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Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is some pretty bad sexism in the book (because that era was sexist, I guess), but I think your comment goes too far the other way and treats sex as taboo. What's wrong with naked women, prostitutes, gambling and topless bars?
Please see my other comment; I don't think there's anything wrong with them necessarily, I just didn't particularly enjoy reading about them and his behavior just seemed sleezy a lot of the time.
> When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. Out of curiosity, does anyone know the solution to this problem? I wouldn’t even know how to approach it. (I’m an undergraduate physics major; I know nothing about fluid dynamics, but from Feynmann’s description I suspect that isn’t necessa…
In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on.
Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind working all day.
So I let it go. I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but I'll have fun making them. And then it'll feel nice using them. And then I'll work on whatever excites me.
Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up!
> When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. Out of curiosity, does anyone know the solution to this problem? I wouldn’t even know how to approach it. (I’m an undergraduate physics major; I know nothing about fluid dynamics, but from Feynmann’s description I suspect that isn’t necessa…
Surface tension plays a role. Water wants to reduce its surface area because forces between molecules at the surface pull them together. So a droplet of water will want to form a sphere. A column of water will first form into a cylinder and then break up into spherical droplets. It’s called the Plateau–Rayleigh instability. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau–Rayleigh_instability
You actually get exactly the same "thinning" behavior if somehow the stream is square shaped or anything else in cross-section.
Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…
There are three forms of cognitive workload: Intrinsic, External and Germane.
Intrinsic is things you just *know*. How to write a class in java, how to write a query in SQL, ...
External is stuff you only need occasionally, and need to look up every time: How to deploy to X, how to set up CI/CD, ...
Germane is context knowledge. Usually referred to as business knowledge.
You want to keep external cognitive load a minimal as possible. You can really dig deployment and stuff, and then this becomes your intrinsic cognitive workload and coding becomes more or less external, but for somebody who just likes to code, it's best to once do a deep dive to deployment logics, write a scaffold and stick with an automated version forever.
"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim…
Well, apart from being playful you also need to be a person who can figure out the equation for water funnel effortlessly as a high school kid. The rest of us can benefit from forcing oneself to intellectual effort
Wait, is this caused merely by the water being accelerated by gravity?
I bet most people would be able to figure out the equations for that if they got interested.
Edit: there's a separate thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931645
"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim…
Well, apart from being playful you also need to be a person who can figure out the equation for water funnel effortlessly as a high school kid. The rest of us can benefit from forcing oneself to intellectual effort
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not. It’s just conservation of volume. Imagine a thing disk of water just as it comes out of the faucet (pi r^2 v*dt) as it falls, the speed increases so the same volume of what is now thinner and longer (r decreases to account for the increase in v).
I think that you mean pi.r*2.v.dt ?
I read (listened to, technically) this book a few weeks ago because I've always been inspired by the idea of Feynman and didn't know much about him. Honestly, I actually like him less after having read it. As I guess I should have expected, because its subtitle is "Adventures of a Curious Character", it's unfortunately for me filled with many more random personal anecdotes, often involving naked women, prostitutes, g…
I don't think Feynman was that different in this masculine or promiscuous respect from many of that era's greats... Schrödinger, von Neumann, Einstein, to name a few. Feynman at least writes extensively about his deceased wife. I imagine you would not enjoy reading history too much as the 21st C Western first world attitudes on these topics are pretty unique compared to any other time.