

Equations True Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know - evo_9
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/equations-for-geeks/

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nhebb
The difference between superficial knowledge and real knowledge is nicely
illustrated in one of Feynman's little stories:

 _"So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful
in those days as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they
had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all
sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we
were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on
the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."

He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much
about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name]
doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a
brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in
Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it,
you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people;
what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly,
and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody
knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the
name of the thing and what goes on."_

~~~
vixen99
A wonderful story well worth reproducing here! Don't want to be churlish but I
somehow doubt Feynman wrote the plural of days as day's.

~~~
nhebb
Corrected.

BTW, I quoted it from "What is Science?" on the Friends of Tuva site. The
whole piece is a good read:

<http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html>

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alttag
@ OP: There's a "view all" link, so that we wouldn't have to suffer the
paginated view. Next time, please use that instead!

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/equations-for-
geek...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/equations-for-
geeks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&pid=2364&viewall=true)

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Mvandenbergh
Is an unpublished attempt to quantify human attractiveness more significant
than all the laws of thermodynamics?

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drcube
Euler's formula is much cooler and more useful than Euler's identity: e^ix =
cos(x) + i*sin(x)

Because you can actually DO something with it, including visualize complex
numbers and use them as the foundation of electrical engineering.

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gyom
The one about the "mathematics of beauty" is just a formula to combine
linearly different objects with different weights w_i that are renormalized to
1.

It's pretty meaningless/generic if you don't specify what the y_i stand for,
and I don't feel like reading the paper. =)

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sandee
Sorry, but a true geek never "pretends to know".

~~~
rufibarbatus
That was true before the Seth Cohen effect (or more recently: the _Big Bang
Theory_ effect).

EDIT: in fact, I find the those fictional theoretical physicists' grasp of
physics appalling — and I don't even pretend to know that much physics!

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TheCapn
To fully explain all the physics they try to dabble in would take a show twice
its length and less than half of the entertainment it already "provides".

The times they touch on topics I have actual experience in makes me cringe yes
but its in the name of entertainment where it has to be fluffed to actually be
interesting.

Take it this way.... the episodes where they play paintball there is so much
unnecessarily wrong with the scenarios that it makes me facepalm almost every
time. But when I look at it in the sense that doing the "real" thing would
make it mind-numbingly boring I realize that I _prefer_ it as it is.

They're exposing a lot of people to a world that most would have no
interaction with (the sciences) and I personally feel that half-baked
representation is better than nothing. (See: Argument people have for/against
Mythbuster's contribution to the science community)

~~~
rufibarbatus
I agree with most of what you said. My edit to the comment obscured its main
point, which was: the expression "true geek" has shifted away from its
previous meaning (again).

My point being: we were geek before it was cool.

(Come to think of it, that might not be totally acurate either. The "proud
geek" generations of the 80s and 90s, though slightly marginal to mainstream
culture, at least were proud to wear the moniker. Before that there were the
labeled geek generations, to whom the word was indeed a very uncool slur.
Maybe I'm closer to the Seth Cohen generation than I'd care to admit.)

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exit
the first euler's identity tattoo looks terrifying. is it a tattoo, or some
kind of scarification?

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Yes, its scarification. Apparently part of the scar came from an accident and
she had the rest done to match.

