Physics and Free Software

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • People talk about being there “for” someone. Here being there “with” him is more important. Something as mundane as letting him take a nap on your couch while you fold laundry. The more regular, boring or routine the better. Best if it’s something you can do without talking. That’s harder since you can’t go see each other, but maybe just leaving a video call on or suggesting it to someone else would help.


  • There are worse things in our daily lives. Like the giant pothole you hit on the way to the store. Your neighbors dog shitting in your yard. The stack of TPS reports your asshole boss left on your desk. These have a direct negative impact on your life. Regardless of their agenda, politicians will always have less impact on us than our daily does of regular human bullshit.

    Pessimistic as that may be, there’s an upshot. As many times as that dog shits on your grass, you might watch your favorite baseball team win. Or for every TPS report, you have a real sincere laugh at the water cooler. Think about the scope. Keep it in perspective.

    Note: This is meant for the people who leaned hard into the move to Canada meme last time. Obviously, there are people who’s lives will be irrevocably be changed. Check your privilege and fight for those who lack it. People of conviction don’t hide.












  • The Humanities. History. English. Linguistics. The Classics. Business. Economics. Finance. Management. Marketing. Law. Criminal Justice. Paralegal. Kineseology. Library science. Nursing. Spanish. Africana. Education.

    You get the point. So, why is STEM not enough and SHLAME-T or something else fucking stupid? Some examples. Theater. Set design. Have you ever seen the riggings and sand bag counterweights? Mechanical props? You could say those are made by “engineers”, which is true in a sense, but most often they are engineered by people who themselves have experience in theater. Why? They need to know how it works just as much as how it is used. Same with lighting and sound design

    Studio art. Painting. Have you ever seen an artist stick their thumb out at arm’s length? They are using it to get an understanding of perspective and scale. It’s geometry. Da Vinci used geometry extensively. Look at the Vitruvian Man or Mona Lisa. Little known fact. Mona Lisa isn’t finished. Da Vinci never painted over all the circles and triangles.

    Ballet. They way they extend their arms and legs is to adjust their center of mass for balance. To maintain static equilibrium. When they spin and move their arms in and out, their angular velocity increases and decreases to conserve angular momentum. In the most literal sense, they are doing physics. They can explain gyroscopic stabalization better than most STEM grad students, because they know how it feels.

    Their are loads of other examples. The mathematics of music. Sculpting with CAD. The billion and one uses for 3d printing. Geometry and mosiacs. The ‘elegance’ of mathematical physics. Poetic code. But, back to Da Vinci. The concept of a “renaisance man”, is not one who is a master of STEM. They are a master of STEAM. Take the arts away, and you lose half the genius.