Whale Powering Up To The Surface And Breaching

One of my favorite “never thought of that, but makes sense” facts is that the moon looks upside-down if you see it from the other hemisphere. 

When my friend from Brazil landed in the US for the first time, she stepped off the plane and saw an upside-down moon, which is more than a little alarming when you’re jetlagged and nervous about moving to a new country.

Since I already brought up my university’s chaplain once today, I thought I’d share with you the best advice he ever gave me.

If someone is suffering and you want to help, instead of saying “let me know if there’s anything I can do,” offer a few options of things you know you can do.

“Can I do your dishes while you study for your exam?”

“Would it help if I came to the waiting room with you?”

“I can distract you if you like.”

When someone’s suffering, making them choose how to be helped can sometimes be an extra burden, especially if they don’t know how serious your offer is. By giving examples, they only need to say yes/no, and they know you wouldn’t offer anything too big for you to handle.

This is what a tiny rock hitting your naked spaceship does. I could hear the ricochets. That’s why the Space Station has armour. http://bit.ly/2pPb7hJ

AERIAL SHOTS OF SOUTH AFRICA, ZACK SECKLER

This stunning photo-essay by New York City-based photographer, Zack Seckler, took him seven consecutive days to photograph over 2,000 miles of South African terrain. The end result is a breathtaking look at Africa’s majestic landscapes, colors, and creatures that inhabit it. 

Grow with us @ Instagram.com/wetheurban

ESO’s La Silla Observatory over the night sky

Image credit: ESO

Throwback to last year at the Louvre when I saw a little girl sitting on the ground looking up to the statue of the goddess Athena. Probably the most Renaissance-like and powerful picture I ever took. 

I'm a physics major who works as a tutor with a bunch of math majors, and today I was explaining differentials to a student and I said to convert the dC/dt equation to one with differentials just multiply both sides by dt and that's the only difference and I could feel them all judging me hfgsgskdhdlhd trust me we know we are wrong but we are too lazy and dumb

Okay, okay, look, all is well.

Yeah mathematicians are gonna cringe a little when people say stuff like this because we know it’s not rigorous, but you know what else? We made that dy/dx notation look like fractions for a reason. Certainly what’s going on here is a little more subtle than division and multiplication and if you’re working with some really weird functions that subtlety could get you in trouble. But for most situations, you can treat that stuff like fractions, and we made the notation that way to highlight that fact and make the symbol manipulation more efficient.

We laid the complicated foundations with rigorous analysis so we would have a robust and efficient tool, and we made it user-friendly, and we gripe about its users using it the way we intended? That’s like complaining that I use my phone without understanding its circuitry or complaining that I eat pop tarts without understanding what’s in them. Those things are true, but my phone was designed to be used by someone who doesn’t understand or need to understand its circuitry and pop tarts were designed to be eaten by people who don’t understand or need to understand what’s in them. I know that someone understands my phone’s circuitry and someone knows what’s in pop tarts and I trust them.

You’re not lazy or dumb. Calculus, as mathematicians passed it off to engineers and scientists, was designed to be used by people who don’t understand or need to understand the rigorous analysis that holds it up. Engineers and scientists trust that we gave them a good tool that we built well, and they use it. It’s nice when they understand it more deeply and it serves them well but it’s not always necessary.

I’m not gonna stop joking about how silly treating dy/dx as a fraction is, because it certainly won’t fly in math circles where doing so might actually screw you over, but even more because that’s what everyone does. Every field cringes and giggles when the out-group uses their tools without deference and deep understanding, as is every field’s right, but it should never be taken too seriously, because guess what!

That’s the anthropocene, babey! That’s specialization of labor! We don’t all have time to understand everything, we just have to understand what we can and trust that someone else understands the rest! That’s science! That’s humanity! That’s beautiful! Joke about it all you want, it is a little weird, but anyone properly hating on it? Cut it out or I’ll cut you out and that’s that!