/aca/ - Academic Topics

imagine if money, intelligence, focus, health, time, and other circumstances weren't a problem. what would you dedicate your life to studying? why does it fascinate you? as for me, i've always wanted to study brains. pick apart this dense mass of flesh that somehow encodes the human soul. i want to be a part of the science that's trying to map brains to computers, interpreting synapses with machine learning and using algorithms to model neural circuits. look closely at how information is processed by the brain, and maybe even try to analyze those heuristics to understand myself a bit better. my excuse is that i'm too dumb and not good enough at chemistry. i just can't commit. who knows, maybe i'll regret this fear of mine forever. i wanted to hear about your unsung passions, too

What's your major /aca/? I'm in my last year of a Master's in Computer Science

What specifically do you do? Do you know any good places to get into it?

$\text{LATEX}$ $${\int }_a^b{x}^{2}dx$$ Specialized tags are can be used for math related topics!

A new Indo-European cuneiform language has been discovered in clay tablets from the Hittite Empire. Dubbed Kalašmaic, it was recorded in Hittite tablets that preserved rituals from different parts of their empire in their native languages. This discovery made me very happy, I hope we get new words and roots in the Anatolian languages after the text is deciphered. Does /aca/ like linguistics and ancient languages? https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/

The Busy Beaver function is a function that takes n as a number of states and returns the maximum finite number of ones that a 2-symbol turing machine with that number of states could produce. This pdf (https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf) is the current (as of 2020) state of knowledge on this function. update from 2022: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6673

Do you know any second languages or are learning any?

If yall remember the marioplex from like a while ago that GT made, that number was big, but younger me around that time tried to calculate a bigger number called the RocketPlex, based on how many items you can get in Rocket League if you buy the collector's edition. I think I made mistakes in my math back then so, I wanna try again... should I? and if I do... should I send it to a Math institute or smth??

I'm thinking about going back to learning Japanese, but I'm not sure whether I should or not. Already studied Japanese for like 3 years on and off until stuff happened in real life and I had to stop. However, the situation changed and I might be able to get back into it. Back then I read a few easy manga and a VN, although with the assistance of tools to look up vocabulary. While that might sound good, I still felt like I was years away from reading without tools or being anywhere close to fluency. Why did I want to learn? I did a trip to Japan in 2015 and I fucking loved it, I wanted to learn Japanese for my next trip and maybe even work there. Of course there were also a few untranslated games and manga etc. I wanted to consume. Nowadays I'm not really dreaming of living in Japan anymore and most of the games I wanted to learn Japanese for actually got a translation, and yet I still want to learn the language for the sake of it. I mean, being able to read these moonrunes is satisfying in its own way, but I might not really benefit THAT much from knowing it. What do you think? Should I study Japanese again, despite like I said I might not benefit that much from knowing it, considering it takes a lot of time and energy to do so? I tried to forget it, but ever since I quit, every time I see Japanese writing I feel bad for quitting.

What's your favorite branch of science? Most things chemistry related has always seemed fascinating to me