I got a mention and my photo on the cover of the latest Model Engineers Workshop. Shame they spelt my name wrong but you can't have everything.
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I got a mention and my photo on the cover of the latest Model Engineers Workshop. Shame they spelt my name wrong but you can't have everything.
Attachment 6486
Congrats!! Make sure you get a few copies to save…
Ken
Article with photos came to 5 pages, I'm very happy an early Christmas present.
Impressive! I hope you're framing that and putting it on the workshop wall. :rocker:
It's shocking how common grammatical errors are. They even misspelled my last name on my driver's license!
Yep, I see language errors absolutely everywhere. Poor grammar and usage abound, sadly. Like so many fingernails on a chalkboard for me…
Ken
Congratulations! :thumbsup:
Way to go Andy, quite an accomplishment!
I just don't get grammatical errors in this day and age. It's why I have spell check on all the time! The bad thing is when I don't watch the corrections this silly iPad does. Looks sometimes like I had a stroke in the middle of the post :)
Spell checkers are only useful for finding a subset of spelling errors - typos that produce a non-word. They're completely useless for correcting grammar errors such as misuse of homonyms (e.g., your and you're, there and they're). The more subtle errors (e.g., using 'that' as a pronoun for people, as in "those people that can't spell") can only be found if you've learned to use your native language correctly.Quote:
Originally Posted by C-Bag
There's no excuse for not proof-reading what you've written and learning to spell and properly employ common words that you use frequently .
While what I've written applies to everyone IN HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE, I think non-native speakers who attempt to write in English should be given a huge pass. We admire their gumption in trying to learn and use what is arguably one of the most difficult of the western languages.
ouch! I resemble that remark.....I should have said spelling errors.
Grammar has always been a weakness of mine. Along with math.
Ah, yes, difficulties with math. It almost seems that it is a requirement for anyone engaging in the sorts of hobbyist pursuits discussed in online fora.Quote:
Originally Posted by C-Bag
I attribute the innumeracy of the general public to two primary faults.
First the schools. When they teach at all, they fail to show how math is used in the real world. Students can't understand why they need to discuss what for them is a skill with little perceived practical use.
The second reason is more subtle. Most everything else to which students are exposed is "fuzzy". History can have different interpretations, art is in the eye of the beholder, literature has always been personal, and even language has many features open to personal interpretation. Math, on the other hand, is the first time they are exposed to something that has only one correct interpretation; no amount of argument or literary *****footing will change that. Many students can't deal with that level of absolutism; they feel their freedom is being constrained. As a result they retreat from the subject, never attempt to learn and end up being mentally paralyzed if they have to make change or double a recipe.
Agreed; some of the absolutism of math is fascinating. Like the cosmological belief that even in a separate universe, where the laws of physics are different, the math describing those laws would be the same.Quote:
Originally Posted by mklotz
I grew up during the Cold War, and I had a great math teacher who was fond of telling his students that, unlike every other subject taught at school, "math was the same everywhere".
Then he would pause for effect and say: "even in Russia!"
One of the more fascinating physics-mathematics mind-benders is:
Is math purely a construct of the human mind used to describe the world in which we live
or
is math an integral part of the world in which we live and we are only discovering it bit by bit?
Consider this...
Gravity is perfectly described by a 1/r^2 (one over distance squared) law. If that exponent deviates from two by only a tiny fraction of a percent stable orbits of stars and planets are impossible and the universe could never maintain its form as it has for billions of years.
Did we just luckily create a law where that integer exponent was forced upon us or are we simply discovering that nature happens to use the same integers we developed back in the days when our math knowledge consisted of nothing more than arithmetic-counting the number of bushels of wheat delivered to the temple.
Not being a mathematician or a physicist my engineering brain says that all the "laws" are just useful models to be discarded or enhanced when we find a better one.
Personally I manage with the much simplified gravity model of "stuff falls down so wear shoes".
I was particularly annoyed by my first year electrical engineering mathematics who not only wanted me to memorise proofs of things like Laplace Transforms but waited 2 more years to explain how certain things were relavent to electrical engineering.
Rather than memorising proofs we'd have been better off learning when a Fourier transform is an insufficient approximation for moving between time and frequency and how Laplace could be used in those scenarios instead.
Reminds me exactly of this week's SMBC comic, and it's a good one:Quote:
Originally Posted by Workshopshed
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/.../2015/12/4.png
Don't confuse the laws with the explanations of why the laws exist. The latter can and have changed but the former, most often derived from direct observation of nature, tend to remain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Workshopshed
Newton described gravity mathematically but couldn't provide a convincing explanation for its source. Over the years other explanations were offered and discarded. Einstein finally had to bend space and time to provide a source for the force and an explanation of why it seems to act instantaneously.
Through all that messing about the law itself remained unchanged. It's probably correct based on the observation that we can fire off satellites, sling them around planets and effect intersections with objects billions of miles away by using it in its ancient form.
It's a major tenet of physics that, if you come up with a new theory, it most properly encompass already existing laws that are known to be correct. Einstein's relativistic equations have to reduce to Newtonian mechanics when the velocities are appreciably less than the speed of light.
