One time I read an econonerd mentioning "purchase power dollars" or some shit like that, basically adjust by a big mixture of how many bananas/gasoline/burgers/etc you can buy with in each region.
I wonder if you could simplify that equation without sacrificing accuracy if the only value you tracked was the average cost of one month's rent on a two-bedroom apartment.
I've said it a few times on this site, but I cannot stress it enough :volcel-kamala: do not go to grad school
aw thank you :meow-hug:
All things considered I'm in a relatively okay spot and I recognize that I'm immensely privileged in so many ways to be able to say that the time I traded for a PhD wasn't worth it, but there' s just so much shit out on the internet either romanticizing advanced education or outright misinforming prospective students that I feel compelled to talk about it pretty negatively. It's also really hard to see how deeply systemically rotten academia is until you're working in it.
finishing the PhD
Thank you but I'm not quite there. I'm 6ish months away (abd as of a few months ago) per my committee's timeline and I've already started a job in industry, so it's already gotten much greener. But yeah getting to this point has been a struggle and moving from academic lab work to essentially the same thing but in an industry where people go home at the end of the day instead of sometimes not at all has reduced my depression symptoms to their lightest since 2017!
Thank you!
All I have to do is teach the shit out of these kids.
That is so cool and it sounds so much more rewarding than writing a paper that maybe 25 people read if the author's lucky.
Lmao I love that so much
Tbf evolution is waaaay simpler than gravity. “Things that are better at reproducing and surviving reproduce and survive more” is pretty self explanatory
Like, it gets a little more complicated when it comes to identifying what part actually is the self-perpetuating one, but it still basically just boils down to that as a principle.
brb going to start running a genetic algorithm to evolve a predictive theory of gravity consistent with physical experiments, GR, and QM. I'll call it earth. -some mice, probably
Well even after Darwin, the theory of evolution took a while to iron out and we're still figuring out more of the details.
I'm like a failed version of the guy on the right who learned that we don't need to solve gravity we need to build communism.
I remember doing this project for a proposal for how to make biofuels more economically efficient in order to outcompete oil :marx-joker:
fair enough honestly, real joker hours.
i'm currently "working" on my thesis on my work on a telescope camera, might just exit after the summer though honestly.
Without revealing too much to a bunch of operators at Langley, what's wrong with your physics experience? That sounds like neat work
I got into physics originally by being like an autistic child version of the guy on the right of the meme.
Over the course of grad school though, I've gotten to the point where I'm not really interested in physics for its own sake, at least not research work in it. I wanted to understand why the universe worked the way it does so I could find my own place in it. Now I understand that the thing that matters are people, and how we socially interface to build society.
Also my advisor is genuinely incompetent, doesn't know enough about the system to work on it, the work itself is essentially electrical engineering of low-level computing boards which isn't really physics, and he refuses to actually hire another person that does have expertise after our last guy left. So basically, I've just been burned out for years now and thinking about the project (not the work itself in particular, I agree, I've gotten to do some very neat things) is like borderline triggering for me.
It's crazy how we let the coolest shit on planet Earth get reduced to the same bullshit that that happens in a marketing firm
Professors as a class are surprisingly often people that were promoted to a position of incompetence.
And when that incompetence leads to asking your workers to try to work with a codebase that's thousands of lines of uncommented code to run a custom chip, well, that's just extra fun.
Professors are part of the same general petty bourgeois class as middle management. This is why professors rarely respect the picket line when their TAs and research aides go on strike.
Yup. They are such weird little capitalists too. In some sense, via normal institutional mandates like tenure, they get quasi unfettered access to a labor pool that is all at the same cost to them. It's against their collectivized interests to join students in demanding raises because their own grants and bottom lines benefit from lower grad student wages.
i don't think that will let my FBI agent track me down at least
Maybe the FBI agents are the friends we made along the way
The standard line about pure mathematics is to give examples of times when toy math or recreational puzzle problems were discovered to have massive applications in fields like encryption or engineering. But for every Euler's Theorem that finds a purpose, there are thousands of papers about quantum fruit loops.
I always think about how weird it is that science has been utterly incapable of figuring out what gravity even is and how it truly works. We have mathematical models, like general relativity, that describe what gravity does on large scales, but those are simply predictive models and don't necessarily describe the underlying reality of it. We know this because those models eat absolute shit when the gravitational field is extremely strong, like in a black hole.
i dont think it's that weird that we're struggling with things that are waaaaaaay beyond human experience.
gravity for roughly human sized objects travelling at human-achievable speeds is "solved", no?
quantum-batshit is far from us, and thus hard. billions of years of expanding space is similar.
Honestly, part of the problem is the development of science during the 20th century to be mechanistic rather than dialectical and the total idealism of modern science research in the last 20 years.
"What is space" and "what is time" are more metaphysical questions than physics ones. Doesn't mean they're not worthy of study and analysis! It gets weird when you talk about what a photon experiences, lol, it follows from time and length dilation that they don't "observe" any time and their origin and destination are overlaid.
Dialectics applied to the physical world is how we get how evolution actually works (punctuated equilibrium) or hints how quantum mechanics probably works (pilot wave).
Definitely strays into philosophical territory when you ask what something really is, but I tend to think there actually is a difference in many cases. This case specifically because general relativity is factually incomplete owing to its inability to reconcile with the standard model even before you get into the philosophy of it.
And I'm not a physicist so my opinion isn't very well informed, but the standard model has so many free parameters that can only be derived experimentally that I can't help but think we're dealing with epicycles all over again. That goes quadruple for string theory and the absurd number of vacuum permutations.
Right, I just think it's weird how long we've been stuck on this same understanding.
I certainly don't envy the state science was in for the thousands of years before we could even accurately model the motion of everyday objects, but on the other hand science is no longer relegated to rich fail sons dropping heavy objects and timing how quickly they fall. Now that there are vast numbers of extremely intelligent people dedicating their careers to figuring this out, you'd think we'd see faster progress. I guess we've just picked all the low hanging fruits by now.
See and that is where I disagree. In the U.S. we've gone from everyone with a potential interest in the hard sciences being able to take and afford taking the time to drop heavy objects and timing how quickly they fall, even if there is no obvious monetary value, BACK to only if you are a rich fail-son with an intense interest in the hard sciences can you take the time and money to drop heavy objects and timing how quickly they fall, but THIS TIME it is normally for a corporation to patent the gravitational formula.
We're literally in the middle of societal devolution.
Absolutely in the US, yes, but I was thinking about it from a more global perspective.
I think it's the difference between having a model that explains why a thing is happening vs a model that simply predicts what will happen without truly knowing why it did. Approximating the output of a black box vs looking inside and understanding it's mechanisms
There's a level when you can say you understand a specific thing though. Like if gravity is explained by the interaction of quantum particles through spacetime, we could say we understand gravity. But the particles themselves might still be a black box. Of course you can always go one layer deeper
Oh yeah fluids are cursed. Fluid simulations come in two varieties: accurate ones that barely last as long as your question and then explode, or ones with so many weird little hacks added to stop it from exploding that you can no longer be sure if it's accurate anymore.
Then after fluids there's air. Aerodynamics is still such a dark art, even with windtunnels and computer simulations. Like if certain Formula one teams or aerospace companies were to lose one or two key figures that somehow seem to be able to see air particles, they'd be screwed.
Like if certain Formula one teams or aerospace companies were to lose one or two key figures that somehow seem to be able to see air particles, they’d be screwed.
this is a certified Mark Webber moment
It's been over 70 years and there's been fuckall progress.
[Laughs in historical linguistics]
Gravity is the curvature of my ass pulling you towards it
YEARS OF COUNTING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for going higher than your FINGERS
Left hand: keep track of multiples of 5
Right hand: counts up to 5
I effectively have 25 fingers now, I cannot be stopped
You can count to 1023 if you use your fingers as binary digits.
My favorite part of algebraic geometry is that I heard one time (from one of my fellow grad students studying algebraic geometry so I assume it's true, but who really knows) that much of the fundamental basic theory isn't really in textbooks, or even papers for that matter, it's just algebraic geometers telling other algebraic geometers that some guy gave a talk 15 years ago in which he proved some theorem, so go ahead and use that theorem.
(I think there's a bit of this in just about every field. I, for example, once spent a few hours trying to find a statement of "Andreev's Theorem", and came up with like 4 different theorems, saying different things, all of them citing a paper by Andreev that doesn't seem to exist anymore before I finally just gave the fuck up and now I take on faith that circle packing a sphere works because of some result on fucking polytopes that people call Andreev's Theorem, except, of course, everyone gives contradictory statements. It's maddening.)
having studied algebraic geometry in and out of school, this explains some of the overwhelming confusion at where the textbooks leave off. there's kind of a massive gulf between what's in the textbooks and what anyone is writing papers about, which makes them incomprehensible.
left as an exercise to the reader
Might as well be carved on a mathematician's tombstone.
Also, if you like math history, read "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", the biography of Paul Erdos. He was a cool dude.
This is honestly one of my main gripes with mathematicians. Maybe everyone else is actually a super genius who doesn't need anything spelled out for them, ever, and wants to put in hours trying to dig through incomprehensible papers with incompatible and confusing notation to try and figure out what the fuck is even happening, but I really doubt it. I think as a field a little more emphasis needs to be placed on making papers comprehensible and textbooks should be written more often and, more importantly, more clearly, with as many examples as possible.
Ah well, I'm just angry about this today. It's fine, I'm leaving the field anyway because there are no jobs and it turns out I actually hate research, actually.
When they say that it's called proof by intimidation lol
To be fair sometimes it is a little obvious or not necessary for education to really dive into the details (unless you're in senior courses about those details but then they handwave all the "simple stuff"). Sometimes it's better to start with the view from 10000 feet and then zoom in on the relevant stuff, then for the people who are into the details you can let them try to work it out - which will really help them learn too. I agree, modern papers and textbooks do have a readability problem even still.
So, there's a concept in physics called Cherenkov radiation, and that happens when some particle with charge is moving faster in a medium than light can. There was a Russian guy back in the day named Askaryan who came up with a clever argument that while this normally gives you blue light to detect, you can have situations that also emit significant amounts of radiation. I was trying to understand this for a class a few years ago so I read the original paper....
It was three pages long and didn't actually bother to lay out the math that proved their argument. Had to find a much later, much longer paper of people actually showing all the details.
Haha yeah, that's just classic, really. Chances are good that a similar thing would happen to me if I ever did manage to find Andreev's paper. Maddening.
Oh! I just remembered another fun one! I once ran across a theorem which according to the paper I found it in was proven in this other paper. So I go to the other paper, and they say "your proof is in another castle (paper)", so I find that one, and it's in german, shittily typed on a typewriter, with the most arcane notation I've ever seen. So what do I do? You guessed it! I just cite the first paper where I found the theorem, which isn't great, because now anyone who reads my dissertation gets to go down exactly the same rabbit hole! Neat!
I mean, yeah, but this kind of thing makes it much, much more difficult to actually learn anything new in math, which is quite annoying. Just write stuff down where people can read it, even if they don't know someone who knows someone who was at the original talk 15 years ago, god damn it!
Yeah, I think that is a thing in a lot of different fields, probably to different degrees. All the people in the field have already trudged through the fundamental examples themselves, so why write it down? The interesting stuff is the cutting edge, not that baby stuff.
Nah for real though, it's quite frustrating. Honestly the whole field (and academia at that rate) is, I don't blame you at all for bailing. I'm sunk-costing myself through at this point.
Didn't specific what 57k a year is so I choose to believe it means 57k hexbear posts a year, achievable for everyone
I think it'd be funnier if the midwit said gravity is just <Einstein field equations>
It's too bad Einstein didn't just keep working on GR instead of getting sidetracked by working on a unified field theory. We'd probably be a little further ahead just from that little bit of a headstart in the 1920s.
