/sci/ - Science & Math

/sci/, I've been a chronically bad math student, and by extension, a bad chemistry and physics student. However, now that I'm out of school I'd like to take a crack at learning about these things at my own pace (a pace which would be pretty swift and consuming once my interest is really sparked). How do I get started teaching myself in these subjects, esp. in a way that won't make me want to blow my head off due to boringness?

21
female
Sexual preference: mostly other women, but some guys can be cute.
Number of times you have had sex: a normal amount of times with my long-term partner...i don't keep a tally
Country: USA
Ethnicity: white
Class within country: lower middle
Do you think are are smarter than most people around you? Nah, just more inquisitive.
Are you an academic underachiever(y/n)? Y
Languages that you speak: Eng, Spanish, ASL, Esperanto.
Time it would take you to read an average length book and absorb information properly: Sometime between a day and five years depending on my attention span.

>mfw every girl on /sci/ likes chicks

The words themselves are marvels, each one perfectly designed for its use. The older, more powerful ones are membranous, packed with layers of different meaning, like one-word poems. "Articulated," for instance, first indicated a division into small joints, then, effortlessly, signified the speaking of sentences. Some words are gradually altered while we have them in everyday use, without our being aware until the change has been completed: the ly in today's adverbs, such as ably and benignly, began to appear in place of "like" just a few centuries ago, and "like" has since worn away to a mere suffix. By a similar process, "love-did" changed itself into "loved."

None of the words are ever made up by anyone we know; they simply turn up in the language when they are needed. [...] Most new words are made up from other, earlier words; language-making is a conservative process, wasting little. When new words unfold out of old ones, the original meaning usually hangs around like an unrecognizable scent, a sort of secret.

(Excerpt from "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas)

There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere, living out his brief life in a social enterprise that extends back into what is for him the deepest antiquity (ants die at the rate of 3-4 per cent per day; in a month or so an entire generation vanishes, while the Hill can go on for sixty years, or, given good years, forever), performing work with infallible, undistracted skill in the midst of a confusion of others, all tumbling over each other to get the twigs and bits of earth aligned in precisely the right configurations for the warmth and ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally incapacitated by isolation, there is only one human activity that is like this, and it is language.

We have been working at it for what seems eternity, generation after articulate generation, and still we have no notion how it is done, nor what will be like when finished, if it is ever to be finished. It is the most compulsively collective, genetically programmed, species-specific, and autonomic of all things we do, and we are infallible at it. It comes naturally. We have DNA for grammar, neurons for syntax. We can never let up; we scramble our way through one civilization after another, metamorphosing, sprouting tools and cities everywhere, and all the time new words keep tumbling out.

It has long troubled the entomologists that the rest of us are always interfering in their affairs by offering explanations of insect behavior in human terms. They take pains to explain that ants are not, emphatically not, tiny mechanical models of human beings. I agree with this. Nothing that we know for sure about human behavior is likely to account for what ants do, and we ought to stay clear of it; this is the business of entomologists. As for the ants themselves, they are plainly not in need of lessons from us.

However, this does not mean that we cannot take it the other way, on the off chance that some of the collective actions of ants may cast light on human problems.

I really want to know!

Also, if it is because of the tea, then it's like I have an extra cup of hot tea just waiting for me a few hours after my first one. Awesome

My pee tastes like very low quality green tea.

Is this because I drink alot of tea?

/sci/, what happens if you drop a pen on the moon?

I am an astronaut and I will be going to the moon soon, NASA asked me to test this out but I don't want to do anything that might be dangerous.

inb4 "It falls to the ground." Moon reality is nothing like Earth reality, that's like the first thing you learn in moon school.

Language and math are other aspects of this that we could talk about. It's pretty clear by now that the "language organ" idea is correct--Humans are predisposed to want to chit chat. But look how easily we can switch from language to language, switch from spoken language to signed language or written language, depending on the need. We are not born with a quill in our fist and a linguistic mental framework that will only function within the bounds of Spanish.

Math/counting? Here, too, is something that comes easily to us. Plenty of us count in base 12 while plenty more count in base 10; both work fine, the only reason people switch to 10 is because it's got the majority vote, and we like to be consistent and mutually intelligible.

>>1703671
Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of.

>>1703597
Well, I didn't mean to say that it could -only- become advantageous. Sorry for the failed mention of the other end of things.

As for this being bullshit, it's just a thought that occurred to me, and I wanted to talk it out with y'all, see where it goes. Whether it's correct or not is irrelevant to me.

Shall we break it down into something more simple than religion?

Shelter. I'd say it's instinctual for most creatures to seek shelter. But it is certainly cultural to seek it specifically in a grass hut, specifically in a yurt, specifically in a Victorian manor, etc. You don't assemble a yurt made of canvas, felt, rope, and wood because it's in your bones to collect, create, and combine those objects. You assemble it that way because that's how Dad taught you to. And once your tribe is no longer living out on the steppes, you don't continue assembling yurts of felt and wood; you move into an apartment, and you have no burning desire in your reptile mind that longs to build a yurt whenever you encounter a piece of rope. Culturally, you've moved on.

Human culture is a superior sort of DNA. It's passed on much more sloppily, but it can also be consciously changed with little physical effort to be more advantageous and useful to the population.

>>1659263
Anonymous, babby is formed when girl get pragnent.

OP here

>http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201004/why-more-intelligent-me
n-not-women-value-sexual-exclusivit
>http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/09/effective_polygyny_in_humans_t.php

Just a couple of articles I came across while composing my OP post, for further reading on the topic if you're interested. These are just about polygyny, not homosexuality. Also, please enjoy these nice lesbians.

>>1658890
>Yeah, what's your point op?

There isn't much of one; I intended this post for /r9k/ but they ignored it. I was just interested in what people would have to say on the topic. Also, I just wanted to test drive this explanation for why nobody should be worried about homosex. I figured /sci/ wouldn't be too bothered about the issue, but some people, even non-religious and non-homophobic people seem to get hung up on "sex is for making babbys which means gays are unnatural/aberrant/sickly". I thought that what I typed out in OP post is a pretty reasonable response to such claims.

>>1659136
True dat, Anonymous.

>>1658543
Hm, I probably did go too far out there, Bongo. Scratch that bit. I didn't mean modern science--just that we were probably having sex before we fully understood what it was for. But who knows, perhaps cave men were more in tune with these things than I've assumed.

How's the rest of it though, my monkey?

It's no secret that humans have always tended a little to the polygynous side (see: sexual dimorphism). Given a ~50:50 male:female ratio, most men in polygynous societies will either have one wife or no wife at all. (Of course not everyone obeys rules, male or female, and so it is also no secret that human beings also tend toward some promiscuity [see: the size of your nads].)

So, considering this, why would homosexuality be so unnatural in such a social animal as us? With over 50% of the male population historically not getting any from the ladies, or at least not getting much, seems sensible to me. Same goes for the ladies who must be sharing close quarters and cooperating with one another.

inb4 'But it's natural instinct to want to make babies!' No, it's our instinct to want to have sex--lots of folks were never in the know that sex led to babbys until SCIENCE!. It is not your instinct to want to make poop, it's your instinct to want to eat. This analogy ends at the fact that we love taking care of babies (though humans have a pretty high infanticide/abandonment rate), yet we're not as keen on cradling our poops...But that's not important at all.

>>1647768
One example of a way to count base 12 on the hands.

(I love learning ways to count using the fingers...so fun)

No joke dude, I was just about to go make a thread about base 12 on /r9k/. I think I may have even done so before...

Yes, I like it much better than base 10. But that could just be the novelty of it; the whole ten fingers and ten toes thing is quite convenient, but of course you can count on your hands using different methods...

I am reading through the image you posted and lol hard.

>>1590774
I just thought /sci/ would have an interesting discussion about the quote in OP post. I read tons of books.

>>1590707
I like to speculate!

And of course by "conscious decision" I meant "bleary-eyed unconscious mass-movement fraught with chaos and lemming mentality, fueled by propaganda and confusion, moving at an incalculably slow and irregular rate, eventually resulting in a cultural change of some sort that everyone seems real proud of." Not sure how else to re-phrase it but I think you get what I mean. Kind of like the green movement.

>>1590686
>I think that choosing who and who cannot have children will lead to riots.

There doesn't have to be a person dictating who reproduces and who doesn't, it could go the way of a conscious decision of the population to cut down on birthing their own children and start adopting the children of others more often.