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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Religious Texts: .. that text was written by some half literate guy living in a desert who heard tenth hand folk stories from his community from people who had died about a hundred years before his time, mixed in with legends, myths and fairy tales that are thousands of years old ... but it's all true because it came from God, believe it or you will burn in hell forever.
You, a loser Christian, reading from a 2000 year old book of morality fables.
Me, a sophisticated Scientologist, reading from a 70 year old Sci-Fi/fad health trilogy.
Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was a time traveller that had already started everything 3,000 years ago and decided to restart it all again 70 years ago.
Or maybe he just copied the successful indoctrination practices of existing religions...
The hypocrisy of any religious book being the words of their all powerful master while they give themselves the option to cherry pick which rules they wish to follow is astounding.
It’s one of the first things that convinced kid me that it’s all made up bullshit to control gullible people.
The funny part that is .... which book are you talking about? ... Christian bible? Jewish Tanakh? Islamic Koran? ... and if its Christian - is it just the Old Testament? New Testament? ... which version of the Christian bible? - King James? New Standard? English Standard? Anglican? Baptist? Lutheran? Methodist? Presbyterian? Roman Catholic? Mormon? Protestant?
I don’t see any difference between cults. It’s all a way to control uneducated people with fake magical thinking and the threat of eternal damnation.
Electron was discovered in 1897. If you own a textbook on chemistry which is older than that, put it up on Ebay in the antiques category.
Newton lived in the 17th century, so if you got a textbook older than that give it back to the museum
Web development: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written last year before Angular v18 was released.
*French SpongeBob voice
"2 hours later"
Programming: that book was printed a month ago, and it's already obsolete.
But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.
Math doesn't change, we just learn more about it.
The mathematical knowledge we had thousands of years ago is still true, and it always will be.
Math doesn't change, we just learn more about it.
Isn't that true of almost all the sciences?
The difference is that if something is proven mathematically it's 100% certain and will not change. In other sciences you may be taught things that later turn out to be flat out wrong.
Bingo, I was taught in genetics class in the 1990s that RNA played a role but DNA was the primary driver and now my understanding is the current consensus is RNA is the primary driver.
Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it's based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.
Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It's not experimental, and conclusions don't change.
1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what "two" means.
Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren't wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
A mathematical discovery doesn't do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.
Has anything changed in Euclid's Elements?
We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.
It's better to say that we've discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.
Since Euclid, we've made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn't document.
Since math isn't empirical, it's rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren't obvious.
Oh that book is outdated. That's the second edition, you need the third addition to complete the one math problem I am basing your entire grade on for the course.
"Why yes I do happen to also be the author of the textbook for this course, why do you ask?"
Computer programming books ... Lol we don't print them any more, they'd be obsolete before hitting the shelves.
Computer Science:
Oh, that textbook is outdated. That was before NodeJS 22.
Or: The new version is reimplemented and incompatible, so everything you learnt about it from the previous versions is wrong.
For me its like "oh great a old textbook, now i can finally understand our legacy codebase".
Mathematics ^teacher^: That textbook was written thousands of years ago, and it is still as useful and relevant as ever, but I want you to buy this one I co-authored instead for the mere sum of $120, otherwise you won't pass.
Philosopher to the right of the mathematician: "You're welcome for the axioms"
Theres a lovely scene in Star Trek where Picard is captured, then finds an exposed wire on the cell panel. He takes it and begins tapping out prime numbers, to show to the aliens’ mathematicians that they’re sentient and capable of thought, independent of language.
Software Development: You bought a textbook?
"Oh, that blog post is obsolete. It was written before version 1.87.0d.20250304.nightly"
"It's okay, I'll just ask ChatGPT."
Asks ChatGPT about new feature.
ChatGPT makes up a completely fictional answer that sounds plausible given the state of the repository two years ago.
As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era. Meanwhile, modern flat-earthers are still making me want to vomit.
I used to see fractals in the shadows on LSD. I couldn’t think of the word “fractal,” and told my friend, “You know, that thing in math?” And he said to me, “When you trip you see math?!” Fun times. To be a teen again.
As a kid I thought Pythagoras was silly for making a math cult. Now that I'm older I get it.
Wrong for physics. Models to describe reality don't magically become wrong just because a model with better predictive power is discovered. Most old models are special cases of newer ones.
Math is a thought game with axioms as rules. It’s much more stable since the rules are “self-evident”.
Fuck you professor, its a 35 line proof, and it isn't as trivial as you think it is!
My favorite way to connect people with academia is pointing out how recently zero was invented because even the most reluctant “I don’t know math” person understands zero these days.
That $300 stack of the cheapest thin paper was last semester. The online code you need for class is void, and the questions won't match the answer key.
Physics books are never outdated, you just discover better models that work in a wider range of conditions.
Science is validated by the new information replacing the old. Al-Khwarizmi worked out numbers so we don’t have to,
The really funny part is the other two are also just math.
The fabric of reality is woven from math, and that's beautiful.
I've got a pet theory that a hypothetical alien species' music would be more recognizably similar to humans' than their biology would.
