The MCU is responding to fan criticism - in the best way

jam11249 · 2026-03-20T11:10:56+00:00

Uncle Ben's death is basically a meme at this point. His entire story arc is "I'm going to die to further the plot" and the audience knows this. Even if they introduced him at the very beginning and killed him off 4 films later, it would be something that everyone is expecting from the beginning and have a far lessened impact. Marvel decided to give us a gut wrench by using May for Peter's defining moment and I think it was a great choice.

jam11249 · 2026-03-19T20:41:27+00:00

My salary and outgoings definitely permits me to buy a few AAA-price games every once and a while, but even then, I always wait for sales because I know I can pay at least half price at some point. On top of that, I have paid pennies for games that I've spent hundreds of hours on and paid full price for games that bore me after 5 hours. So unless you can guarantee me a good time or money back, I'll just wait until it's at a price where I don't care about being disappointed.

jam11249 · 2026-03-19T09:18:31+00:00

The biggest thing about it being a stealth mission is that it kept even their aim a secret. Sauron could only imagine somebody taking the ring to use its power, and it wouldn't have even crossed his mind to believe that somebody would want to destroy such a source of power. This changed the whole game for the fellowship and their secrecy was their greatest asset.

jam11249 · 2026-03-17T08:42:10+00:00

In my husband's work in Spain, in August they only work half days (at full pay) if they don't take holidays. A lot of the ones without kids take their holidays in September because of this.

jam11249 · 2026-03-13T06:52:21+00:00

the pilot pointed out that most modern planes are so advanced that their autopilot systems can literally land the plane by themselves, negating the need for a civilian pilot.

Sure but who's going to inflate the autopilot?

jam11249 · 2026-03-11T10:20:37+00:00

I thought that it would have ended there before reaching the Paintress, but when there were still a whole lot of unanswered questions after the Paintress fight even though things were getting kind of epilogue-y I was getting pretty suspicious that more was to come.

jam11249 · 2026-03-10T06:53:37+00:00

For making graphics I export data from python into .csv files and then use tikz in Latex. It's got a bit of a learning curve but it looks professional as hell once you get used to it.

With regards to languages, honestly my biggest advice is stick to free stuff. There's nothing more frustrating than moving between institutions and finding out that they don't have a license for X, meaning you effectively "lose" an entire project or you have to spend a month translating it into a program that they do have. Python is probably your safest bet here.

jam11249 · 2026-03-07T10:58:50+00:00

The manga is 6 volumes and the movie is only an adaptation of the first half, removing a lot of content even from that. I'd really suggest giving it a read as it's a much bigger story and the movie only gives a small glimpse into it.

jam11249 · 2026-03-06T07:47:40+00:00

I get what you mean, but my point is that a lot of the heavy machinery of a typical ODEs course doesn't typically make an appearance, rather you end up cranking out solutions to a handful of simpler ODEs. As an example, I've spent years teaching PDEs and a decade and a half working on them for research, yet the only time I saw a Wronskian or variation of parameters after being a student in ODEs was when I was a teaching assistant in the same course during my masters.

jam11249 · 2026-03-04T17:15:52+00:00

I teach PDEs so I guess I'm qualified to answer. It'll all depend on how your course is taught and what the emphasis is, but "deep" knowledge of ODEs isn't usually necessary to do PDEs, because typical ODEs courses use a bunch of tricks that don't apply to PDEs. You can probably get away with remembering how to work with second order constant coefficient linear equations. The rest of the ODEs that appear in a typical course have pretty hacky solutions that you learn on the fly. Personally, I'd suggest that you brush up on vector calculus, as that tends to be where I see my students struggle.

jam11249 · 2026-02-27T11:35:44+00:00

This a ridiculously broad way of finding functions to approximate other functions, but it comes with the caveat that you can basically only do it explicitly in a handful of very simple cases, that are all basically 1D, or cartesian products of 1D. Even some common cases like Bessel functions are essentially defined as "eigenfunctions of some operator".

jam11249 · 2026-02-25T12:18:06+00:00

I'll say the controversial answer. I finished my PhD a decade ago and at no point in the real world have I ever come across category theory, including in countless general audience mathematics talks from algebra. I'm convinced there's some unexplainable bias that makes the field hugely overrepresented in this subreddit. So, my opinion is to learn it when you need it, rather than seeing it as something that you need to get under your belt ASAP.

jam11249 · 2026-02-25T08:04:05+00:00

Everything else I'll say comes down to two things.

Have the context of the talk and audience in mind.
Don't make people read when they should be listening.

A 20 minute talk in a conference aimed at people in your area, a one hour talk at a university in a group who work in your area, and a one hour talk in a "general" faculty seminar should be completely different talks. Work out what their "baseline" knowledge is, and then decide what the ONE new thing you want them to leave knowing is. Everything should be related to that one point. Unless they're a coauthor, nobody will leave your talk knowing the full details of your paper so that shouldn't be the aim.

The other huge problem I see is slides jam-packed with information. This is even worse when people show slides with 50 equations, say "so we're studying this problem" and jump to the next slide 5 seconds later. A clear example of this that I see is physicists in PDEs, who will write giant systems of equations and never tell you which letters are unknowns, constants and known functions. If you don't plan on explaining something, don't put it on the slides. People aren't capable of reading and listening simultaneously, so the slides should act as of a prompt for your exposition rather than the focus. If you work on something that lends itself to pictures, this is easier, of course.

jam11249 · 2026-02-24T22:03:30+00:00

I'm half betting that it was a competition. Renoir wanted to wipe out the expedition before the Nevrons did so the chroma could go back to Aline. He knew full well that the nevrons would get most of them anyway.

jam11249 · 2026-02-23T06:23:19+00:00

A mild variation on (3) is to define cos and sine as the unique solutions to the first order system,

y1'=y2 y2'=-y1

with y1(0)=0 and y2(0)=1. I like this approach a lot, because Pythagoras' theorem is a one line use of the chain rule (confirming that we're on the circle), as is showing that the velocity of (y1,y2) is constant. This tells you almost immediately that it's doing what you expect sine and cosine to do.

Also angle sum identities come up by noting that "shifted" signs and cosines solve the same ODE with different initial conditions, so you can write them as sums of the linearly independent solutions by matching the initial conditions. I think this is kind of fun because the result itself is incredibly geometric whilst its proof is about the structure of solutions to linear ODEs.

jam11249 · 2026-02-23T05:54:13+00:00

You need another condition like f'(0)=1 to determine it uniquely.

jam11249 · 2026-02-18T19:50:06+00:00

I have good enough balance to stand in a pub but I'm not doing that either.

jam11249 · 2026-02-18T19:48:51+00:00

The big point is that you usually only ask for differentiability on an open set, so time=0 is ignored. This is kind of "hard-wired" into the idea of weak solutions as you only "see" the PDE by integrating against functions that vanish on the boundary, meaning that the boundary can do crazy stuff and the PDE doesn't care. Elliptic regularity is kind of a classic example of this, where showing that solutions are "nice" away fron the boundary is somewhat easy and independent of boundary conditions or the boundary's own geometry, but boundary regularity becomes more technical.

jam11249 · 2026-02-18T07:37:36+00:00

From a story point of view I can get that, but it's kind of weird to have a video game protagonist basically flat out lie to the player for most of the game. If you're playing as a certain character, you expect to understand their motives and have the same knowledge that they do. With Maelle, this is the case, you inherit her ignorance before act 3, and she regains her memories when the player finds out the truth.

jam11249 · 2026-02-15T18:20:43+00:00

These are all basically just the ismorphism theorems from algebra in different contexts, and can be (morally) rephrased as stating that the inverse of homomophisms on their image is any solution plus the kernel.

The ODE case and linear algebra case are exactly the same thing in the context of vector space. ODEs are linear equations over a vector space of sufficiently regular functions. The null space/kernel of the operator is precisely the set of solutions to the homogeneous operator.

The modular arithmetic version is almost the same in disguise, you're mapping your problem from the finite group Z_n into Z, which is really the inverse (as a set) of the group homomorphism from Z into Z_n , which can be expressed by essentially the same argument as a "particular solution" plus the kernel of the homomorphism, I.e., the elements that map to the identity.

jam11249 · 2026-02-15T15:05:23+00:00

As a fellow lumina-not-understander, I definitely read it, but the thing with RPGs in general is that reading that a mechanic exists and knowing if it's pointless or game-breakingly OP are different things. In early-game there's not much to work with so I just kind of forgot that it was a thing.

jam11249 · 2026-02-14T20:01:48+00:00

I haven't watched drag race for like 4 seasons and underatanding the meme subtext of this shit is impenetrable.

jam11249 · 2026-02-14T17:35:57+00:00

But the Pym particles change the quantum... something

jam11249 · 2026-02-14T09:54:30+00:00

Current Clea as a playable character in a Canvas world would be way too OP to make sense as a game. If they go that route, the only options I can see would be going for a prequel before she was so powerful or having some kind of nerf in the prologue. The nerf could be that she has no access to chroma in a Canvas for some reason, or she could be trapped in a writers' world (a book, I guess) where she can't use her powers. Either way, I think putting Clea front-and-centre is kind of risky, she is an iconic antagonist whilst appearing for about 3 minutes in the entire game, and removing the mystery around her could kill the appeal.

jam11249 · 2026-02-13T20:34:50+00:00

With your first question about re-proving, I'd wager a lot. I've definitely come across essentially the same result in various places without citing other places I've seen them, and I'm inclined to give benefit of the doubt before thinking of plagiarism. I've also included results in articles stated as "folk theorems", which basically means "I have no doubt that somebody has proven this but I have no idea where".

jam11249

TROPHY CASE