The Academics Thread

[Pariah]

Fierce winds in the area have knocked out power not just to my school, but to the entire neighborhood. Nonetheless, the emergency lights are still on – and so is the Wi-Fi. So we are continuing the school day as usual, but without our computers, projectors, Smart Boards, etc.

 

There is an old chalkboard sized slide rule around here somewhere. I was contemplating pulling it out to show how things were done back in the old days.

[Cancer]

* Cancer shows off his old 12-inch ... Pickett slide rule. *

[Pariah]

That's a big, big camera.

 

3,200 megapixels! The camera heart of future Vera Rubin Observatory snaps record-breaking 1st photos

[Cancer]

The telescope that is to feed that camera is even more amazing in its way.

[archer]

6 hours ago, Cancer said:

* Cancer shows off his old 12-inch ... Pickett slide rule. *

 

My parents got me a slide rule when I was a kid.

 

Shortly after that, my dad's work required him to take electrical engineering classes at night school and bought him an electronic calculator (this was back when the only electronic calculators available cost $400 and did very little more than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division).

 

My dad let me borrow his gadget from time to time (which I thought was really cool), learned to do basic math on paper and in my head, and I never learned to use the sliderule without looking at the instructional pamphlet.

 

By the time I needed things like trig functions, TI-30's were available and relatively dirt cheap.

 

 I've still got my slide rule and its instructional pamphlet. I keep it in the box with my fossils, some Civil War bullets and cannonball fragments, and an arrowhead and a pottery shard I found.

 

It took quite a few years before the irony of which box I kept it in really struck me. 

[Cancer]

I got my primary slide rule I think in 8th grade.   So I actually still have it, and know how to use it.  The first four-banger purely electronic calculators weren't available for four years or so, and were out of my price range for another year or two.

 

(I was actually given a circular slide rule in 2nd or 3rd grade, but I never learned to use it; I lost track of it for decades and could use it when I found it among my parents' stuff in my fifties.) 

[Pariah]

4 hours ago, Cancer said:

The telescope that is to feed that camera is even more amazing in its way.

 

I know. They talked about it at length in that workshop. I'd love to see it in person one day.

[Starlord]

19 hours ago, Cancer said:

The telescope that is to feed that camera is even more amazing in its way.

 

Is it more amazing than a tachyonic antitelephone?

[Bazza]

Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court

In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/publishers-are-taking-the-internet-to-court/

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

 

[Pariah]

I just got a text from my principal asking if I had my seating charts handy. (It's Sunday afternoon here, by the way.) Apparently one of my 4th. Students just tested positive, so now everyone who sits within six feet of her has to be quarantined.

 

Here we go.

[Cancer]

Monitor your own condition carefully.

[Pariah]

Measured body temperature within established norms. No unusual symptoms. Avoiding coming within two meters of students like the plague (so to speak). Mask on. Hand sanitizer applied liberally.

 

You can only do what you can do.

[Old Man]

I continue to be beyond grateful to live in an area that isn’t literally sending kids back to physical school amid a lethal pandemic. I mean, what the actual f—k. You’d think people who run educational institutions would have been educated but there I go making sense again. 
 

Stay safe, guys. I worry. 

[Cancer]

I worry too, but school administrators are the most arbitrary and most brain-dead of all the Dilbertesque management types.

 

At universities there were some abortive attempts to compel faculty into in-person classes, and those were greeted with monolithic defiance. Also, the science and engineering departments at least are much more effective with their oblique threats that administrators actually can be intimidated on a personal level.   Public primary and secondary schools operate with their academic staff in wage slavery, so administrators (who are also a step further down on the intelligence level) can make arbitrary decisions. 

[Bazza]

34 minutes ago, Old Man said:

I continue to be beyond grateful to live in an area that isn’t literally sending kids back to physical school amid a lethal pandemic. I mean, what the actual f—k. You’d think people who run educational institutions would have been educated but there I go making sense again. 
 

Stay safe, guys. I worry. 

 

No one teaches logic* anymore, except in the philosophy major courses. 

 

*Syllogism

[archer]

On 9/10/2020 at 4:24 PM, Bazza said:

Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court

In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/publishers-are-taking-the-internet-to-court/

 

 

I'm a big fan of the internet Archive and what they do. 

 

But in this case, they're making a copy of book (on their own increasing the number of books in existence) then loaning out the copy.

 

Look at it this way:

 

A physical library purchases a book and loans it out to their patrons. As the book gets used by numerous people, it gets worn out. At some point the library removes the worn-out book from circulation and sells it as a second hand book in order to raise funds to purchase a more books.

 

If the library wants to own and lend out that same book again, the library has to purchase it.

 

On the other hand, if you allow that same library to make a copy of the book then lend out the copy, only the copy would get worn out. Eventually the copy would be removed from circulation. Then the library would take their pristine original of the book and make a new copy.

 

The library would never have to purchase that book again because it can continue to make its own copies forever.

 

 

 

 

The internet Archive is trying to argue that instead of working like a regular library and having to purchase the same book over and over again because the physical copies of the book wear out over time, that instead it should just be required to purchase the book once then should be allowed to make copies of it forever.

 

They might or might not win the lawsuit. But if they do, they're being granted a new and special right which is a major change to the way that things work at the moment.

[Michael Hopcroft]

On 8/28/2020 at 8:40 PM, Cancer said:

Best academia comic ever

And if you remain in this class, you will be a scholar, and it will be one of the proudest moments of your life when you get that final grade -- whatever it is.

[Cancer]

Another timeless life experience in academia

[Bazza]

Could be worse, you could be @Pariah and the subject is organic chemistry.

[Old Man]

I had a friend on college who had almost that exact experience.  Only she had two weeks, not an hour.

[tkdguy]

2 hours ago, Cancer said:

Another timeless life experience in academia

 

I've had a very similar dream.

[Cancer]

I think just about everyone who's attended college has.

[Pariah]

I've had dreams like this recently...and I graduated in April.

[Sveta8]

Make it so you thought the final was on Wednesday on 3pm, when it was actually on Wednesday at noon. Frantic emailing ensued. Got to retest, but man.... that was three days of pure panic.