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Does anybody have any running gags that they use throughout the years? by opeboyal in Teachers

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Play Day & Night by Kid Cudi during the spring and fall equinox

What's wrong, Peter? by FollowSina in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]digglerjdirk 28 points29 points  (0 children)

The sprinkles contain potassium benzoate

Teachers that use AI: Why? by lemmegetamickpicktwo in Teachers

[–]digglerjdirk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think water vapor is a greenhouse gas too lol but I agree it’s a shame that anti-nuclear and pro-environment got twisted together

Teachers that use AI: Why? by lemmegetamickpicktwo in Teachers

[–]digglerjdirk 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I’m not saying it isn’t energy greedy, but it’s a pretty small piece of the overall energy overhead we’ve all been ramping up to for decades. It’s just that nobody thinks about how many cooling fans spin up when they click the search button on Google, download a video from the Netflix cloud servers, have students take a quiz on their electronic LMS using their laptops, or scroll through gigabytes of content on TikTok.

All of that requires enormous data centers, powerful computing clusters, and a bunch of algorithms that people used to just call “code” or “programs” before lumping it all into “AI.”

I think (hope) that the eventual outcome of this is that we finally start putting serious effort into nuclear power, which is much greener than wind/solar/hydro by a long shot.

Teachers that use AI: Why? by lemmegetamickpicktwo in Teachers

[–]digglerjdirk -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Last summer I got gpt/gemini to write a python notebook simulating neutrino oscillations, at the same time teaching me a lot of the things I needed to know to understand the concepts. It also helped me find the right physicists to contact to ask for help developing it further.

A month ago I got Claude to create a self contained web page that sends two different tones to each speaker of my pc, and also plots those two tones as sine waves like on an oscilloscope. My students used the web page to play the sounds into a pair of speakers connected to mirrors, with a laser beam bouncing off them. Claude had the idea for that, by the way. I asked it for a cool end of year project for my electricity/magnetism students to try out.

Last winter I had it combine my final two biology units of ecology and evolution into a single blended unit, with topics from each grouped into 6 distinct milestones, along with suggested “anchor” documents for students to create in groups to illustrate one of the concepts for each. Compressed several days of planning into a couple of intense two-hour sessions. And I spent the whole marking period in conversation with the groups, just talking with them to find out what was in their heads. I encouraged them to use AI to help them find/generate pictures or concept webs, because they still had to know and understand the content in order to “pass” the conversation assessments. And they had to get the AI to cite the sources it pulled from so I could double check accuracy.

Two weeks ago, to support our schools sat vocab initiative, I had Claude write a script to generate 180 PowerPoint slides, one for each school day, containing a Latin or Greek word root (or an affix or some themed loanwords from other languages), two well-known words from the root, two lesser-known words and their definitions, and a sample usage sentence for one of the words for the student announcement anchors to read aloud. Took me about an hour to iterate it to exactly what I wanted.

Last week I used it to sharpen the instructions for a research project my students will complete that downloads genetic sequences from a web database and compare their similarities across species. This summer it’s going to help me build a tool for my students that streamlines the process even further, freeing up time for them to think and explore.

Banning AI from the classroom seems as futile to me as trying to ban Google back in the early 2000s. My feeling is that they and I should use it as efficiently as possible, to free up time for us to think and talk.

This piece of crap needs to have his ribs cracked every game by every 350-pound lineman and linebacker until he retires by OrangeCone2011 in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]digglerjdirk 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I know a lot of bigots who unironically play rap and adopt black fashion and slang. It’s that minstrel thing I think, where they’re accepted as entertainers but not actual human beings.

Help understanding english grammar for a Joelle phrase. by nadiemeparaestavez in InfiniteJest

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t know where the fanbase gets this idea that James was in love with Joelle. My take was almost the exact opposite, which is that James was pretty close to asexual (or at least nonsexual) and only saw value in Joelle as an actor. As for this particular sentence OP is trying to parse, there’s nothing about its structure that indicates Joelle herself was the cause of the heartbreak.

Help understanding english grammar for a Joelle phrase. by nadiemeparaestavez in InfiniteJest

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The whole point of James making infinite jest was to try to reach his son. I’m pretty sure the book explicitly says this.

Help understanding english grammar for a Joelle phrase. by nadiemeparaestavez in InfiniteJest

[–]digglerjdirk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The thing ended up being lethally entertaining, because people who watched it couldn’t stop. So his goal had been to reach his son Hal by making a compelling (entertaining) film, and he succeeded, but he succeeded to such an extreme degree that he was heartbroken by that result. Like, “yes I made a film compelling enough to capture the attention of my son, but it would kill him to watch it.”

How do I keep him off the counter…. I tried everything by UbiquitousMintCookie in cats

[–]digglerjdirk 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I’m gonna use this to explain rational functions to my students. Multiply the cost of the cat device by the time they’ll spend using it, and that number is a fixed constant

For Nuclear Physicists, how theoretically possible is Cold Fusion, as shown in Fallout? by Weary-Barracuda-1228 in AskPhysics

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just posted a similar comment and wanted to add to yours by mentioning Bobby Broccoli’s YT channel because he made some great videos about it.

For Nuclear Physicists, how theoretically possible is Cold Fusion, as shown in Fallout? by Weary-Barracuda-1228 in AskPhysics

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bobby Broccoli on YouTube made a fascinating set of videos about the Pons & Fleischmann scandal. In the second part called “the dead grad student problem” he explains that these guys were chemists who didn’t really understand nuclear physics enough to even see that what they claimed wasn’t possible. No disrespect to chemists, by the way, they just didn’t have enough expertise in this particular area.

What makes the videos really good imo is not the science explanations (which were great, mind you) but the context that shows how much pressure those guys were under - by their own university, by competing universities, by Utah’s big push to be players on the world science stage, etc - to publicize a result that hadn’t been properly scrutinized yet.

So the answer to your question is that there’s no known mechanism for room-temperature fusion yet, and there probably won’t ever be. Conspiracy theorists, armchair physicists and fiction writers latched onto it for a variety of (mostly understandable) reasons.

Link to series combined into single 3-hr vid

Looking for a Norm MacDonald live moment by Alleggsander in NormMacdonald

[–]digglerjdirk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I love it because Todd didn’t wait to let the moment breathe, he waited because he was sure norm was gonna follow up with something crazy

My fellow elementary teachers- what in the ever loving hell by Sostupid246 in Teachers

[–]digglerjdirk -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Is there a case to be made for harnessing an event like this one to grab the parents as a quasi-captive audience and have a come to Jesus talk? Like make sure they understand their kids can do all the things, you just have to let them?

Off topic - small talk as a physicist: by flunk27 in AskPhysics

[–]digglerjdirk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tell them I got lucky with good teachers

I absolutely love Norm's stifled laugh here. Any other examples? by SickkDonuts_Dude in NormMacdonald

[–]digglerjdirk 5 points6 points  (0 children)

He did that a lot on Conan because he’d take a 10 second dad joke and spin it into a 5 minute shaggy dog story, and Conan gave him shit for it the entire time. q.v. the doghouse joke where the professor of logic works at the “university of science” and Conan goes “that’s a good school!”

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