/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11458225
For someone with little background, I'd teach it like this:

Take a transparent symmetrical container that's partially filled with a liquid, like a water bottle, then tilt it. The surface of the water will tilt around some axis line on the surface, and that axis happens to run through the center of the container. You can see that by holding your thumb and a finger against either end of the surface line and rotating the bottle while holding it in place with your finger and thumb.

Now, it intuitively couldn't be any other way. The surface of the water certainly isn't rotating about any other axis. It'd be odd to imagine the water's surface rotating around a point on the edge of the bottle, or the cup, or what have you.

>>11353723
Was interpreting each light as a button.

So for each, you can switch the state of ether 2 or 3 lights. 3 allows you to change the total parity of the 6-light array, but you cannot change the parity without also changing whether or not the top and bottom numbers match. We can signify whether or not the top and bottom match by a binary X or Y:

000
001 is equal to the state XXY, since the first 2 columns match and the last one doesn't. Flipping either row switch changes it to YYX, but flipping the column switch does not change this state since the numbers in the column will remain either matching or different.

Now, you're left with a similar issue. You have 3 lights, you can only switch 3 lights at a time, and (3N+1)%3 for any value of N will never be 0.

Sage again.

>>11353694
No matter which light you pick, you will switch the state of 4 lights. Since you start with 1 light on, you can only ever have an odd number of lights on. 0 is even, so the answer is no.

>>>/sci/sqt/

The 1/3%11 is indicating a modular inverse function.

That's to say:
>(N * 3) % 11 = 1
Where N is your answer, 4. The logic is that a number multiplied by its inverse is 1.

If you test out 1/7%11 and get an answer of 8, then this is your answer.

Next time you have a question that just requires a a one-post answer, take it to >>>/sci/sqt

If only there was a board dedicated to sharing advice.

>>10005737
>Imagine that someone puts out a paper detailing how to build nuclear bombs using only common household ingredients
This was already figured out by a boy scout in the early 90s: David Charles Hahn. Weapons-grade nuclear material is made by further isolating the fissile material used in nuclear reactors.

The science behind it is NOT censored, but the engineering required to make it is such that actually making it is prohibitive for anyone who doesn't have the time, the money, the space, the intelligence, or really the good health to pull it off without succumbing to the radiation. In terms of dedication to his craft, David Hahn was a magnificent bastard, completely above and beyond, and you'd have to have done something seriously fucked up for a vindictive ex to do half of what he did.

>>10001312
>earth becomes unable to sustain human civilization

Earth isn't directly sustaining human civilization, though. Human civilization is sustaining human civilization. We capped out at under a billion until industrialization and modern medicine came along, and the next big boon is probably going to come out of anti-aging.

You can't place a time frame on it because as time goes on, we make better life-sustaining systems with the same amount of resources. For example, the resources that go into a batch of polio vaccine may save a hundred people now or fifty people half a century ago, just because we've gotten better at processing the same amount of materials into better products.

>>10001312
>earth becomes unable to sustain human civilization

Earth isn't directly sustaining human civilization, though. Human civilization is sustaining human civilization. We capped out at under a billion until industrialization and modern medicine came along, and the next big boon is probably going to come out of anti-aging.

You can't place a time frame on it because as time goes on, we make better life-sustaining systems with the same amount of resources. For example, the resources that go into a batch of polio vaccine may save a hundred people now or fifty people half a century ago, just because we've gotten better at processing the same amount of materials into better products.

>>10000000
A big chunk of the people here are engineering students. Another chunk are physics & math. Can't be up your own ass on a topic you know nothing about.

Pic related is the last marine biology discussion I remember seeing on /sci/.

>>9997864
Imagine your mother's face. You should not actually see her face before you as you would your computer screen right now, but you should be able to discern features of her face that you've never even spoken about. The pores on her cheeks, the curve of her nose, things that you've never registered in any way other than visual input. If you can imagine things that you've never thought of in any way other than how you've seen them, then congratulations, you don't have aphantasia.

Now, send her a message that says you love her. I'm sure it'd make her happy.

>>9220202
I see the ideas you're trying to get at, but you're very inarticulate when it comes to expressing them or drawing the connections between them. Even in your first paragraph, you jump between ideas and can't even make them coherent enough to show that you understand them very well.

>Persistent exposure to limited language frameworks as precursor to pseudo-autistic symptoms in otherwise high functioning adults
This just means that if you're only exposed to a limited variety of language, you're going to have trouble expressing yourself (i.e., "pseudo-autistic symptoms"). It's terribly ironic that you have trouble expressing this idea.

>Propogation of religion and prescriptive moral ethics via individual-level quietude of unconscious fear of finitude as precursor to society level illusion of stochastic model of prediction of future events
This means that when society informs you of how you should act (via religion & ethics), it silences any worries about your limits and gives you tools with which you can hope to make progress. It's the statement that you can do anything if you set your mind to it, because that's what modern societal ethics are all about: the perception and/or illusion that you are free to determine your destiny.

You don't really connect these two ideas. You just jump from "being inarticulate makes you inexpressive" to "social determinism is only found through pattern recognition and doesn't debunk free will." Both of these ideas are strikingly obvious. Of course being bad at communication makes you bad at communication, and of course being able to set a route for your societal pathway/career/education says nothing about free will. You're saying exactly nothing that's new. You're just obfuscating statements of the obvious behind a bunch of pseudo-intellectual jargon.

>>9188471
>m = -2
>n = -3

Checkmate, science.

>>9151728
>Your choices are 1 and 6 or 2 and 3
That's assuming that all coefficients are integers.

What you do is factor out a, which gives:
>a[x^2 + (b/a)x + (c/a)]

You apply the quadratic formula to find the factors of what's on the inside, then you re-multiply everything by a.

Remember not to distribute the entirety of a across both factors. The expression a(x+N)(x+M) is NOT the same as (ax+aN)(ax+aM). It is the same as (ax+aN)(x+M), and if the numbers u and v multiply to equal a, it is also the same as (uv+uN)(vx+vN).

>>9127205
This is why, even when you're working, you look at other jobs and even interview for some every couple of months, just to check your market value. Once you have good experience, you WILL get a better offer from someone else. This is when you ask for that promotion, and if you don't get it with the job you already have, then you can walk right the fuck out on 'em. With two weeks' notice, of course. You want to make sure that the other job's still open and that you don't look bad for the next next employer when you do this all over again.

It works especially well if you start young, and by young, I mean younger than 30. You might feel a little old sometimes, but knowing the demographic here, time is most likely still on your side.

>>9124374
That's not how science works. A singularity would only have the amount of information already available to humankind along with any connections between the parts of that information. To gain new information that mankind doesn't already have, it would need to run actual physical experiments to obtain empirical data, which would take time and resources.

Saying that the singularity means automatic scientific infinity is equivalent to assuming that all a scientist does is think really really hard until he or she discovers something. Again:
>That's not how science works.

>>9125382
I'd rather my child have autism than die of something stupid like measles. It's pretty fucked if you'd rather have your child be vulnerable to death by chicken pox.

>>9122048
>>9122421
This stopped being a discussion on high a long time ago. Africa is industrializing, and the industrialized world re-stabilizes at a heightened population due to the availability of food, health care, and a position in the economy. Growth continues, but the rate of growth has been decreasing for over 40 years.

>>9092118
Now, it is a legitimate question to ask, and I think it has to do with the drive for exploration. Humans (fit natural ones) are the species that have the ability to travel on foot for the longest distance without resting due to a combination of pic related, omnivorous capabilities to stave off hunger with local flora, and the human body's ability to cannibalize itself more safely and effectively than the bodies of many other complex species. As such, humans evolved as persistence hunters, banding together and advancing toward prey animals until the prey became too exhausted to run further. This changed with the advent of tools & farming, but that happened on a fairly short evolutionary time scale, so the human body is still very much built for long-distance travel.

To supplement this, the more evolutionarily fit humans were the ones who were not only willing to venture out into nature after the prey, but who also derived some pleasure from the experience of hunting. Looking out onto the world is what early man saw before he had his meat, so you feel a primal sensation of enjoyment when you see the same. It's akin to how cats that have never been exposed to hunting for their entire lives still love to chase small, swift objects around. It's hardwired in as a psychological trigger that stimulus x invokes pleasure, even if you can't pinpoint how or why it would do so from your own experiences.

But that's just my inference. I'm no expert in anthropology.

>>9090916
I was not involved in this paper.

>>9086968
It does glow, just not at visible wavelengths. The decay via energy transfer you're referring to is just heat transfer, and most heat from your body is carried off through convection with the air. Also, compared to the heat produced from your cells metabolizing ATP, the energy coming from a lamp would be negligible. You'd sooner glow from your own body's waste heat than you would from coming into contact with light.

>>9082394
>>9083774
Seconded. Or he couldn't write his resume for shit.

Documented achievements matter. Those engineering fraternities and relevant clubs damn well better have had projects in them wherein he played a quantifiable part. Circlejerks like ASME and NSPE are alright connection-builders if you actually make friends with people and keep in touch with them, but a lot of their chapters aren't terribly hands-on simply because they don't have access to enough capital for everyone to participate in a project.

As far as I'm aware, the only club at Carnegie Mellon that might impress an employer looking at your resume would be the CMU Robotics Club. Other than that, the guy just had no co-ops or internships and had to polish the turd when it came to his coursework like a new graduate might do in pic related. You know that the person who wrote this will have some notebooks or documentation that proves they did what they say they did. For the interview, they'll ideally want to bring said proof: CAD printouts, experiment logs, the engineering report itself if they're at liberty to share it, and especially anything that's handwritten because it proves that they did this specific part of the project. That's what the hiring manager values.

Employers don't care about academic success; employers care about whether or not you can do the job.

>>9081650
>please do try to put a negative spin on CRISPR effectively dealing with a heart defect
Gene Modifications Being Used to Eliminate a Genetic Minority

>>9081042
>sob stories
Not sob stories. They're gonna want to know about a time that you faced adversity, and you can frame it as a time when you took the reins of leadership for the team. They might also hit you with what you tried to do to get them to work and what you would do in a work environment where people can actually face discipline for dragging ass.

>If you really took a good hard look at their resume
You'd have to see their resumes for you to judge it. If you can manage it, try attending a career fair and asking other students if you could have a copy of their resumes. That way, you can get an objective grasp on the kind of people you're attending (and eventually competing) with.

That said, any employer knows that charity work or burger flipping would just be filler. That's to say that they wouldn't care about it unless you go for an apprentice-level position like a co-op or internship. They're gonna care about the apprentice-level work and not the filler when you get to the entry-level, though.

>SAT
Employers won't care, and after the application process, even the college doesn't care, so for all intents and purposes, it is not an achievement.

>GPA
It's an achievement to some, but beware of hard GPA requirements. The ones that care that much about GPA are the ones who can't otherwise judge whether or not you can do the job. Senior engineers' judgment is a better metric than GPA, but not everyone wants to offer direct oversight. They sometimes just watch what they give you and what you spit out. That's to say, they don't know what you're doing anyway, and that may apply to other people you're put onto a team with. Soft GPA requirements are less likely to be trouble, though.

>published papers
Though it doesn't overqualify you, this might count as an achievement, provided that you wrote something that couldn't have been written by just anyone that was your age. Extra points if it shows passion for the field that you wind up applying for.

>>9079798
>the students didn't know enough C and they felt it was better to stick with Java

That doesn't sound right, considering that C programming is required for the curriculum, starting at ECE 220:
>http://www.ece.illinois.edu/academics/ugrad/curriculum/
>https://wiki.illinois.edu/wiki/display/ece220/Course+Overview+and+Policies

That's not to say that every student displays anything more than surface-level understanding of their coursework. There really are a bunch of people from these programs who are unprepared to face the world, who have a hard time figuring out things that aren't enumerated for them in a textbook. It's a real bitch being on a team with these people in a required course, but it makes a decent story for the job interview if you wind up having to drag them along to get your grade.

There are also people who are, as you put it, overqualified. They're not as few and far between as you might think, though they're often the minority if there isn't a well-established professional work program on campus. Co-ops and internships really do build up the wisdom you're referring to when it comes to qualification. I'll tell you that once you graduate, the only qualifications that matter are your DOCUMENTED achievements. It's really not enough to be more intellectually lucid than your peers. What exactly have you done that makes you overqualified?