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Studying for an engineering economics test. Most boring thing ever. It is supposed to be easy, but I find it hard because it isn't intellectually challenging enough to interest me.
Kholdstare said:Anything coming out of humanities department.
QuarkCharmer said:I took a history of sciences course as an elective way back when. It was fantastic and even touched on the general idea of how many mankind-altering equations work (with simple algebra and intuition, it was an elective afterall). I took it around my third year when I was a music student and I think it played a major role when I re-evaluated my life and decided to go back to school for physics.
I really hate law/politics related anything. Economics, government, all of that.
Jimmy Snyder said:Engineering economics. Is that like how to make a project come in under budget? Are you hoping to get a job with a govt contractor?
Engineering economics came in handy when I bought a new car while in graduate school. I had done some programs in my calculator, which was programmable. The dealer agent was going to give me a 'great deal' on the interest rate. I pulled out the calculator, put in the numbers, and showed him that it wasn't a great deal (I was paying more for the car). He looked at me, excused himself, came back, and gave me a better deal. I saved on the order of $1000, which is pretty significant for a grad student ~27 years ago.InvalidID said:Studying for an engineering economics test. Most boring thing ever. It is supposed to be easy, but I find it hard because it isn't intellectually challenging enough to interest me.
WannabeNewton said:I can only state high school classes because I'm still in my first year of college so I can't really assess anything yet in that regard, if that is ok. By far, english literature and french were two classes I was forced to take that I absolutely loathed. They were easily the most useless classes I have ever had the misfortune of being forced to sit through for 4 years; such a waste of time that it should be a crime.
I have no use for them. I have never had any use for them. I doubt this will change in the future. Like I said: it is a total waste of time. I can read books for enjoyment on my own time but I don't need some english teacher to pick apart every single sentence of a book and fabricate some metaphor or allusion or profound statement about the human condition when it was just some mundane line meant to be read literally. The things people do to make a subject more important than it actually is just blows my mind you know what I mean? English literature classes have ruined my love for reading fiction books. Everything from Catcher in the Rye to A Clockwork Orange, which sit on the pedestal of 'greatest books ever made', were totally picked apart and analyzed to the bone for no reason other than to make substance out of a no substance class.FreeMitya said:It's a shame how many younger people are beginning to loathe literature classes when the older people I meet generally liked/loved them. I guess it's a testament to how poorly they're often taught these days.
WannabeNewton said:I have no use for them. I have never had any use for them. I doubt this will change in the future. Like I said: it is a total waste of time. I can read books for enjoyment on my own time but I don't need some english teacher to pick apart every single sentence of a book and fabricate some metaphor or allusion or profound statement about the human condition when it was just some mundane line meant to be read literally. The things people do to make a subject more important than it actually is just blows my mind you know what I mean? English literature classes have ruined my love for reading fiction books. Everything from Catcher in the Rye to A Clockwork Orange, which sit on the pedestal of 'greatest books ever made', were totally picked apart and analyzed to the bone for no reason other than to make substance out of a no substance class.
WannabeNewton said:I have no use for them. I have never had any use for them. I doubt this will change in the future. Like I said: it is a total waste of time. I can read books for enjoyment on my own time but I don't need some english teacher to pick apart every single sentence of a book and fabricate some metaphor or allusion or profound statement about the human condition when it was just some mundane line meant to be read literally. The things people do to make a subject more important than it actually is just blows my mind you know what I mean?
I love reading. The issue isn't reading. The issue is english teachers stripping apart every line of a book trying to extend some long discussion about the damn color of a room. I see no use in any of this.FreeMitya said:I'm sorry you feel that way. I think a good teacher can really enhance the work or, more importantly, can turn people into lifelong independent reading addicts. Harold Bloom, for example, is known for that. Unfortunately, it's very easy to screw up a literature class, especially if the teacher incorporates politics or something of the like.
WannabeNewton said:I love reading. The issue isn't reading. The issue is english teachers stripping apart every line of a book trying to extend some long discussion about the damn color of a room. I see no use in any of this.
WannabeNewton said:I love reading. The issue isn't reading. The issue is english teachers stripping apart every line of a book trying to extend some long discussion about the damn color of a room. I see no use in any of this.
HeLiXe said:I would prefer a chorus of people scratching their nails against chalkboards than to sit through another algebraic derivation in my astrophysics class.
lisab said:Philosophy of Science was damn painful.
QuarkCharmer said:Okay, you win.
I had the (dis)pleasure of sitting through that as well in an astronomy course.
WannabeNewton said:I have no use for them. I have never had any use for them. I doubt this will change in the future. Like I said: it is a total waste of time. I can read books for enjoyment on my own time but I don't need some english teacher to pick apart every single sentence of a book and fabricate some metaphor or allusion or profound statement about the human condition when it was just some mundane line meant to be read literally. The things people do to make a subject more important than it actually is just blows my mind you know what I mean? English literature classes have ruined my love for reading fiction books. Everything from Catcher in the Rye to A Clockwork Orange, which sit on the pedestal of 'greatest books ever made', were totally picked apart and analyzed to the bone for no reason other than to make substance out of a no substance class.
Sayajin said:Another subject ( maybe worse? ) is philosophy and everything related. In my HS our philosophy textbook actualy was trying to disprove Evolution by using statistics and saying that the probability for life to emerge and evolve to human is so low that it wouldn't be probable for this to happen even for the entire age of the universe...
...The guy who wrote the textbook had Ph.D on philosophy and many other fancy things.
Nevertheless the whole book was about how everything other except philosophy is useless.
I am not even joking with this one. I never understood who in the world permited this to be studied in official high school.
Len M said:Philosophy within science clarifies the framework from within which the scientific method operates. It has no remit in determining the validity of a scientific model within its domain of applicability, that validity starts and ends with empirical verification. But extrapolation of the model outside of it's domain of applicability with no corresponding empirical verification of that extrapolation is a legitimate target for philosophical clarification. Maybe the probabilities for life to emerge are so low as to make it an untenable model in terms of possible empirical verification, I don't know. I'm not hinting at intelligent design or anything here at all, I'm simply wondering about the context of the book you describe - I'm suggesting that you perhaps need to understand the remit of scientific models when reading associated philosophical text, the former deals quite clearly with the scientific method, domains of applicability and empirical verification, the latter conjectures about those models as they might apply outside of the domains of applicability and outside of potential empirical verification. As soon as the model becomes a verified model then philosophy has nothing to say about it in terms of its applicability and its scientific "truth" within its domain of applicability.
AnTiFreeze3 said:No, it clarified the scientific method. Past tense. Philosophy has no use in science beyond what it has previously attributed.
AnTiFreeze3 said:No, it clarified the scientific method. Past tense. Philosophy has no use in science beyond what it has previously attributed.
lisab said:Philosophy of Science was damn painful.
micromass said:Oh god, don't remind me...
Sayajin said:To be even more precise. The only reason that Philosophy contributed to science is that for some reason the word Physics wasn't popular in the time of Newton so he had to use the word philosophy in his famous book. What he ment actualy was Physics. If we correct this mistake we can now say that philosophy never had any inpact on real science.
All the philosophy before and after Newton including the ancient greeks turned out to be wrong. No philosophical theory ever had experimental confirmation or some use to describe fenomenon in the real world.
Further more I think that having to study this in high school is unacceptable.
I would really want to post some picture of the referred philosophy book from my previews post but It's not in English.
The thing is that in Science people use advanced equipment and math and try to understand very strange things in the universe. It could turn out that our human race is not smart enough to even be able to understand all physics laws. Even the physics that we know today like GR and QM is very hard to be explained without math (almoast impossible).
With that said some philosophers try to explain why the nature( the universe or whatever you call everything real(reality?)) is the way it is and why it has this laws WITHOUT actualy knowing the laws or having any mathematical knowlege. Just from pure talking a lot of useless words. Yeah right...
Hercuflea said:Classes I hate, in approximate order: discrete math esp. COMBINATORICS, econometrics, any Literature, statistics, marketing, English, political "science," management, "sociology," "environmental" classes, art
Indifferent: psychology, Computer Sci., music, thermodynamics (I like it but so far I suck at it)
Classes I love: Linear Algebra, Diff. Eq and PDE's, Calculus, Complex Analysis (although it blew my mind), Nuclear Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, History (don't like the attitudes of the profs though)
Classes I have yet to experience: Real Analysis, Functional Analysis, Abstract Algebra, modern physics, numerical analysis, nuclear reactor physics, plasma physics, organic/inorganic/physical chemistry, differential geometry, topology, knot theory (sounds awesome)
Len M said:But science is practiced in terms of empiricism (at least if you consider verification to be a proper part of science) and empiricism can only be practiced with our involvement. So we need to ask ourselves what the relationship is between a reality that involves us and a reality that is independent of us. That relationship cannot be addressed through the scientific method because we are an intrinsic part of establishing an empirically verified model, we can't verify a model of independent reality! So we have to invoke theories of realism or idealism to express the relationship between empirical reality and independent reality (though in the case of idealism no independent reality is assumed to even exist). None of those can be proven or disproven, so the extrapolation of a scientific model to independent reality turns that model into a philosophical conjecture within independent reality. The particular flavour of realism or idealism that is adopted becomes a philosophical stance from which you interpret the models and their relevance to independent reality. But that's all it can ever be (an interpretation) whereas the scientific model, within empirical reality is a scientific truth (within its domain of applicability). But having made the distinction between a model having a scientific truth within empirical reality and that same model having philosophical conjecture within independent reality one then is much clearer as to the role of philosophical thinking within science. Philosophy has no role to play within the domain of applicability of an empirically verified model, but outside of that domain, either within independent reality or as part of a hypothesis that in principle cannot be empirically verified, then philosophical thinking is as valid as any other mode of thought. At least that's the case if we adopt a bottom line of science as requiring empirical verification. If we don't adopt that premise then I'm not sure what science then becomes, certainly not the science I relate to.
So when you read that book, what is the author referring to? Is he dealing with unverifiable models and philosophical thinking or is he saying that empirically verified models can be proven wrong by philosophy? The former case invokes philosophical thinking and is legitimate (though not in any sense of proving or disproving), the latter is clearly wrong because the only premise by which an empirical model can be shown to be incorrect is through the process of empirical verification.
micromass said:I know it's completely off topic, but I find it weird that you can take complex analysis without having taken real analysis...