you can measure the things you know.
- Comment on phonetic alphabet 3 weeks ago:
Oh, so L could be “lead”!
- Comment on phonetic alphabet 3 weeks ago:
“Nevermind” or “Next” would be pretty good.
L could maybe be “Lagos” because there’s two cities named that and they’re pronounced differently?
- Comment on Funny how android used to be what we now call FOSS 4 weeks ago:
I was going to say “isn’t Motorola owned by Google though?”, but then I looked it up. They’re owned by Lenovo. But they were owned by Google! In 2014, which is 12 years ago and I’m going to go crumble to dust now…
- Comment on this keeps happening 1 month ago:
violet08: Something something if they like stress, the rockclimbers should come climb me.
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here until I’m not.
- Comment on It's literally science 2 months ago:
“Hmmm, I’m going to write you a prescription for 75% more RGB LED backlighting”
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 2 months ago:
😛
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 2 months ago:
Right, but I don’t wear shoes in my own home. I’m not asking them to do anything I’m not doing. I’d also like them to not piss in my plants, despite them being a guest.
- Comment on The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. 2 months ago:
Ugh, sometimes we’ll be in the grocery store, and my wife will look at something that clearly says $7.99 and she’ll say “oh it’s only seven dollars”. Every time. I can’t believe how well that works on her. If I didn’t like her so much, I don’t know if I could handle it…
- Comment on A Baldur's Gate HBO series is in the works, will be set directly after Baldur's Gate 3 with new and returning characters 2 months ago:
He was pretty expensive then too. He’d already done the Star Treks.
- Comment on "Luke, I am your *second* father" 2 months ago:
And in a roundabout, indirect sense, Darth Vader did kill Uncle Owen. He just might not even know it…
- Comment on thank you fb 3 months ago:
Not to mention, given the labels on that one map, they seem to think Google satellite view is, like, a live camera feed from space or something they just overlay roads and borders and stuff onto?
And that it would mean anything at all for the map to just suddenly have a big snake in it unexpectedly…
- Comment on I took a picture of the back of my pizza box for you guys just in case you were stuck home because of the snow and needed something to do. 3 months ago:
I was like “haha, that’s funny” and then accidentally spent like 10 minutes finding stuff because I was curious where the binoculars could be. So… thanks I guess?
- Comment on Too late 3 months ago:
Chatta-newfy-doofy-poopy
- Comment on can you? 3 months ago:
Right!? It’d be like if you were eating a banana and you just threw the peel away. It’s against nature!
- Comment on Challenge accepted 3 months ago:
FROM THE TOP ROPE!!!
- Comment on [Video] A good cameraman says more than a thousand words 3 months ago:
That would be Toronto’s Pearson Airport! Often ranked the worst or nearly the worst in North America, depending on the survey. It’s not great…
YYZ is a pretty great song though!
- Comment on LinkedIn homepage swaps the "sign in" and "create account" buttons depending on whether you're a new or returning visitor 3 months ago:
Ugh, my bank does this. But they fucked up so bad, it’s on the client side and so slow that the page loads, and I go to click the login button, and then it moves out from under my cursor and I click the register button.
I don’t know who decided this was a thing people wanted, but they should have their UX license taken away…
- Comment on friendship ended with pi, now sigma is my best friend 3 months ago:
I know we’re joking… but just in case people don’t know, π, despite what we call it in English, is the letter “p”, which ought to be said “pee”, and was chosen for “periphery”. Though “perimeter” could be used as as well. Because even though we have the special word “circumference” for the perimeter of a circle, pi is the ratio of a circle’s perimeter to its diameter. As in, take diameter, multiply by magic constant p, get perimeter.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
I don’t know what this pic of Ron Perlman has to do with anything. Maybe he’s one of the good ones!
- Comment on Actual theft 4 months ago:
I fully support this correction, and I’m glad I know more than I did before. Thanks!
- Comment on Actual theft 4 months ago:
All of her facial features are a bit bigger on the left, like her nose. I wonder if it’s a focal length thing like this dude?
- Comment on Best "screwing around" Game Request 5 months ago:
I’ve played a bunch of Valheim with friends, but I can’t do it by myself. The openness is cool, but I can’t grind, so any kind of survival or crafting game becomes tedious so fast.
It seems like fun when other people do it, but it just doesn’t happen for me. Oh well!
- Comment on Best "screwing around" Game Request 5 months ago:
A few people mentioned Saint’s Row, and it basically wasn’t even on my radar as a series I knew about. I’ll check it out!
- Comment on Best "screwing around" Game Request 5 months ago:
All good info, thanks! Time to put some stuff on a wishlist…
- Comment on Best "screwing around" Game Request 5 months ago:
Yeah, I said in another reply I didn’t even think of Spiderman, but I actually have been playing the remaster of the first modern one, and I agree fully. It totally matches this vibe and it’s pretty great!
