CodexArcanum

This is especially funny because I think there's only 7 positions on a typical trombone anyway, and unless you have godlike lips can only hit 3 or 4 octaves across those. i played trombone through high school and it's like the easiest instrument, haha.

I hadn't read there were so many angles on the word. I had heard it came from Joyce and never dug deeper. I'm surprised that you quoted a passage from Oxford but didn't check the OED. Joyce being Irish, the OED would better document the English he'd have been using. Merriam-Webster and derivatives are American English dictionaries.

From the OED:

Honestly, I'm just surprised physicists don't have a gif/jif thing going on with quork/quark pronunciation.

Oh oh iyo

He lives in me!

Awww, JEJ 😭 Well, as long as there's baseball, he'll live on in the cornfields of our cells.

Centrioles is my favorite pasta shape, the little ridges hold sauce so well.

Sometimes you need a stranger to really get that Rough Endoplasmic treatment.

What is this, a barn for aphids!?

~~Got'em!~~ Saddam!

I believe the Fahrenheit scale was originally set up for 100° to be human body temperature. We're just built colder now I guess? I had to look up what zero was and apparently he originally set it at the coldest the air had ever been around his village, but later had to standardize it and so cooked up some brine that froze at 0°.

I would propose that 100 should be calibrated around the wet bulb temperature, which I think is around 105°F but varies with humidity. That's the temperature where sweating doesn't cool you off any more, so any temperature 100 or more is deadly to most people. I like 0 being freezing for water, seems sensible and is also a good "prolonged exposure to this or lower will kill you" cutoff point.

Start with a list of numbers, like [1 2 3]. That's it, a list of numbers. If you treat those numbers like they represent something though, and apply some rules to them, you can do math.

One way to consider them is as coordinates. If we had a 3-D coordinate grid, then [1 2 3] could be the point at x = 1, y = 2, and z = 3. You could also consider the list of numbers to be a line with an arrow at one end, starting from the point at [0 0 0] and stopping at the other point. This is a geometric vector: a thing with a direction and a magnitude. Still just a list of numbers though.

Now, what if you wanted to take that list and add another one, say [4 5 6], how might you do it? You could concatenate the lists, like [1 2 3 4 5 6] and that has meaning and utility in some cases. But most of the time, you'd like "adding vectors" to give you a result that maps to something geometric such as putting the lines with arrows end-to-end and seeing what new vector that is. You can do that by adding each element of the 2 vectors. And, almost magically, the point at [5 7 9] is where you'd end up if you first went to [1 2 3] and then traveled [4 5 6] further. We made no drawings, but the math modeled the situation well enough to give us an answer anyway.

Going further, maybe you want to multiply vectors, raise them to exponents, and more? There are several ways to do these, and each has different meanings when you think about them with shapes and geometry.

But vectors are just lists of numbers, they don't have to be geometric things. [1 2 3] could also represent the coefficients of a function, say 0 = 1x^2 + 2x + 3(x^0). You can still do the same math to the vector, but now it means something else. It models a function, and combining it with other vectors let's you combine and transform functions just like if they were lines and shapes.

When you get into vectors beyond 3 elements, there's no longer a clean geometric metaphor to help you visualize. A vector with 100 elements can be used just as well as one with 2, but we can't visualize a space with 100-dimensions. These are "vector spaces" and a vector is a single point (or rather, points to a point) within them.

Matrices are similar but allow for deeper models of more complex objects.

A vector is a variable-length collection of homogeneous elements. For fixed-length, use an array if homogeneous or a tuple if not. For heterogeneous, untyped collections, please consider one of the many "list" variants.

Jane! Smoke this crazy thing!

I saw Titanic in theaters when I was around 11 or 12 with my parents and grandparents. Kate Winslet's breasts and that hand print are indelibly printed in my mind along with the real awkward feelings I was having.