Scientists suck at naming and abbreviating stuff
Scientists suck at naming and abbreviating stuff
I had a professor that heard us lament over all the values for k. The next quiz he made the entire back page all the different equations and constants for k and kappa. Legend.
50At least a couple of these are uppercase and some are lowercase, but yeah.
It's a bit like a fun game: Ask someone in the military to hand you an "M1" and see what they come up with.
33Hot take, in my opinion this is one of the reasons pseudo-code or even sometimes code is easier to parse than formal math expressions, especially in the context of physics.
What do the variables mean? It is often difficult or impossible to google them even if you know the correct name of the symbol and there is very little consistency to give you hints, a symbol in superscript is an exponent? A signifier?
Niche areas of academia will abstractly define a variable/constant as a community and then reference it in papers as if everyone who reads any papers on the topic from now on will magically know the variable. At least in programming the variable has to be defined in the code and is easily searchable on a search engine...
The only math notation I have encountered that I actually think is elegant is set theory and category theory notation.
24In case of math literature, I'd say it is mainly because the equations would be horribly long. Things like integral computation comes with lots of details, or some kind of long exact sequence. Experts would have trouble understanding it, while normal people almost certainly have no interest in understanding the formulae.
Also, often there is no meaning to the variable. Like, in a real function f(x), x is just "a real variable". There is no additional meaning to it.
As for other fields, I dunno. They might have copied math literature style or something.
9I think you can extend this problem to all academic writing. Make it dry, impersonal, formal and fancy. Use big words and long complex sentences, my college English teacher liked to say.
And what a racket the MLA handbook is, huh?
Back when I was in flight school, I was taught how to read Area Forecasts. This is a general outlook of the weather over a large area, say, the American Southeast. They're about a page long and read like this:
SYNOPSIS…LOW PRES TROF 10Z OK/TX PNHDL AREA FCST MOV EWD INTO CNTRL-SWRN OK BY 04Z. WRMFNT 10Z CNTRL OK-SRN AR-NRN MS FCST LIFT NWD INTO NERN OK-NRN AR EXTRM NRN MS BY 04Z.
Synopsis: Low pressure trough at 10:00 GMT in Oklahoma/Texas panhandle area forecast to move eastward into central-southwestern Oklahoma by 4:00 GMT. etc.
Know why they abbreviated it all like that? Because when they first started doing this these forecasts would be distributed by telegraph or teletype. The most common way individual pilots would get this information was to call a flight service station on the telephone and have a briefer read it to them.
We have the internet now; the NWS doesn't publish text Area Forecasts anymore, not for the continental United States anyway. They instead have internet-based animated weather maps which can show observations and forecasts graphically, which is a lot easier to understand than a severely abbreviated block of allcaps.
Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? "When it's a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it's an entry in a journal..." Surely there's a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of "list things about your source until you're confident someone else can look it up."
Title: Principles Of Magnetopticalacoustic Levitation In The Comfort And Privacy Of Your Own Bathroom Author: Linus Sebastian et. al. Date of Publication: December 42, 1310 ISBN: 000000000133 Pages referenced: 14-16
You could do this in Notepad, there's no need for an association to make up rules and publish an inch thick reference book, and it would be much more readable to normal non-academics who might want or need the study instead of being so impenetrable there's an industry of writing news article-like summaries of studies that draw conclusions from the study that the study doesn't actually say. Problem with my approach is it killed two parasitic business models which is why it's done the way it's done.
3Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”
I'm still a bit puzzled why we can't just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you're referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what's the issue with something like this below?
Books
Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.
Periodicals
See above
Journals
...
Films
etc.
It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it's pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.
Then again, I'm quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I'm also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.
6
I saw a video once of a guy asking students at an Indian university what they studied and what k meant to them. I can’t find it now, but there were easily a dozen answers and then the joke answer at the end was “it means she’s mad at me”
15Ah yes, Coulombs and capacitance, two things that are totally unique and unrelated entries in this list.
14Nobody said they're unrelated, first of all - in fact, that arguably makes it worse. Quickly looking it up, I believe capacitance is distinct from charge, which coulombs are a unit of.
But even if they weren't, the point would be that they use the same character, possibly causing confusion so as to which is being referred to in equation or text when using the symbol.
4They are causing confusion in same context and i think that's alsl the point
1
Definitely absurd. But if you were a sci fi author trying to make a consistent world building thing, it would actually be a useful video.
... I see you Neal Stephenson, hiding behind the couch.
5Ayyy it's the carameldanzen man
3
Hey physicists generally use k for that integration constant. Or whatever unused letter they feel like.
11I thought one of those said "Columbus" and I briefly recited in my head, "In Spring of 1492, C sailed the ocean blue."
11Wait I thought it was "in 1776 C saild the river Styx"?
4
The favorite letter of pirates.
7r is over here feeling betrayed
2
One constant to rule them all
5Yes
Tap for spoiler
Sí
4Counterpoint:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein
Or maybe that's also backing up the claim... All a matter of perspective lol
3Or they can just be boring and do "Huh, we have an array of telescopes, it's very large." OK, what do we call the small one?
We've increase the frequency for radio, lets call it High Frequency. We've increased it further, what do we call it? Even further. Surely it can't get faster than this. God dammit. Fuck it, just use numbers.
6
I write sff for fun, and I hate running into neat science named something stupid.
You have to keep a balance between reality and the fantastic in scifi, and if I have to use a real but stupid name it doesn't really give me truth points to spend, and it still uses up my "fantasy" budget even if it's technically true , because I have to do extra work to make whatever I'm writing attractive to read and believable. Just because something is true doesn't make it believable. And I'd rather use my fantastic budget on something actually fanciful, not fritter it away on true but poorly named things.
Basically, scientists lose out on a tiny bit of free marketing when they name their thing something stupid.
I wish astronomers in particular would name a star with earth like planets something neat. I would like to use Trappist as a setting...but that name. Bleh.
2I am a sci fi reader but maybe my scientist side showing but I like the Trappist name. The fact that real scientific names are sometimes "stupid" or weird I think makes out easier.
I mean like Southern blots had a name behind them, Edward Southern. Northern and Western blots were just named as a sort of joke about it. Naming doesn't have to be serious and rarely is by those within the community. So many congressional bills have long obtuse names because someone chose an word or phrase for it and then made the title acronyms spell it.
3
Letter
1Vitamin
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