Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

https://explainxkcd.com/2986

67 points

My research is so specific that I would doxx myself if I explained what I do.

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38 points

You grow the Hadrons for the collider?

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8 points

They hose down the court after the collisions.

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4 points

No, that’s ridiculous!

They encourage the hadrons to climb into the collider.

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30 points
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I know of only one field that is specific enough like that. Carolynne?

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8 points

Busted. Carolynne will now need to skip town, as she has done several times in the past.

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10 points

At least you have job security!

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1 point

It is very secure

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2 points

ok but like PLEASE I need to know what it is you got me curious I’m begging

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20 points

I watched some technical video the other day about a quantum guidance system and for a brief second I thought it might be a flat earther conspiracy because a handful of the field specific jargon in the beginning sounded made up.

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Is that the quantum gravity detection thing? Basically a way to map the entire gravitational field of earth giving each 3D space a unique position without the need for GPS?

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7 points

The specific one I was watching was just talking about dead reckoning based on the same principle, but mapping seems like it could be a natural next step for the tech.

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2 points

Care to share a link to the video? A way of mapping the world without GPS sounds interesting

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17 points

this is especially true in math. everybody’s chilling when it’s just calculus and linear algebra. but then it becomes about manifolds, orbifolds, presheaves, adjoints, limits, modules, homology, etc.

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11 points
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I’m not chilling. Second try on multivariate analysis in a week. I don’t want to fail.

(Yes I’m procrastinating by writing this comment)

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5 points

that’s fair. i remember multivariate being a bit rough back in the day. i feel like a lot of the difficulty with it might be due to how many shortcuts are taken when explaining things in singlevariate analysis, since a fair number of core concepts and tools don’t translate super well into the multivariate case.

i think the worst offender is the idea of the derivative as “the slope”, since that makes it quite hard to guess what the multidimensional derivative should be, and it makes the notions of gradient and partial derivatives a bit suspect. but some of the ways they teach integration in singlevariate analysis also don’t translate super well.

i feel like with calculus a bit part of the difficulty is in building up the intuition about how things work and what things mean, but my experience has been that that’s not a huge part of calculus courses. knowing some of the history about differentials and infinitesimals can also help a bit too, since that’s how calculus was first done, and it helps to understand the notation as well.

i hope some of this helps, and feel free to ask if you have any questions about some of the concepts

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2 points

It should be easy, it’s just analysis but with an added dimension, basically. How is it so hard? How is it that the more I’m “learning” for that damn math exam the less I know? Why do I need it in the first place? Why have exams at all? I know what I know, and it’s not like I’m learning anything by preparing for them. I hate exams so much, it’s so stressful.

I doubt you have the answers to that, even if you did, they wouldn’t really help. So let’s ask something useful, since you’re offering.

What the hell is a total derivative, and why is it suddenly the same as a tangential plane?

Why is the gradient just a collection of the first partial derivatives? How’s a tuple of them any useful? Apparently it’s showing the direction of steepest ascend or something? I don’t get it.

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4 points
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Math quiz: Find the 2 words in the list that are made up.

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2 points

i wish some of them were made up

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5 points

Technically, all of them are made up.

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15 points

small slice: The stuff you can observe with equipment affordable to schools and colleges
big pie: The stuff you can observe with orbital telescopes, particle accelerators, 2-mile-long drills, deep sea submarines, or not at all

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1 point

The number one thing I… eh, never mind.

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