Life Left to Go

regala-electra:

antheia:

eraofstories:

ichigomashi:

brodingershat:

scientiststhesis:

dr-archeville:

8bitstickmod:

nightguardmod:

songoharotto:

fabricated-amity:

my entire math life

This is basically the problem with the entire modern educational system.

Time to do unpopular opinion? Time to do unpopular opinion.

Balancing a checkbook is applied addition and subtraction, stuff of the third grade. Okay, yeah, it is a failure of the modern educational system if he hasn’t learned it by now.

Imaginary numbers interact with real numbers (1, 2, π, 1.5, etc) for complex numbers, and are useful if you want to get into engineering or science — you know, high paying jobs.

Remember Tomb Raider? How they make her turn? Quaternions, which use THREE sets of imaginary numbers.

Like how your cell phone gets reception? That requires resonance, the understanding of which can be aided by complex numbers.

And don’t even get me started in the more exotic physics like fluid dynamics or quantum mechanics. That is, the forefront of how planes fly and how computer chips work.

There’s this term, innumeracy, that is to math what illiteracy is to english. One thing that bugs me is when ignorance is paraded about, when one acts as if math is an optional knowledge. Doubly so when it’s the very thing holding them back.

The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.

Thank you maths side of tumblr

The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.

Come to think of it, that’s applicable to how a lot of subjects are taught.

But I’m afraid maths gets the worst of it, really. I mean, how often have you heard people complaining about history? Social sciences? Even chemistry, which is more specialised than maths? No, maths gets the worst of it by far, and everyone demonises it because no one ever tells them that maths is a language, and a quite difficult one at that, because it’s the language of the Universe (of god, if you will).

Not only that, but it’s also the only language that’s truly universal (we’re certain aliens will arrive at the same maths we have) and that can truly explain everything that’s in principle conceivable. Human language can describe the stuff we see, and some extrapolations we imagine; maths can describe everything that is, was, will be, has never been, and could ever be.

Everything is maths.

This is already excellently explained and defended, so please forgive me for reblogging and adding a veritable novel to it. 

This is precisely what nobody ever even tried to make me understand as a kid, and what I try so desperately to make people understand as an adult.

When the above say that math is a language, they are being more or less literal.

The reason that mathematics is so confusing to so many people is pretty much just because it was never properly explained to them.

Math is a language heavily reliant on the symbolic representation of pre-existing concepts. As a language, it is dedicated to the pursuit of absolute grammatical consistency and the simplification of its sentence structures without any accompanying sacrifice of meaning. 

So, actually, math is infinitely easier than English.

I’ll get to why below.

Read More

thank you for teaching me things

the really weird thing for me about this, is that I’ve sort of seen if from both the english and math sides. Math for all the reasons above, but I don’t think people who aren’t majoring in English, or who don’t know people who are super well realize the shit that you take for it. Beyond that, how many of your classmates hated being ‘forced’ to read the classics or whatever their teachers told them to, hated having to write essays analyzing literature, because when are they ever going to analyze literature after high school. As someone who has talked people into staying in English because they loved it, when people around them made them think that it didn’t count, that it was worthless, that by focussing on words and stories they weren’t helping society at all, I think that people on the math side are forgetting that that is by far not the only subject where people act like this. I’ve had similar experiences relating to my minor, history, where people insist that because it is an academic subject, not focussed properly on ‘jobs’ it is worthless. The real problem is not about math at all, but about a failure to see the value in knowledge and learning. When you learn to read, if you’re told that the only reason you need to know is so that you can read food labels and street signs the disservice being done to you is as great as that done when we tell people that managing money is the only use of math and and saying that math is always hard and not fun is no more damaging than saying that literature is always boring.

But part of school is teaching you how to think, in varying ways. So it’s important that you get a little bit of deconstructing literature and a little bit of higher maths. If you don’t want to become a physicist, you stop taking mats at a certain point. If you don’t want to become an editor, you stop taking english classes. And in the interim, that gen ed crossover gives everyone a vague idea of what other people do, and allows people to explore a multitude of options before choosing a path. 

Or even to decide that they like both — I was a humanities major with a love of calculus who now has an equation tattooed on her body. 

so…a huge wall of text on the non-glee part of my dash. Huh.

And for context, the dialogue in the gifset is meant to be a joke/show off the character’s toolish-ness.

(Source: dermit, via dahlstrom)

tyleroakley:

When advice is this good, you can’t just take it, you have to share it.

drugzs:

(Source: greatclassicmovies, via amediumdrip-archive)

(Source: drunkonstephen, via daxterdd)

(via notadamandsteve)

tyleroakley:

Boom.

And that’s all there is to it.

(Source: commie-pinko-liberal)