Physics and Free Software

  • 19 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The Humanities. History. English. Linguistics. The Classics. Business. Economics. Finance. Management. Marketing. Law. Criminal Justice. Paralegal. Kineseology. Library science. Nursing. Spanish. Africana. Education.

    You get the point. So, why is STEM not enough and SHLAME-T or something else fucking stupid? Some examples. Theater. Set design. Have you ever seen the riggings and sand bag counterweights? Mechanical props? You could say those are made by “engineers”, which is true in a sense, but most often they are engineered by people who themselves have experience in theater. Why? They need to know how it works just as much as how it is used. Same with lighting and sound design

    Studio art. Painting. Have you ever seen an artist stick their thumb out at arm’s length? They are using it to get an understanding of perspective and scale. It’s geometry. Da Vinci used geometry extensively. Look at the Vitruvian Man or Mona Lisa. Little known fact. Mona Lisa isn’t finished. Da Vinci never painted over all the circles and triangles.

    Ballet. They way they extend their arms and legs is to adjust their center of mass for balance. To maintain static equilibrium. When they spin and move their arms in and out, their angular velocity increases and decreases to conserve angular momentum. In the most literal sense, they are doing physics. They can explain gyroscopic stabalization better than most STEM grad students, because they know how it feels.

    Their are loads of other examples. The mathematics of music. Sculpting with CAD. The billion and one uses for 3d printing. Geometry and mosiacs. The ‘elegance’ of mathematical physics. Poetic code. But, back to Da Vinci. The concept of a “renaisance man”, is not one who is a master of STEM. They are a master of STEAM. Take the arts away, and you lose half the genius.

















  • I prefer to only use the inbox for anything that is unread that I haven’t read.

    At work, we have to use outlook, which has a handy macro feature. I wrote wrote one to flag an email, mark it as unread, and move it out of my inbox into a different folder. That way it is out of my inbox, has a number indicating how many items I have left to complete, and is given priority over other emails. Use cases and email systems vary, but maybe something like that could help you

    Bonus. If you are forced to use outlook against your will, you can benefit from the todo app. Any email you flag will be automatically put as a todo along with a link to the email.