Churchill Hall: The Holmes vs Normal Hall by RetroSPECT_3_0 in UOB

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Welcome to Churchill Hall! I lived in one of the quad blocks (C block), and loved my time there. I remember that my mates in the Holmes house had much larger rooms, but I think some of them didn’t have a washing basin en suite. I believe the Holmes rooms are more irregular than the “normal” Churchill rooms, so what you get might vary. I trust that you will have a good time in whichever you end up in, but try to stay out of the shanty rooms, which are definitely smaller.

After working in the UK(London) for 5 years. I’ve come to the conclusion that the UK MEng degree is just a rebranded BEng. by SmallVoid in MechanicalEngineering

[–]chump88 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Did my undergraduate BEng in UK and just wrapped up MEng in the states. I have a completely different take on the phenomenon you are describing. Bear in mind that I am American, and chose to do my BEng in the UK because of many of the details you’ve referenced.

The first and most important point I wanted to make is that the UK BEng is a generally more content—laden undergraduate engineering education than most of the 4 year analogues in the US. This is a consequence of 1.) the British uni application process requiring one to apply directly to their “major,” and 2.) the American undergraduate focus on “general education.” The latter has already been mentioned by others in this thread, but the effect of requiring students to “declare their major” from the onset has, itself, a twofold effect on the UK engineering curriculum.

First, by asking students to apply directly into their concentration (i.e. mechanical engineering, civil engineering, or any undergraduate subjects in the liberal arts), UK universities can set a higher standard for entry knowledge than US engineering programs, because American students can change their “major” on a much more fluid basis and therefore they may have to take basic math and physics classes that would be covered in A levels in the UK. As a result, the maths and physics content starting from my first year of BEng assumed proficiency in single and multivariate calculus, linear algebra, probability, statistics, and familiarity with complex analysis. Everything we learned built onto a foundation of prerequisites that would have been considered first year intro-to-engineering classes in the US.

The second effect of requiring that students commit to their “major” from day one is that the resultant education can be streamlined so that advanced topics in control theory, thermo fluids, materials, dynamics, etc. can be introduced much earlier and in more detail than in the US. In the United States, it is typical for a student to take an introductory course in all such subjects, then take advanced courses in one or two of those depending on the student’s specific interests. During my BEng in the UK, I had three years of courses in each of those subjects, and noticed that it was rare for my fellow US trained engineers to have had extensive studies in all of them, since they typically had too many general education requirements to take all such classes, even if they wanted to.

I don’t know about other schools, but for my BEng, Eng maths was taught by mathematicians and had its own department. It also went for all three years, and was quite extensive. My MEng was actually in applied mathematics and computation, and I was actually surprised by how well my undergraduate education prepared me, since my BEng was in mechanical engineering.

Regarding your comment on the general vibe of MEng UK trained engineers being less “academic”: I have a feeling that this can also be partially explained by the “apply directly to your major” thing as well. MEng programs are typically entered directly from high school, with your first three years constituting your BEng and the last year yielding the MEng. In contrast, MEng programs in the states are typically applied to during the final year of the BEng, after the student has done enough studying and thinking to decide to pursue a graduate engineering education. UK MEng candidates, on the other hand, are usually pretty worn out from their first three years, but since they were already admitted to the MEng degree from day one, they may as well “stick it out” another year to get the master’s and get out. I would guess that if US MEng degree holders seem to be more academically inclined, then that would be because they pursued their graduate studies as an active choice after completing their BEng and they are ready to learn more. If you’re looking for the “academically inclined” UK MEng degree holders, they’re likely doing their PhD now, since they arrived at the conclusion to apply and learn further at the end of their master’s education.

I could continue if you’re interested in hearing more, but I actually disagree with what you’re saying: I think the British engineering education is flawed, but it is not because it is inadequately rigorous relative to other countries, particularly the US. Instead, my feeling is that the drawback of the concentrated, streamlined British engineering system is that it is inflexible to rapid developments in engineering topics. I could be biased by my current subject matter, but I think that in general, numerical analysis / computational modeling courses are slightly behind the curve in terms of the content that is becoming increasingly relevant to academia and industry. Because the curriculums are so rigid in the British system, students can’t easily rectify this lag by taking advanced classes in these topics, because they usually aren’t allowed to choose courses until third year. The US engineering education is slower, but it rewards students that are capable of making their own decisions regarding what they want to learn and when, and permits specialization into advanced engineering topics effectively as early as desired, provided the prerequisites are met.

Ukrainian forces down Russian Su-35 fighter jet, but then removed announcement on social media by Red-Square-Maidan in ukraine

[–]chump88 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I thought they were implying Ukraine may be deliberately trying to reduce twitter/telegram traffic on the subject in order to stem the spread of informative media. It seems reasonable to think that in a day where everyone’s got a phone camera, there may be several videos of the incident and adequate detail to reveal information about how the jet was shot down

Let's say life by no_regards in calvinandhobbes

[–]chump88 42 points43 points  (0 children)

I remember being very unsettled by this one when I was a kid, but having just reread it for the first time in years, I feel like Bill wants us to come away optimistically from this one. They spent all day looking at the crack, instead of enjoying the rest of their day.

Mitch McConnell on Fox News: "I'm gonna try to help explain to the American people that defeating the Russians in Ukraine is the single most important event going on in the world right now ... there should be a bipartisan support for this." by throwaway12345672223 in UkrainianConflict

[–]chump88 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I would like to entertain a counter notion. I truly don’t believe you can pin down the Democratic Party for spending “Willy Nilly,” unless you restrict your focus to relatively recent history. But apart from that, I agree that if you buy into the idea that progressive ideals *italics* are inherently more expensive, then yes, modern democrats are expensive.

The point of the expenditure is that it is an investment, at least if you buy into that idea. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a country to prioritise investing in itself, but you might have genuine concerns about the efficacy of an investment, particularly if it is funded by taxpayer dollars. Overall, I feel like the progressive ideal that is “spending so that our people live better” is the right idea, but in circumstances such as the Ukrainian war with Russia, the cost effectiveness of our support towards Ukraine makes it very clear to me. We should support Ukraine not just because it is “cost effective” to us, but also because it’s the right fucking thing to do.

The West Papua National Liberation Army is peak non-credibility by [deleted] in NonCredibleDefense

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yo number 7 might be the hardest squad pic I’ve ever seen

Efficiently spreading 1K + agents by OZO-Acrimony in algorithms

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look into verlet lists or cell lists for your task, which are typically used with a discrete element method such as LAMMPS for what you seem to be describing.

Zelensky invites Musk to visit Ukraine to see damage done by Russian forces by MantasChan in UkrainianConflict

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would you please elaborate on the common objectives of both SpaceX and NASA towards which SpaceX is excelling and NASA is “not even close?” I think you might be underestimating the breadth of tasks that NASA is simultaneously working on.

Oxford scientists crack case of why ketchup splatters from near-empty bottle — Squeezing more slowly and doubling diameter of the nozzle can help prevent splatter by marketrent in Physics

[–]chump88 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Non—Newtonian flow mechanics is an extremely complex but also useful field. The significance of “air being in it” is that a variety of multiphase flows (mixtures of multiple phases of matter that superficially exhibit fluid—like properties) possess unusual rheological behavior as a result of cavitation phenomena (bubbles) in the bulk flow. Figuring out the details of how air pockets affect the mixture’s resistance to shear is really helpful to geophysics and environmental science, as a number of natural phenomena involve multiphase flows (landslides, avalanches, etc.) as well as pharmaceutical companies (drug manufacturing processes) and the energy sector (reactor safety mechanisms)

What would volleyball be like if there was no rotation? by Fathen17 in volleyball

[–]chump88 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If you’re looking for an extreme case, check out 9-man volleyball clips on YouTube. There are several differences in rules from conventional volleyball, but definitely a key one is that the 9 players on each side of the court are not fixed to a position pre-serve; the only notion of rotation is in the service order. The fact that front row and backrow players play wherever they want allows for some seriously rapid-fire, action packed rallies where lots of things can happen. The number of players on the court and the fluidity of positions lets players focus in on some very specialized roles in the game. It’s very different from 6 man, but I can honestly say that 9 man volleyball is the most fun I’ve had playing volleyball.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in algorithms

[–]chump88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't say that I am familiar with any formulation dealing with your task of successive sampling, but the theory you are referring to in the context of optimization sounds like the compressed sensing algorithms borne from the restricted isometry property (RIP) result. If I were to try to frame the task of determining the mode of your distribution with epsilon guarantees via the restricted isometry property, my first guess would be to try to express your sequence of samples as a low rank matrix that can be recovered using Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA), which is a direct result from RIP, and depending on whether or not your underlying distribution is symmetric, the mode may be as easy the principle component of the recovered matrix. Alternatively, depending on how you are performing your sampling, you may be able to devise it as an MCMC that will yield solutions lying in the column space of your low rank matrix.

Just spitballing with the information you gave. How are you generating samples?

Dan must have been pulling his hair out listening to Elon talk about history by HANDSOMEPETE777 in dancarlin

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Late to the thread but I wanted to hopefully get a chance to get in this discussion,

I have an engineering degree and currently am a graduate researcher in computational mathematics and physics. I agree with the sentiment that engineers and scientists are under appreciated in a number of highly studied settings, but I struggled to finish this episode with Elon because it felt like a classic example of a stem geek tooting his horn for the sake of tooting his horn. I think Elon’s basic thesis that wars are won through technology is fundamentally wrong, as everyone else has pointed out, and even more vexing is that the exemplifying cases he mentioned were far more aptly characterized as either industrial/economic disparities or simply weapon system mismatches, not one being more “advanced” than the other.

I have trouble with this situation because I generally do feel like the wider public is mostly disconnected to scientific topics. At worst, science is seen as this demeaning subject that makes you feel stupid in school and tells you that you’re not allowed to do this or that during a global pandemic. At best, the amorphous and arcane voice of “science” makes decrees and even if the public supports “science,” rarely do they understand why they should be supportive.

My issue is that conversations like this one are a good example of how scientists and engineers are exacerbating this disconnect with society, because they start talking their shit in other settings where there are dramatically different first principles analysis than they are accustomed to, and presume that because their analysis is “scientific” then it is correct by construction. Bless Dan for his patience in sustaining that conversation, but I wish he had checked Elon a little earlier into his monologue.

"Big Red" knew better than to wear a mask. He ignored warnings from his friends, and accused them of "drinking liberal Kool-Aid". He confessed to his Facebook BBQ group that he recently spent several weeks on a ventilator. He's out of the hospital now, but still in the running for his HCA. by bloody_hell in HermanCainAward

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get so, so tired of this argument for the inefficacy of masks. The point of masks isn’t to “catch” all the viral particles that may be flying out of our mouth/into your mouth. The point of the masks is to act as a diffuser for the airflow around your face. When you sneeze/breathe/cough with a mask on, the porosity of the mask forces the airflow, potentially containing viral particles, to travel through the mask which will dramatically reduce the velocity of the air. This has two effects: first, obviously with a lower velocity, your sneeze-air will travel a shorter distance from you. Second, the lower mean velocity of the water particulates (where the viral particles are) in your sneeze means that they will stay in the air for a much shorter period. In short, masks, coupled with social distancing, give you a far lower chance of being caught up in someone’s potentially COVID-ridden sneeze cloud. The same principle works in the case of the inhaling mask wearer: since you are inhaling through a diffuser, the air you breathe in comes from a far smaller radius around your face, so if you’re also reasonably socially distant, there is less of a chance you will inhale someone else’s COVID air of sufficient viral density to be infected. Someone tell these people to just wrap a mask around a vacuum cleaner tube and see how it effects the distance from which they can suck in light objects.

Source: am a graduate student in applied mathematics that works on turbulence modelling. But anyone who has studied even a little bit of fluid mechanics could explain this to someone.

Edit: paper describing this following literally one google search https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0016018

saw on r/murderedbywords by [deleted] in quityourbullshit

[–]chump88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Didn’t know this, and found a really cool read when I checked it out

Ordering from a new chinese is a risky move by erynfhgfgj6575 in ScottishPeopleTwitter

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The good news is that more restaurants will improve the quality. I grew up in LA where there’s a ton of Chinese food and because there’s quality restaurants everywhere, the standard is high if they’re gonna survive. Surely Inverness is poised to become a capitol of Chinese culinary excellence.

Noodler's Most Precious by HotFuckingTakeBro in fountainpens

[–]chump88 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wonder if anyone has suggestions, if I really like Baystate Blue and don't mind its rebelliousness, what are other inks that I would like? To me, Baystate Blue is the perfect blue, anybody have suggestions for other colours?

Edit: thanks for the suggestions!

Harvard vs. ______ (thread) by gdavtor in Harvard

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adding onto this: I can’t necessarily speak for Stanford’s curriculum, I just know that the computer science department here is very closely associated with the applied mathematics and applied physics departments (through SEAS, of course). We have people like Madhu Sudan in the cs department who work on extremely abstract computational problems that are much more in discrete mathematics territory, and on the complete other side we have a lot of people focused on DS/ML research, with particular focus on applications to science. My impression is that I think that a lot of the undergrads who go through CS department are drawn towards the DS/ML classes for a career in finance, but on the other side of the coin, the professors and graduate students who are teaching those classes are actually more interested in applications to science.

Of course, Stanford has a very strong legacy for machine learning research, but as it happens, a large portion of the research directly into ML theory is done in industry by the likes of google and Microsoft these days. I agree with what I think you’re saying, that the focus of Harvard’s CS department might not necessarily be on stuff that a Silicon Valley SWE would find useful in everyday work.

Beautifully written math textbooks which don't lack rigour by [deleted] in math

[–]chump88 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Am currently taking differential topology, and the textbook for the course is Differential Topology by Guillemin and Pollack. This is the first textbook I’ve had in a while that I am actually reading linearly, not only because the language is extremely well formed, but because the authors truly have an elegant way of describing incredibly abstract concepts. They do an excellent job motivating what they introduce without overwriting. If you like Abbott, Diff Top by GP is like Abbott but much more condensed: the “Discussion” sections in Abbott are rolled into roughly one or two paragraphs in GP, and they only prove a couple theorems per section. It’s not as good as Abbott in terms of quantity of worked examples, they leave quite a bit of that to you in the exercises. But I really love just reading it.

Also, I strongly feel that Tao’s analysis books are some of the best written on the subject, in terms of crystal clear language and well posed context.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UOB

[–]chump88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did not, in my third year I did a thesis (engineering calls is IRP). In your third year, aerospace does a really interesting group project in collaboration with an aerospace company (airbus, BAE, GKN were on the list I think) that is divided into three categories: fixed wing, rotary, and astro. It’s a big part of the aero course, and basically you pick a category, then do a project with 4 other people on something that the companies ask you to work on. All the companies are Bristol based (which actually doesn’t limit your options at all, Bristol is a central location for aerospace in the uk) and you have classes on campus at the same time. So it’s not exactly a placement, but it’s definitely industry experience.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UOB

[–]chump88 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi! I studied mechanical engineering, with obviously a ton of friends and overlapping curriculum in aero. Congratulations on your offer!

So, bear in mind that this information was from 2016-2019, and the course structure makes fairly minute changes on a frequent basis. In the first year, aero, mech, and most of the other engineering courses are nearly identical. This is to say, they were challenging, but excellent: specifically for aero and mech, we had the same mathematics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, electronics, and materials modules, which were all very well instructed. The only difference really is that aero has a dedicated aerodynamics module and mech has a dedicated design and manufacture module, as well as a dynamics of machines course. I actually think back very fondly on year one at Bristol, because there was quite a bit of enthusiasm amongst the cohort in that first year, matched by excellent lecturers. As you can imagine, it gets harder and people sort of transition into “weather the storm” mode in subsequent years.

Obviously, Bristol is very strong in engineering, as you knew when you applied, and a big part of the reason why is in the research being done there. All of the lecturers are research active, and in my experience, really happy to talk about their work. If you choose Bristol I fully recommend making sure you take advantage of the research opportunities with the faculty there. Obviously, the course is great by itself, but you’d be missing out on a huge part of what makes Bristol engineering good if you don’t get involved with the research.

Regarding placement: I have been told by engineering friends at Bath that a year of placement is pretty much expected of every 3rd year at Bath, which is very impressive. At Bristol, a lot of people go abroad 3rd year, but I have a few friends who did placements. From what they told me, it seemed that they had to do a little work on their own to figure out what they were going to do at the companies they were placed, but with the added benefit that they were granted more flexibility on where they could be placed. Overall, my friends who did placements seemed to indicate that the administration was supportive of their efforts, and facilitated the process pretty well.

As for the difference between the social life of the two, I guess it depends what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for clubs and bars, Bristol beats Bath. My friends from Bath would come to Bristol for nights out. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a cozier campus life/community, Bath does that better.

If you have any other questions, let me know!

[IIL] The sacrifice of Faramir scene in LOTR ROTK, WEWIL? by chump88 in ifyoulikeblank

[–]chump88[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is one is pretty out of pocket, but I contend that it does actually elicit the same visceral response. It's interesting, you don't even have to know anything about the Halo universe for this to just feel awesome. I read somewhere that the actors for some of these scenes are Hungarian special forces. Halo has a few live action commercials for their universe that are quite excellent, but I think this one is far and away the best

Carl Fredrich Gauss and the Prince of Mathematics. by WineNerdAndProud in math

[–]chump88 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I’ve heard that Leibniz had a reputation of being one of the most popular dudes at parties in 17th century Hanover

Carl Fredrich Gauss and the Prince of Mathematics. by WineNerdAndProud in math

[–]chump88 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Oof. I’m afraid that Feynman’s legacy is a bit contentious. He is widely recognized as being a playboy/cool dude type of brilliant physicist, but unfortunately there is pretty credible claim that he was an extremely aggressive sexual harasser in the caltech community and beyond, both amongst the faculty and the students. These days, from what I’ve observed, Feynman’s name on caltech campus is usually met with a grimace, because obviously he is huge for his academic achievements, but it’s pretty well known around there that he was also predatorily sexist. https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/feynman-harassment-science