memes

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.

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.

Web development: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written last year before Angular v18 was released.

But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.

Programming: that book was printed a month ago, and it's already obsolete.

Oh that book is outdated.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.

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Oh, that textbook is outdated.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.

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https://xkcd.com/435/

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?

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.

As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.

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”.

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.

Reality: The universe was spontaneously created last thursday and there is no way for you to disprove it.

Science is validated by the new information replacing the old. Al-Khwarizmi worked out numbers so we don’t have to,

“It was made up 2000 years ago and is the absolute final word in everything. Well, the parts I pick and choose to fit my own beliefs.” -every religion there is