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What was your favorite course of study? (yeah, it's biased -- do your best!)
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* Twilight1 will have to hang his Mozilla beanie dinosaur in effigy if
Netscape sells-out to Alot Of Losers..
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 12 2018, @11:42AM (17 children)
Hands down, chemistry. The other sciences are neat and all but chemistry teaches you how to easily create things that go boom.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by schusselig on Friday January 12 2018, @04:10PM (1 child)
Other: History. Teaches you why you should learn how to make things that go boom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:32AM
I love reading about history. I only wish it was taught better in school.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Friday January 12 2018, @04:35PM (3 children)
I too liked Chemistry.
I ended up taking Chemistry at the local college after I graduated HS. They actually had real nice equipment and it made the experience so much better. I really enjoyed it and still think about doing it all over again just for fun.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 12 2018, @08:04PM (2 children)
No need for classes. All the information you'll ever need is online for free. Really, once you have a few gallons of nitric acid, the world's your oyster as far as things that go boom are concerned. I wouldn't advise trying home brewed peroxide-based explosives though. TATP, for instance, is damned nifty but it's also a good way to lose a hand.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @09:28PM
What I learned in H.S. Chem... Table salt, melt it, add a couple DC electrodes, that's all you need. Just don't throw the stuff in a swimming pool.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:43PM
Avoid all contact with metal, particularly copper-containing metal.
Start with half a cup of 6% peroxide. Add 2 tablespoons and 2/3 teaspoon of crushed hexamethylene tablets, commonly available as wax-coated solid fuel pellets for camp stoves. Stir to dissolve, and start to cool the mix with an ice bath. Add a quarter cup of citric acid. Stir to dissolve. Immediately filter it, keeping to liquid, to get rid of undissolved crap like wax. Let the liquid sit for a day or two, so that crystals form. Filter it again, this time keeping the crystals. Wash it several times with water, then with alcohol. Let it dry.
You should have about 4.5 grams of white powder. It is enough to blow a hole 1/4-inch deep into a concrete floor. I never got it to go off by hitting it with a hammer, so it is decently safe. It ignites easily. It will transition to Mach 25 detonation if you slightly confine it, for example in a pen cap that isn't even sealed up. Spread thin it just flashes like gunpowder, but add a shaving of wood on top and it'll detonate.
Unlike TATP, it won't sublime and thus get all over. Like TATP, it degrades, becoming inert after a few weeks.
Advice for keeping your body intact, unlike mine: if you are fucking around with it, doing stuff like igniting tiny bits of it with a shaving of wood on top to cause detonation, be aware that detonation shock waves can propagate to a larger container that might be sitting nearby.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday January 13 2018, @12:15AM (1 child)
Chemistry certainly is fun. Not only can you learn how to make things that go boom, but you can also learn how to make things that make the world seem amazing!
But in all seriousness, I preferred physics, on the grounds that calculating where projectiles will land, and then launching a few to test your math, is just plain fun.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2018, @04:10AM
Physics is what made other subjects like mathematics and software fun...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:25PM (7 children)
There is no boom without physics, and to understand physics you need to be fluent in math. Chemistry is your first abstraction layer, followed by biology. After that, everything is politics
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:27PM (5 children)
Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday January 15 2018, @04:25PM
Obligatory SMBC. [smbc-comics.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:13AM (3 children)
He missed off philosophy. If done properly, it's arguably more fundamental than mathematics. The trouble is, it's frequently not done rigorously enough and is an umbrella term for lots of fields so not sure where that would put it in the "purity" stakes.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
I'm not so sure (at least with mathematics as it is done today). After all, philosophers still claim to say something about the world, the humans, etc., while mathematics is about abstract ideas that need not have any relation to reality.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:21PM (1 child)
That's a good point but some branches of philosophy focus solely on abstract concepts too e.g. philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover between mathematics and philosophy. I suppose logic is one of the biggest areas of intersection. You could even make a case that those who first derived the rules of logic were doing philosophy.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 26 2018, @02:41AM
I took a 100-level philosophy class 10 years before I took discrete math, and the first third of that discrete math class was the material from that philosophy class. Philosophy has a bad rap for being a bunch of stoners mentally masturbating around paradoxes and opinions, but philosophy also has rules and structure.
Were the early mathematicians philosphers, or vise-versa?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @09:58PM
Biologists think they are biochemists,
Biochemists think they are Physical Chemists,
Physical Chemists think they are Physicists,
Physicists think they are Gods,
And God thinks he is a Mathematician.
Or, another (shorter) way it goes:
Physicists defer only to mathematicians, mathematicians defer only to God.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @05:40AM
Bah [wikipedia.org] - because, yeah, you need chemistry for it, but chemistry 's not enough.