I've never been anywhere quite like it. My friend once described it as "an art piece that uses museum curation as its medium" and that's the best description I've come across. To get an idea of what that means, understand that it's fully laid out as a museum with exhibits featuring various objects and artifacts and expositions thereof but these exhibits wildly vary between truth and fantasy. Some are showcases of real, if niche, cultural practices and some are histories of entirely fictional figures that are nevertheless compelling and beautiful.
The creator was awarded a McArthur grant in 2001 and I feel it was more than deserved.
> "Contrary to popular belief, the core problem in dyslexia is not reversing letters (although it can be an indicator),” she writes. The difficulty lies in identifying the discrete units of sound that make up words and “matching those individual sounds to the letters and combinations of letters in order to read and spell.”
The more I hear about dyslexia the more it sounds like the result of not being taught to read properly rather than any kind of neurological issue.
Swinsian was the only Mac music player I could find that could come close to replicating my old MusicBee setup. The license fee was annoying but I paid it anyway and have no regrets.
I haven't had a chance to really dig into your resource yet but I am definitely going to do so. Perhaps I'll wait a few days until the change you mentioned is implemented.
> And to get back to what I assume is your real conundrum (why do we extremize something to begin with), I just don't think there's any true answer as to why nature behaves this way.
Having read about some of the history of this idea, it seems to have been originally built on philosophical grounds, the idea that nature chooses the most harmonious path, as opposed to Newton's laws which seem to come from intuition based on observation of the world. If you keep asking "why?" in either framework you will eventually run up against an epistomological barrier which is unlikely to ever be crossed but in the case of Newton's laws, their basis in physical intuition makes them much easier (for me at least) to accept as given and take as a starting point for constructing a world model. With this being the case I think an acceptable result for me would be to find a proof of equivalence between the Newtonian and Lagrangian pictures. From my reading it seems like the derivation from D'Alambert's principle may be part of the journey.
Do you know any references that discuss this in detail? I'm interested in the history of these developments. Who noticed this? Who asked this question?
I recently got hold of a copy of that. I started Hand & Finch - Analytical Mechanics but their woolly discussion of virtual work and virtual displacement was very frustrating and unenlightening. Perhaps I'll have a better time with L&L.
But simply getting to the Lagrangian picture from the Hamiltonian picture would just leave me wondering why the Hamiltonian picture works!
My motivation for getting to the bottom of all this is to fill the gaps in my physics understanding at least up to quantum mechanics. I have a grasp of QM but I would like to have some insight into the conceptual leaps that brought us there from classical mechanics. QM works in the Hamiltonian picture and I recall from my undergrad days that you get there from a Legendre transformation on the Lagrangian (or something to that effect) so I'm trying to understand the justification of that approach before moving up the conceptual ladder.
Ideally I would like to be able to trace my way from simple postulates based on observation of the physical world all the way to QM, then maybe to QFT after that.