/lit/ - Literature

>>19235117

The Dutch language is extremely difficult at least from my point of view of living in the Belgian Flanders region, very close to the border. I suspect we even might write things in a very summarized manner (from the perspective of someone not natural to Dutch) because of this. Lots of expats have told me it looks like we are very cold and ultra-objective in writing and then they are surprised when they meet us in person and it's all warm and nice. But with this said, there's a lot of literature actually, it's just not well spread to other languages as far as I know.

>>12919860

She's the postdoc, and she was in charge of telling who and what to do. I'm not saying she didn't slack all the way through, of course she did, but every lab manager and lab chief always does. The code monkey who did most of the job will never get credit until he is chief in his own project and bosses others around while doing little himself. As a PhD student I don't like this dynamic but none of us created the game nor can we change it with all the Chinese drones around.

>>12919433

Plato would be writing essays about fundamentals along with whatever meme author you want to name, such as Slavoj Zizek, Nick Land, Peter Sloterdijk, etc etc. It is somewhat humorous that you are equating all the supposedly positive values you mention with achievement, and that you equate every achievement with achievement in contemporary science. I'm a physicist and let me tell you, that shit ain't deep at all.

These are impressive technical feats - we used a set of different telescopes to act effectively as a single Earth-sized cup that could read in radio waves of ~1.3mm incoming from 50kk+ light-years away. This data is so noisy and has traveled so far that we needed codemonkey white knight and his boss I-will-make-this-paper-look-better-with-my-face to run their image reconstruction algorithm on 4 fucking Petabytes of data for 2 fucking years so they could reliably say that they used taxpayer money to stare inside the asshole of the universe. But keep in mind, these are established methods that were tweaked - they have simply put extra topping on cake that someone else baked. Not to say this is no achievement, but as for Plato? He would probably not waste his life on such ultra specialized and ultimately small contribution. On an achievement level, as a physicist I'd say it's pretty damn easy to match the "raw talent, dedication, creativity, and huge sense of scale" associated with typical work in scientific fields (because it's just that, typical work - sorry to break it out to you).

Now tell me OP, how does this invalidate, or even relate to, descriptions of society, fictional stories about human occurrences, day to day news, romances, etc etc? Let me answer this rhetorical question myself - it doesn't, and you're an utilitarian faggot for thinking so. This work is not going to feed your human appetite for feels, and if you're a Borg who can do with only "cold hard factual data", you wouldn't be on /lit/ anyways.

>>12856377

>Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

I think this one by Tyson is a good sampling of the overall feel of scientists in the 21st Century. Let me give you a bit from my anecdotal observations as a physicist who "only barely" scraps by due to not enjoying the publish or perish market as he expected:

Most of my immediate colleagues are either experimentalists or what I like to call "Hamiltonian pilots". For anyone to understand, a Hamiltonian is basically a "prescription" (i.e a function and at times some other more general rule of set transformation) that attempts to fully describe the interactions of a given system by means of the potential energies and momentum of the elements inside said system. Regardless of how abstract this is, it allows us to turn almost anything into a neat differential equation that has a neat existence theorem and has even nicer numerical ways of solving without ever holding up a pencil. Someone else versed in physics might say we are all using "Density Functionals" now, but the essence is always the same: come up with a proper description of interactions and your job is over, just put that shit in Matlab or some Python routine. There is some room for interpretation but it mostly boils down to whether or not it fits experimental data: even if you don't quite understand the experimental data itself. Furthermore most of these models have to be "truncated", i.e, they actually wield infinities many times over but we conveniently ignore them because a partial version of the solution matches the thing we want to match. The philosophy to these folks is "shut up and calculate".

As for the experimentalists, they provide the things our numerical models have to match, Usually, "things" mean only spectrum: put a sample inside a chamber, blast it with your favorite wavelength, and measure the resulting dispersion of light; sometimes you'll want the frequency of the re-emitted light, sometimes a resulting temperature, but the means of acquiring it is roughly constant in spite of the absurd technical deviations. Thanks to the streamlining of this process I have PhD candidate colleagues who are absolutely marvelous lab technicians that would probably struggle to convince anyone that light is just a traveling form of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. Even worse, what we interpret in a experiment as being those "fields", and the many conceptual problems such as the fact that it's transporting well localized energy in spite of existing all across space, are completely above and beyond this sect of my peers; if it's not directly related to the particular measurement they're doing at the moment, they won't be able to think about it without consulting Google.

IMO I kind of agree with Ted and Ellul in here (not the blowing people up part) - like most others, physicists are now tools of Technique, not the other way around.

>>12773494

Damn her gaze will hunt my dreams. It's like I'm staring inside of Heaven's burnished vault of pleasures but in reality I lie on the outside and can only feel the most pure coldness of longing

>>11773222

This thread has over 200 posts and no one has mentioned the word "emergence" in favor of "sentience". C'mon Land not even you have said it man

>>11756330

That's the great irony of life OP. You are locked out of enlightenment yet bombarded by tales of it, ever enticing you. The hero's journey ends with you realizing you were not the hero.

>>11563771

What the fucking fuck I can't stand these trolls that didn't even read the damn book. That is an insular society that is a management nightmare for the actual leaders and so unstable that a fucking savage with a designated shitting forest is enough to ruin the lives of several citizens and scar them for life. You're damn right that's a fucking ideal society and also Plato is a faggot because that ideal is more than impossible to even fathom in reality. Even Starship fucking Troopers has a society better adapted to change and external threats and that was a fucking joke - oh wait Huxley's imagined world is also a fucking joke that you just didn't get. I'm kinda glad that blind idiot capital is giving us the worst parts of BNW's segregation of societal roles so that some of us remain glutton and lumpen foodstamp NEETs who spend all day talking shit on weaboo forums about how ideal it would be to have even more addicting substances pumped directly up our rectums.

>>10765021

The game presents the story under proper light anyway and the books are (a very good, but still merely) an amalgamation of reshaped mythology accounts of Slav and a few other traditions. I'd say just play the games and do a quick reading of any of the books to see if it's your thing

>>10707589

In what level would you say it exists, anyway? Is it symbolic, is it actual, is it imaginary? Aphorisms really get my neurons processing information angrily

>>10564580
>says the pleb who thinks planescape was a literary masterpiece