bigger_cheese

I studied Engineering rather that physics. In our lab reports we were expected to include a discussion of the results and the experimental method. It was basically expected that the report should include associated commentary around potential sources of error and modifications to improve the experimental accuracy.

I don't recall ever being marked down for failing to obtain the "correct" result the impression I came away with was so long as you were thorough in your discussion and analysis the exact result was less important.

I can remember my second year thermodynamics class had a fairly complicated lab which involved taking measurements from inflow and outflow of various heat exchangers in a variety of configurations (Counter flow, Cross flow etc) then computing the efficiency of each configuration. I recall getting into minutiae in the report about assumed friction factors and suggested methods to asses the smoothness of the pvc pipes etc. to improve the accuracy of calculations etc.

As an Australian I've have repressed childhood trauma from being forced to dance to Kylie's "The Locomotion" over and over again in Primary school, it was the Macarena of it's time...

She collaborated with Nick Cave in the mid 90's which was a massive hit, it was all over radio at the time.

I lived through that time as well by 1999 it was pretty clear Google was "the best" search engine site. Alternatives like Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista etc. were on the downswing.

I can remember the characters in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer talking about Google (not sure if that counts as household awareness but it was getting there).

1999 was the time of Napster, it was a completely different internet it really felt like a Wild West.

In Civ I there were resources, for example jungle tiles could have "gems", hills had "coal", grasslands had "game" etc. There was also another resource "luxuries" which is what I think you are talking about, you obtained these via establishing trade routes between cities, or by creating specialized citizens (entertainers).

I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units).

There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.

The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.

Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)

My background is material's science so there might be another meaning physicists use that I'm not familiar with but my very simplified understanding/explanation of Phonons are that they are vibrations within a crystal lattice. These vibrations exists at all temperatures above absolute zero, so I don't think it is accurate to say phonons form due to reduced temperature.

The homescreen recommendations seems to aggressively prioritize what you last searched for.

I missed the end of the recent Australia vs India cricket series so I searched for highlights from the final day of play. Since then for the past 2 weeks my homescreen has been an endless stream of cricket related videos. For some reason it has a particular focus on podcasts related to cricket.

Linear Algebra was a first year subject for me as well. I studied Engineering in Australia.

I'd say Yes and No, there are standardized ways to analyze common engineering problems, for example beam deflection equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflection_(engineering)

or Heat Exchanger efficiency calculations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_mean_temperature_d...) etc.

Often the models and equations rely on making assumptions in order to simplify the problem (cue the joke about physicist and the spherical cow). This is one of the reasons thing are designed with tolerances and safety factors.

Software like CAD and particularly Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) packages can simulate the problem but at least with CFD you would typically perform other types of verification such as wind tunnel tests etc.

Netflix was tipping point for me, at the time Chrome was only browser on Linux that let me watch Netflix.

I don't know if this is a trick but the fast way I did that problem quickly in my head is 20% = (10% X 2) i.e calc 10% of the number then double it.

To quickly calc 10% just multiply the number by 0.1 which you can do by moving the decimal point one place 20,000.00 => 2,000.000 then it is easy to double that number.

to get 4,000.

17% for example is 1.7 x 10%

in this case 1.7 x 2,000 = 3,400

>"Most iconic" in the Western world is just because, like I argued, the Eastern Front is way less known and depicted in movies. It's almost the definition of "lesser known", of which there are many reasons (Cold War thinking being a big reason initially). Overlord is more iconic in the West because it has been brought to the forefront in multiple accounts, movies and games.

I don't think it is just Eastern Front, the Chinese Theatre and War in Pacific get far less attention as well. I'm Australian and we learn a little bit about it in history class at school but there are no movies or books about relatively momentous things like Fall of Singapore etc.

I had something similar happen to me. But it sounds like my teacher handled it differently. I used to watch a lot of documentaries. There was a public access TV channel that would air educational content, I'd occasionally watch it for "fun".

After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.

He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.

Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.

I don't live in either city, I have family who live in both Melbourne and Sydney so I travel to each city relatively frequently at least a couple of times a year. My experience was Melbourne had their system years before Sydney had Opal cards.

I can distinctly remember first time using tap on/off card to get around Melbourne and thinking how much more convenient it was then needing to use Paper ticket machines Sydney had at the time.

Wikipedia lists 2008 adoption for Melb vs 2012 for Syd that seems to align with my memory. So might have just been curse of them being an early adopter.

It happened in the past in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Dalfram_dispute)

Union workers on the docks refused to load Pig Iron which was being sent to Japan, this was whilst Japan was committing atrocities in China.

I'm Australian, that screenshot is from the State election in South Australia, it is an example of how the Upper House ballot paper looks, it is similar in my state New South Wales.

The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on.

There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line.

You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods.

Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons.

For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed.

Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed.

edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.

> Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone

I grew up in the 90's and my parents were strict, particularly compared to a lot of my peers. Things like watching television was heavily restricted. I remember making similar arguments to my parent's deaf ears "I won't fit in, all the kids at school will be talking about what they watched on TV last night, I'll be a loser" etc.

My experience was that most of the kids didn't care that I couldn't understand their Simpson's references or whatever. If anything they were sympathetic, I would get a lot of "man your parents really suck" and then kids would shrug and move on.

I did resent my parents growing up. Looking back I think they were pretty clear examples of "tiger parent" stereotype. I felt immense pressure and stress to achieve good grades and it honestly felt like nothing I did was enough to make my parents happy. I get along with my parents now as an adult but as a teen my home life felt very unhappy at times. I can remember the relief I felt when I left home to live on my own.

So I think it is more likely your child will resent you, then them being ostracized by their peers.

I don't necessarily know if it is diet America but a lot of the Australian holidays and celebrations do feel to me (as an Australian) as slightly odd. I suspect it is because Australia is a relatively young country so there isn't a long existing history of traditional celebrations so we have kind of appropriated existing traditions.

Christmas is best example I can think of there are decorations depicting things like Snowmen and Snowflakes etc. We sing songs about "dashing through the snow" all whilst it is oppressively hot outside, its hard not to notice a bit of dissonance.

ANZAC Day is really the only holiday celebration I can think of off the top of my head that has a uniquely Australian flavor, with things like marches, Two-Up etc.

As an Aussie cricket comes to mind, you run-up from a standing start before releasing the ball.

I think equivalent for US would be "Wind-up" (at least I think pitchers in Baseball performs a wind-up before releasing the ball)

I think more Aussie way to say that would be:

'I'm heaps keen to chuck that saying into the old tucker bag'...

I ported some Algol code into C years ago, despite being completely unfamiliar with Algol I found code very easy to understand.

Found the paper with original code here, it's for a Reinsch spline: https://tlakoba.w3.uvm.edu/AppliedUGMath/auxpaper_Reinsch_19...

I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere.

Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.

I'm also Australian I experienced an overly attentive waiter recently when I was eating at a steakhouse with a few friends. It felt like every 5 minutes they would come up to the table interrupt the conversation to ask something like "How are you enjoying the meal? Can I get you anything?" It was a little bit jarring because of how frequently it occurred. I don't mind once or twice but the frequency in this case seemed excessive.

Possibly it was because it wasn't very crowded and the junior waiter was trying to look busy in front of their supervisor.

I edited the link once to a graph that better illustrated what I meant both results came from a google image search.

I'm sure it can work but I've found it hard to slot into our use cases.

Power BI's trending is one thing I have really struggled with the limitations it has.

For one of my use cases (industrial plant data) we often want to trend timeseries data on a common xaxis with uniquely scaled yaxis.

i.e Temperature, Pressure, Flow Rate, Fill height etc all have differently scaled yaxis but common xaxis.

Something like this example https://imgur.com/a/zd5Giom

Power BI limits you to a single primary and a single secondary Y axis only (i.e limit of two scales).

My Org has been heavily pushing us to use Power BI, I have found it has a lot of pain points.

I expect how useful it is depends a lot on your use cases. If you want to throw a couple of KPI's on a dashboard it fulfils that requirement pretty well but if you want to do any analytics (beyond basic aggregations like, min, max and median) or slightly complicated trending (like multiple Y axis) Power BI is painfully complicated.

I would say it depends a lot on environment the children are raised in, I grew up in the 90's my family had one television set in the house (in our families living room) and it was only turned on if someone was watching a program. There was a tv guide which you would consult, if there was nothing you were interested in then tv would never get turned on. My Dad in particular would get annoyed at what he saw as "needlessly flicking between channels".

I can remember visiting friends houses where there would be multiple television sets (including tv sets in bedrooms) and television would always be turned on, even if no one was watching it. It was like a constant low level background noise. I found it strange but it was normal to them, they were used to eating dinner or playing with legos etc with tv constantly on in the background.

Not sure how helpful this advice is for students I'm in my late 30's have programming experience but had never touched Python until about 6 months ago.

What made Virtual environments work for me was switching to a different Editor. I use Visual Studio Code currently it works well with Virtual Environments.

When you first create a new python file in a given "project folder" it prompts you to create a new Venv and when you switch project folders it remembers and restores the Venv for each project.

One of my work colleagues pointed me to VSCode - it streamlined a lot of python things for me.

If your students are disciplined about creating a new folder for each project managing virtual environments vscode could help them.

Only issue I have is my work office has a corporate proxy setup and pip needs certificate to connect (and if I work remotely I have to turn this setting off) I wrote a shell script to toggle between the two proxy settings. Not sure if university will have the same issue proxy issues but if so this would certainly be a pain point for many students.

It might be related to mobile phone users, as far as I can tell the chrome browser on Android does not let you install extensions. I imagine a huge swathe of chrome users are using it on their phone.

I presume native advertising on youtube has more strict vetting (i.e. needs to comply with advertising regulations unlikely to be out and out scam etc) then creator sponsored content.

Some sponsored content seems like borderline scams to me I see a lot of creators shilling for stuff like "not a bank" banking apps etc.