study stuff

Eleni/23/Math Major/Aspiring scientist/All around mess/University life: Take 2

[lothmoth]

did you know they say calculus is the language of God. did you know they tried to hold math up to infinity like a candle to the void. did you know statisticians plunged into the vastness of random chance and picked out patterns and equations and eight hundred ways to tell you how big your inevitable errors are and how far off those guesses at errors might be. math haters I can't sit with you anymore. human innovation is cradled in these ancient, methodical, desperate attempts at understanding what we are not designed to understand

[potatosalamisandwich]

something about getting tangled up in quantum physics is so alluring when you’re just trying to do basic math homework; this is your sign to get an existential crisis and fall into a spiral of self-doubt from quantum entanglement and superposition and quarks and aaaaAAAAAAAAAAH

[happyheidi]

｡ﾟﾟ･｡･ﾟﾟ｡ ﾟ. October will bring blessings.

ﾟ･｡･ﾟ

[acreaturecalledgreed]

i feel like theres something horribly wrong about the fact that “dark academia” means like, wearing a beige sweater on a cold and windy day while you read a book and not like, “ive become completely unhinged and disconnected from the world outside of my passions and i am actively building a monstrosity out of flesh and radiation” 

[puppercupboard]

we do not Want an aesthetic around sitting in a library on a mildly gloomy day, what we Want is an aesthetic based around throwing yourself into studies so forbidden that they result in a complete disconnect from your own humanity and moral system in your persuit of knowledge

[acreaturecalledgreed]

EXACTLY

[chaotic-archaeologist]

It’s the feeling of your eyes about to fall out because you’ve been reading for so long. The sound of the pipes in your building clanking while you work in your office late at night. The feral way you hide from your email inbox, and how you find yourself typing and retyping a reply trying to sound normal (even though you can’t even tell what normal is anymore). It’s zoning out in the middle of a department meeting only to jolt back when somebody says your name. It’s living off the free food people leave in the break room and communing with the ancient, half functional microwave. Most of all, it’s about sinking your claws into the cozy beige sweater of the poor, misunderstanding person who so foolishly asks “what’s your research about?”

At last, a captive audience

[quotefeeling]

“I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life, and start figuring out the one I have.”

— Holly Black

[harshstudymotiv]

oh you hate studying?

the answer to that is to study more.

you’ll get more used to it, maybe find a method you like.

and even if you don’t, you’ll get through school much faster and easier if you study more.

use the study to defeat the study!!

idea by my irl friend

[karcatgirl-vantas]

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

[skluug]

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

[ryan-sometimes]

I love how every century or so the entire field of physics collapses on itself because of a few discoveries that go against everything currently known and then we just kinda have to wait a little while until it gets back on its feet

[oneirotrope-deactivated20231115]

thinking about the time a prof told us that in real research mathematics it's fine to be slow, speed itself is not essential, as long as you can find it within yourself to make consistent unyielding inexorable forward progress, like the time some guy stole an M60A3 tank and terrorized a suburban neighborhood with it, said guy wasn't going that fast but plowed through cars and telephone poles and shit no problem. i'm not kidding that's what he said, that's the metaphor he used, he told us that the act of mathematics is like the 1995 san diego tank rampage

[max1461]

I've said this before but there are a bunch of positions in the philosophy of math that I think are essentially isomorphic. Or, maybe put better, they represent different parts of the elephant that is the "true" nature of mathematics. Or something like that. I think game formalism, Haskell Curry's formalism, structuralism, and maybe even some varieties of Platonism (specifically the "Platonism" to which summer transgenderer is sympathetic, if I have understood it correctly) are all more or less saying the same thing. They're grasping at different parts of the same idea. Math is the study of the consequences of definitions; it's the study of the behavior of systems of rules; it's the work of taking your imagination seriously; it's the study of logical necessity. It's the study of "if you say something is like this, what else must it be like?". You can phrase this nature many different ways. But I think that's what math is.

[kidneygf-deactivated20220914]

love is in repetition

[kidneygf-deactivated20220914]

love is in doing the same things with people over and over again and never getting bored because you love the person you’re doing them with so much. love is in telling someone I love you 9 times a day and it being just as sweet every single time. love is in making dinner together every day and watching the same movie over and over again because someone you love loves it so much. I’m so normal about this

[kidneygf-deactivated20220914]

love is in hearing my little brother tell me about the same cool one liner he came up with at school over and over again because he looks so happy when he says it. love is in making a face at a baby and then making it 15 times more because it makes then smile. love is in watering your plants every day. love is in taking photos in the same pose with someone every year to show how much you’ve grown together. love is in repetition goddamnit

[rudjedet]

people who don't know anything about academics: man y'all are stuffy and boring what's up with that? actual academics: *too busy fist-fighting each other over the beryllium problem or the existence of a dentistry profession in ancient egypt to reply*

[micewithknives]

people who dont know anything about academics: *for some reason have the illusion of everyone in Fancy Academic Clothes doing Boring Research and glossing over Historical Facts Because Historians Dont Like The Truth*

actual academics: someones lying on the floor in a band tshirt they havent changed out of in three days crying over the paper they’re supposed to be writing that was due over a month ago. the whiteboard says “6 hours since our last fight about Whether Silcrete Exists”. someone wants to give their thesis the title “theyre lesbians harold” but cant figure out how to cite a tumblr post as a title because they havent eaten in 48 hours

[art-thropologist]

People who don't know anything about academics: they're keeping this grand conspiracy about these civilizations a secret!!! actual academics: can barely coordinate a time for a Zoom meeting, will infodump about their specialty for hours without prompting

[frawgs]

[ursulaklegay]

actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it

[fairycosmos]

being in your 20s is like im 17 and i don't know who i am. im 55 curled up with a book. im ancient. i've been here forever. i never left. i'm 5 years old and i'm lost at the supermarket

[metamorphesque]

why do all the words sound heavier in my native language?

—  @metamorphesque, Yoojin Grace Wuertz (Mother Tongue), Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky (by Garth Greenwell), Jhumpa Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others), @lifeinpoetry

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[tsunamiwavesurfing]