51–60 of 285 posts
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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
You also need tenure, more than anything else.
Sadly yes. An argument that the current uni system should be changed to make this not so.
> 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…
I imagined it has to do with how the water coming out of a faucet is affected by gravity, and gains velocity. If you imagine two cross section slices, one near the faucet, and the other near the sink, the bottom slice is going faster than the top due to gravity. Another insight is that the amount of water (flow rate) passing through these slices remain constant. To keep the flow rate the same, it has to be narrower.…
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…
Your cognitive workload is too high. 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…
What are you basing this opinion on? :)
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As an aside, the blog in your profile link ( https://teraku.me) has an invalid HTTPS cert. Seems to be for a different domain.
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…
So, he was an overall great guy, you say?
And there is an audio book version of his illustrious escapades?
Great, have to give it a try. Thank you!
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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 ?
> 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
(15cm, to spare you the lookup)
This is one of my favourite anecdotes from that book. In recent decades, we've learned how important intrinsic motivation is, and this is a great example of it. My father was a massive fan of Richard Feynman and also happened to be extremely cynical about formal education. He believed that if you wanted to learn something, you had to take the initiative and learn it for yourself, rather than waiting for the education…
The anecdote of Feynman shows this actually well. He gained a lot of knowledge and inspiration for other problems solutions by working out the motion of the plate. But he did so by using the calculus and tools of theoretical mechanics. Those were what enabled him to do the theoretical description which then yielded the insights.
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What is it about those anecdotes that makes you like him less?
I don't know, I don't disapprove of any of those things morally or anything, but it just got old eventually. As an example, somewhere in the later parts of the book he talks about a period where he starts painting, and very shortly afterward he starts trying to convince women to let him paint them nude, including a student at the institution where he was a professor. Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with n…
As others have pointed out, a lot men in that era seemed similar in a way. I'd been assuming that going through all the changes that happened in the 60s as a middle aged man must have had a certain effect on them. Seeing expressions of sexuality go from being something very private, something to be ashamed of, to being something that the younger generation is much more open about.
For example, I remember reading Asimov when I was a kid. His earlier books were all very buttoned up, with highly intellectual and in depth discussions of galactic politics or robots. Then his later books are full of sex. I gather that Asimov in his later years gained a reputation for being somewhat creepy too.