Science and Math!

Ah yes, quite a menace, that. Too many good chaps coming down with omniscience these days.

I have no need for that hypothesis.

USAF needs to read this.

Sociology!

edited 29th Sep '11 6:34:45 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Oh... that is such a great, great, and horrible, horrible, and so, so true sociology joke...

Edit: I love how SMBC says that economists are Always Chaotic Evil.

~eyes Tomu~

Hey, what's your DnD alignment?

edited 29th Sep '11 8:04:52 PM by USAF713

More Lawful than Chaotic, really. :P

Lawful Evil with Good Tendencies :P

Unaligned. Pre-4E can blow me :P

edited 29th Sep '11 9:01:56 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Them's fightin' words.

D&D factionalism aside, how can you even be unaligned? You're not some sort of deep god (that I know of) and you're clearly of human intelligence. You have to have some alignment.

edited 29th Sep '11 9:52:14 PM by BooleanEarth

"Unaligned" is the 4E description of "A creature whose alignment is not significantly intense enough that it has cosmic impact."

Holy Word ain' got nothin on me.

If I remember correctly, "Unaligned" in 4e would be the equivalent of 3.5's "True Neutral"? Which is/was the default/average alignment for humans, by the way.

I was treating it that way, but 3.5's True Neutral is not the default alignment for most humans, and in fact the opposite: it's the rarest alignment in higher-order creatures, possessed only by those either too stupid or physiologically incapable of grasping moral/ethical dilemmas (animals mainly) or those so completely detached as to be beyond moral and ethical boundaries (gods). Thus my skepticism at Tomu being unaligned.

Also, I find it amusing that we've derailed a thread about science into what is arguably the exact opposite of science.

edited 30th Sep '11 7:18:43 AM by BooleanEarth

What? Religion?

Batman is-<Is shot>

A detective. So, a forensic scientist. <Unshot>

I thought he was vengeance, and the (k)night?

Shush, get back to math and science!

Well math and science make no sense in Batman comics, they're only ways for him to show off how powerful and manly and smart he is.

Well science is, I haven't actually seen a lot of math in Batman. Even the Calculator is basically a misnomer.

There's some basic cryptography when he interacts with the Riddler (those were some of the coolest episodes in the series BTW).

I preferred the ones with Clayface, myself.

Don't go offtopic now!

Also, the more I learn about Physics, the more I find out what we actually work with are approximations of the mathy stuff, and the mathy stuff is actually unsolvable save for the simplest cases.

I wouldn't say it's unsolvable, it's just that we use models for a lot of things that it would seem we ought to have down exactly. It's not "I think it's about a hundred but we can never know," it's "eh, if it's about hundred, then this equation comes out at what it is."

edited 1st Oct '11 4:53:29 AM by BooleanEarth

Nononono, I mean like the huge differential equation systems? Like, in fluids and heat transfer? That is unsolvable in most real cases. So you have to ask a machine to do millions of calculations point-by-point.

edited 1st Oct '11 5:00:57 AM by PacificState

Ah, that's true, which really creates an interesting dichotomy when you think about it. We usually have one set of equations that models the real phenomena, and then another that we actually use. My favourite physics book actually has a lengthy section on the properties of infinite-dimensional configuration spaces. Now, that's totally unsolvable for anything real. Ever. But the author basically just says that it seems to be very close to the way the universe works, and the math is someone else's problem.

I guess that's part of why there's such a split between theoretical physics and applied physics. Of course that's not even counting engineers, who are more likely to just guess anyway and use duct tape if it's not close enough.

edited 1st Oct '11 5:14:33 AM by BooleanEarth

You've just about summed it up XDD

I really like how engineers and researchers were portrayed in Eureka Seven. There was genuine respect and understanding there. One particularly touching moment was when the rebels, who owned a Super Prototype Super Robot They wanted to take it to the laboratory where it was built so they can repair it. But it's a military facility and thus they expect opposition. And they make plans to take hostages and coerce the scientists and ingeneers into it. And The Hero goes: "Nonononono you don't need to do any of this. Just show them the Nirvash and you'll have to repel them with a stick while they beg to fiddle with it!"

I mean, who wouldn't, right?

edited 1st Oct '11 5:22:38 AM by PacificState

And then you have fun things like the Navier-Stokes equations.

They work perfectly well, and they are used in practice a lot; but they are bloody difficult to solve exactly when the situation gets complex.

By the way, if someone wants a fun project to spend a few lifetimes on, a major open problem concerns whether these equations always have a singularity-free solution in three dimensions...

From what little I've read on wikipedia the formal sciences seem like a giant math asteroid passed by the world of social science and the asteroids gravity completely shredded all things humanizing except for all the souless skeletons of the former social science constructs.