science_memes

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trailing9, in Joy

It’s inherent to grants. If you want scientists to choose their topics you have to fund them unconditionally.

Hazrod, in Vortex me daddy

Each one of these costs more than the building itself

xusontha, in So proud. 🥹🥲

I wash fancy dishes Mom, you just don’t understand

Also if I’m not careful I could dissolve my finger lol

GreenTeaRedFlag, in Vortex me daddy

I love labs were they are like “we use three tools. A toothpick you can get at any restaurant, a device invented in the middle ages that hasn’t changed and is still made by like 30 people tops, and the million dollar magic machine that we don’t really understand”

AllNewTypeFace, in PI is what
@AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space avatar

That must be from a Christian homeschooling textbook

Saeculum, in Joy

Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants. If this was even a problem, which it isn’t, the root cause is capitalism.

F4lcon, in PI is what

It’s to make the numbers simple because they aren’t important, the methodology is

TheOakTree,

I get that, it’s like rounding gravitational acceleration (on earth) to 10…

But why don’t they just use 3, preceded by a “pi is a little more than 3, but for now we’ll round down to 3.”

jadero,

Especially given that using π=3 is accurate enough for most daily use by ordinary people for ordinary things.

F4lcon,

3 or 5 is equally inaccurate. Engineers usually round it up from however accurate they need it. Scientists usually try to use it to as many digits of significance as they can.

3 or 5 is equally inaccurate, it doesn’t matter which you use if you think that’s accurate. Most people, engineers and scientists and mathematicians, use computers, but you’ll find they can get inaccurate pretty quickly too.

Again, 3 or 5 is a meaningless distinction to round an irrational number to. 3 is not an accurate value of pi in any sense and neither even is 3.14.

jadero,

I would draw your attention to the difference between mathematics and reality. Although mathematics is extremely useful in modeling reality, it’s important to remember that while all models are wrong, some are nonetheless useful.

Thus, a household gardener or storage tank owner or a builder of small boats can choose the appropriate diameter of hose, tank, or pontoon very effectively by rounding PI to 3 but cannot do so when “rounding” to 1 or 5. In these cases, it literally doesn’t matter how many decimal points you use, because the difference between 3 and any arbitrary decimal expansion of PI will be too small to have concrete meaning in actual use.

Under the philosophy you are promoting, it would be impossible to act in the physical world whenever it throws an irrational number at us.

I don’t know, but I suspect that there is a whole branch of mathematics, engineering, or philosophy that describes what kinds of simplifications and rounding are acceptable when choosing to act in the physical world.

The real world in which we act has a fuzziness about it. I think it’s better to embrace it and find ways to work with that than to argue problems that literally have no numerical solution, at least when those arguments would have the effect of making it impossible to act.

Stuka, in Joy

This system is one of the primary reasons I decided not to go into academia

eestileib, in Vortex me daddy

I’ve done time in biotech and in applied physics, and damn the gear over in the APh labs is cool as fuck.

I want an optics table for mini gaming.

I want a device that cools itself to -76F, evacuates itself to intergalactic pressures, then heats up a coil hot enough to vaporize gold for…

Well, I’ll find a use for it anyway.

Tar_alcaran,

I want an optics table for mini gaming.

A highschool lens-and-prism set is like 30-40 bucks on aliexpress, including a triple laserpointer. Not quite an optics table, but I’m assuming you don’t do your tabletop gaming with orange goggles and/or actual half-molten minis?

eestileib,

I plan on counting fringes to evaluate distances for my 40K sessions.

And yes, we use a welding laser to stimulate radiation damage.

swnt, in chemists?
@swnt@feddit.de avatar

Wait, that means that programmers are NOT single? 😂

I think something is missing there

ComradeWeebelo, in internet points

Publish or perish.

Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.

While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.

Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.

spiffmeister,

While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs

To publish open access normally costs upwards of $3k USD as well. There’s practically no point in the publishing chain where academics aren’t getting screwed.

Let’s also not forget that you have to review other people’s papers for the journal for free.

LillyPip, in Joy

When your future began to depend on what you were published in, and those publishers had to compete with corporate interests. Capitalism poisons nearly everything it touches, but especially academia.

snek_boi, in The audacity

I get that this could be making fun of the idea that a hypothesis is different to a theory, but there are epistemic stances that don’t distinguish between either. From that perspective, both a hypothesis and a theory answer the question of “What do you think is happening here?”

TonyTonyChopper, in chemists?
@TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz avatar

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/ef5573af-ddd2-4898-bf68-fb5119776e4c.jpegpretty simple, gets more fun when electrons and fractions of components are involved

D3FNC, in Joy

I’m gonna go with “immediately after the fall of the soviet union” when the feds pulled the plug on all funding for higher education in lieu of doing donuts in the parking lot and invading Iraq over and over again

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