You can calculate how long a pencil can stand on its tip before falling using quantum physics.

Basically a version of this was on our freshman accelerated physics final, and no one got it right so our professor happily explained it to us the next day.

It was pretty much the same as is described here.

https://thephysicsvirtuosi.com/posts/old/how-long-can-you-balance-a-quantum-pencil/

Whether or not an irregular verb retains its irregularity depends largely on how much it is used in everyday life. If it’s a common word, it’s more likely to stay irregular, because we’re frequently reminded of the “correct” form. If it’s a rare word, the irregularity tends to disappear over time because we simply forget. That’s why “to be” couldn’t be more irregular (it’s used enough to retain its forms) and the past participle of “to prove” is slowly becoming regular “proved” (it’s rare enough to be forgotten).

yes i like language very much

Edit: typo

One of the most accurate and successful theories in physics contains the single worst prediction and isn’t mathematically rigorous at all.

Doing calculations with it feels like doing vibes based maths, and you spend a lot of time doing things like: “oops divided by zero guess I’ll cancel it out by multiplying by zero” and it works.

I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

Computer science students multiple years into the course think I’m a hacker for using the linux terminal

That Earth was in fact way older than 6000 years.

That the diesel engine wasn’t originally ran on diesel fuel. (In college I was led to believe that it was hemp oil). It was actually peanut oil and later they tried hemp oil.

Shale tastes like mud, yes, but it has the consistency of a chocolate bar if you eat a little.

Honestly not bad. Great experience.

My highschool friends weren’t really friends, just people who’d been temporarily thrown into the same unfortunate position as me.

That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.

Just how greedy some professors can be.

Like the one that had a publishing deal with Pearson. He wrote his own textbook, charged $700 for it, then made you remove parts from the book so it made used copies of the book worthless.

Nothing mind blowing? Only mind blowing course was Sociology. My professor worshipped Bernie Sanders and I appreciated him engaging his students to do better.

But also, That succeeding in college/university just shows that someone can learn, follow instructions, work in a group, etc. It really is to prepare someone to show up and do the work. I mean everyone is different and there’s just more likelihood of someone being a better person to work with than someone who doesn’t have that structure or ability to absorb info and think.

I don’t think necessarily that people need higher education but it helps. I tell people I think careerwise it helps to have at least two of the three:

• skills
• networking/network
• higher education

Know college isn’t for some people and the people I know that are successful are often very skilled or/and have connections, can make connections to get employed where they are.

Oh and STEM though, I think people 100% need college/university for more specialized fields and STEM like medical professionals, physicists, etc.

That teaching isn’t the point. It’s getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.

It has been proven that each mathematical reasoning system* either has a statement that cannot be proven true or false, or a statement that can be proven both true or false. In simpler terms, it has been proven that we can’t prove everything.

Gödels incompleteness theorem if anyone wants to look it up.

• only holds for reasoning systems that can reason about numbers

I know people’s experience varies on this but I absolutely hated high school, and only discovered that I enjoyed learning as a process because of uni. And I’d probably still be small minded and somewhat bigoted if I hadn’t gone. Simply because it forced me to critically evaluate my own views and also exposed me to a number of types of people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

It’s a shame it’s so expensive in some countries, because I think it’s important to have a well-educated society more broadly.