Equations True Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know
wired.com
wired.com
"So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those days as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"
I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."
He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."
I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on."
BTW, I quoted it from "What is Science?" on the Friends of Tuva site. The whole piece is a good read:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/equations-for-geek...
Because you can actually DO something with it, including visualize complex numbers and use them as the foundation of electrical engineering.
It's pretty meaningless/generic if you don't specify what the y_i stand for, and I don't feel like reading the paper. =)
EDIT: in fact, I find the those fictional theoretical physicists' grasp of physics appalling — and I don't even pretend to know that much physics!
The times they touch on topics I have actual experience in makes me cringe yes but its in the name of entertainment where it has to be fluffed to actually be interesting.
Take it this way.... the episodes where they play paintball there is so much unnecessarily wrong with the scenarios that it makes me facepalm almost every time. But when I look at it in the sense that doing the "real" thing would make it mind-numbingly boring I realize that I prefer it as it is.
They're exposing a lot of people to a world that most would have no interaction with (the sciences) and I personally feel that half-baked representation is better than nothing. (See: Argument people have for/against Mythbuster's contribution to the science community)
My point being: we were geek before it was cool.
(Come to think of it, that might not be totally acurate either. The "proud geek" generations of the 80s and 90s, though slightly marginal to mainstream culture, at least were proud to wear the moniker. Before that there were the labeled geek generations, to whom the word was indeed a very uncool slur. Maybe I'm closer to the Seth Cohen generation than I'd care to admit.)