Been Playing With Machines At Work

math rant, sorry

i genuinely think that math hating is a learned social behavior. you have to hate it to be relatable, otherwise you're a nerd - and not the eccentric fun kind of science nerd. also there is this assumption that if you're not naturally good at it, you shouldn't even try, which doesn't really exist for other subjects. like, students won't mind writing an essay, or doing arts, even if they're not amazing at it, but doing math when they might fail is somehow torture.

all these memes like "pythagoras is useless irl" and "satan put the alphabet in math" read to me like "the curtains were blue cause they were blue!!>:(" bs, but receive way less criticism online. do people even agree with the memes, or is it just herd mentality? cause honestly, why is math more useless than anything else we learn in school? why is saying "x-2=4" more evil than saying "what minus two equals four"?

of course, math people with low self esteem and condescending auras are also to blame for making math unappealing, as well as math teachers with no social skills lol. but the overall meme-ability of math hating sure is not helping, cause kids go into school with the expectation that math will be hard and they won't enjoy it

being cool is when you know algebraic topology and linguistic reconstruction and medieval islamic theology and the poststructuralists and quantum physics and old poetry and queer theory and chinese history and 3+ languages (real knowledge, not wikipedia shit). you can't be cool without learning all of that. but if you do, everyone will agree you're cool and you won't have to work on any of your negative personal qualities

A cartoon for New Scientist.

porcelain

Not a particle, not a wave but a secret third thing

My aesthetic is like dark academia but the medieval Iranian / Islamic golden age version

the command line feels so personal... like how some people say when they pray they're talking directly to god but instead I'm talking directly to the computer