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”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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
science_memes
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.