bernulli

The existence of Udacity / MIT OpenCourseWare / open textbooks, etc. without the whole population of the world being qualified in math & ML & everything else that exists proves that providing videos is not sufficient. Many advanced topics require the student to actually sit down at some point and do the work, and that's where educators and peers come in.

I think we are already in an unprecedented golden age for people who are able to self-educate, i.e. have the material and mental means (money & self discipline) to actually sit down and learn. Unfortunately, I don't have the impression that this is a viable path for the vast majority of people.

That doesn't mean I find your scenario unlikely: administrators may find this an attractive way to cut costs, only to be surprised after a year when the learning outcomes have completely collapsed (except for the 5% mentioned above).

Maybe you missed the part in Cold War doctrine where Germany is the battlefield intended to be used up to stop the invasion before the Rhine.

I also found his ‘visual proof’ for neural networks as general function approximators super intuitive.

So, the fact that the faces I draw look like they went through a blender does not mean that I haven't studied drawing enough, it's just proof that I am this generation's Picasso and everyone petty enough to not recognize my genius is simply not acknowledging my creativity? Amazing! After all, was there ever a single serious artist who would go so low as to study anatomy, optics, geometry, perspective, architecture, etc. ?

I'll take a wild guess here that your technical artistry isn't in the field of fluid mechanics. There is a whole, very mature, very developed, field of fluid dynamics for visualizations out there. Just check out what people present at SIGGRAPH every year. It's amazing. They know exactly what they're doing. The thing with the visualization of many physical systems is that humans are really good at spotting discrepancies, e.g. if things don't bounce off well, or the smoke looks like honey - then it just looks really bad (like my blended face drawings) - but producing bad results doesn't automatically make me a great artist.

I like where the author is coming from, but maybe having started with the actual physics and/or equation and then explaining what those terms mean in a naive way would have much more impact. Giving an intuitive explanation of a physical term can be a great service to anyone learning a subject.

Starting instead with "here's how I imagine diffusion" from scratch reads like an introduction to homeopathy: "why, you have a bloated belly that feels hard, then you need to drink a (properly diluted) solution of some hard substance, say granite".

That's simply not true.

What can I say, words have meaning. I see that you speak the lingo of your peers, when you write about Rust, Rick & Morty, KYC/AML, SSRI, etc. Fluid mechanics also has a lingo, simple as that.

If you write a 10 page article about using some-framework-or-other, and you invent your own terminology and can't even be bothered write the name correctly of what you're writing about, that's not a good sign in my book. Doesn't matter when it was invented/developed/released.

And that's on top of the plainly wrong statements in the article.

The problem with that is that you see all that because you already have a working knowledge of fluid mechanics. Someone reading this from the intended audience, ie someone looking for a gentle introduction, will not realize that absolute statements like “The incompressibility of fluids is the reason why those beautiful curls pop up in fluid bodies.” or “A substance that can not be compressed, can not have areas of higher and lower pressure” are simply and plainly wrong.

The result simply is, as I stated, that the interested reader will not have learned anything physical about fluids, and will not even know the vocabulary to dive deeper afterwards.

Note also, that the “naive” way still requires you to understand the divergence of a vectorfield, at which point the whole approach collapses and I wonder why they don’t simply give us the equations and then we can see for ourselves.

Oh boy. The author desperately wants to avoid showing equations (or even correctly naming the Navier Stokes equations), and gets rid of the physics along the way. No, fluids can absolutely be compressible, and incompressible fluids absolutely have pressure differences.

Avoid. There are so many great resources out there that show you how to implement simple fluid solvers while teaching you something physically relevant.

'Apples-to-apples' is the keyword you need to read up on.

It's worth to emphasize your edit: the alternative to high-school is not restricted to solitary confinement.

Of course it did, exactly because there was a lockdown that prevented many COVID deaths.

If there hadn't been a lockdown, many more people would have died from COVID than now died from drinking. Sweden for example, famous for its non-lockdown, suffered 10 times as many COVID deaths than neighboring Norway with lock-down (and alcohol).

Yeah, but picking Rust over Python won't get others killed.

tl;dr: Sweden's non-intervention killed 10x (!) more people (per 100,000), led to higher rise in unemployment, and a further shrinking economy compared to neighboring countries [1].

Of course it's impossible to "prove" which measures had which impact without running the same experiment 10000 times on 10000 different Earths.

But here's almost a (horrible) controlled experiment, as close to an apples-to-apples comparison we'll ever get:

Sweden, famously praised by some U.S. politicians for its non-intervention response to COVID, suffered significantly more both in terms of loss of human lives (10x (!) more people (per 100,000) killed than in neighboring countries), and economically (more , than its direct neighbors:

"Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."

"Plus, Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%."

"Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...

Haha, I wish! Most of the books for the intro classes I teach are essentially redundant. It's a lucky occasion when you teach something where you learn something completely new that you find interesting, and these classes are typically small, so there's even less incentive for a publisher.

Unfortunately, the incentives are quite different. In France and Germany, once you get a university research position or CNRS appointment, or in Germany a permanent professorship, you can essentially do what you want within the 36hrs/wk, and writing a nice little handout is what professors often like to do.

In the US, new faculty are judged by their research output and grant input and are still under the threat of losing their job if they don't make tenure after a few years. There is zero incentive to write a book on top of the 80hrs/wk that are put into the job already.

Also, in Germany, a university will absolutely buy textbooks in bulk for students to use, but that's a philosophical decision of how you want to run a society: if it's upheld as important that everyone can get (essentially) free access to top education, that's what you get. If education is treated like a business, you get something else.

Yet another reason not to conflate the science of a pandemic with actually fighting it!

To be fair, I was without doubt influenced by one of these 'This is fine' memes, but instead with the line 'But what are the long-term effects of fire extinguishers?'.

Again, those are two different things, as I discussed in my post.

But let's run with your argument for a minute: So what you're arguing is that we should kick out of our hospitals anyone with cancer, ALS, HIV/AIDS, heck, the cold and the flu - because if we don't know how to heal it, we clearly don't have enough data yet. How about letting people drive cars even though we haven't been able to solve 'accidents'?

There are very few things settled in the science of fire, but that's beside the point.

I'd say the science is settled on what the most effective thing was to eliminate COVID: complete and total shut down, as soon as possible: New Zealand has the lowest casualties of any OECD country and held sporting events in full stadiums when the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper.

The "article" is conflating two completely different things: science, and battling a pandemic. Both have very different standards, methods, and goals.

"Scientific skepticism had to be shot" is the comment you get when you try to compare fighting a pandemic with scientifically studying a pandemic. When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements, write it up, have it peer reviewed, and published. You try to save lives, learning as you go along, that's necessarily messy but the best we have.

Were mistakes made? Surely - but what would have been the alternative? The primary goal was/is to beat COVID and save lives, not to completely understand it before doing something about it.

Also, the disparagement of automotive engineers hits needlessly close to home ;-) -- the simple fact of the matter is that there is a whole field that studies injection, sprays, aerosols. These are experts with decades of experience in how droplets form and propagate through the air. I'm not giving carte blanche, but this seems like knowledge and experience that could be usefully tapped in this case.

Thank you!

Case in point: Lilienthal, who wrote the aerodynamics book that inspired much of the wing building of the Wrights, died when he crashed with one of his gliders.

Amazing book by the way, there was a cheap reprint published a few years ago.

Could you provide some links to more information? I was only aware of warming as a big problem. Thank you!

Looks like you've got it all figured out, good for you!

You verbatim wrote "As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free". How is that not giving away your work for free?

How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.

The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.

So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?

As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.

I'm still missing the part where I get rich! Please tell me!

Truth be told, in my field the intro level textbooks are essentially indistinguishable, down to graphics and specific examples, and every publisher has one. Even if I got free samples for all of them (I don't), there is zero difference for the student. You look at the classics, maybe check out a new book, but in the end pick the one you're already familiar with because you don't have any time to waste.

I see the downvotes, but I still don't see how some guy self-publishing and printing his own book at Kinkos is proof for a conspiracy in which publishers collude with professors to force students to buy books from that publisher. If anything, it's an example for the exact opposite.

What's the longest text you've ever written that you can judge 'it's not that hard' to write a 500p standard textbook?

As a corollary, only very few professors actually have their own textbook and thus don't make any money whatsoever from choosing a specific textbook.

Finally, why would you deny someone money for work they did, typically in their spare time? Who else do you think should give away their work for free? Musicians? Doctors? Carpenters? Bakers? Do you accept money for the work you do?

You can compare the price of college textbooks to the price of textbooks for professionals and you will see there is no difference. It's simply a niche market.

Personally, I prefer decade old textbooks, hardcover, beautifully typeset, clear diagrams and equations, black and white. Of course that doesn't exist for every field. But try to imagine the complaints you get from students for teaching from 'obsolete' textbooks that aren't even in four color print.