this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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(page 2) 24 comments
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[–] [email protected] 204 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Use 2 E192 in parallel: a 6.19Ω resistor with a 4500Ω resistor. This gives 6.1846Ω which is close enough for rock and roll.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

This guy electrons!!! <3

[–] [email protected] 93 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I feel like this is one of those comments I want to hoard in the off chance that I ever get into this and start building shit but I know deep inside me that's never gonna happen.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 4 days ago (3 children)

For you and anybody else wondering, the GP is a joke and should not be taken seriously.

The reason there isn't a resistor with the value on the meme is because real resistors have error tolerances and are never the exact value on their marks. If you go assembling a card-castle of resistors with the wrong value so that the labels add up to the value you want, you will still have a resistor of the wrong value.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 days ago (9 children)

The actual method for calibrating exact resistor values involves starting with a lower resistance and etching away parts of it with a laser to get to the exact value you want. You probably still couldn't get as many decimal places as OP tho

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Just learn the math, it’s quite easy. IIRC you just add the reciprocals of the resistors then take the reciprocal of the answer.

1/Req = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3 ….

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Ohh, I remember this from uni physics class. I guess I just don't know how to apply it in any practical sense though. Lol Thanks for reminding me!

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 days ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Where are the spherical cows?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

No no no no, I think you got that wrong. Chickens are spherical, cows on the other hand are cuboid. And humans are cylindrical.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Chickens, cows, and humans all are toroids. True story.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Can confirm, am shaped like a weird donut

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

You do have 2 holes on either side that meet the middle and are continuous from 1 end to the other. So yeah, you are the weirdest of donuts.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago

would be a great band name

[–] [email protected] 80 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Welcome to the field of engineering! Your first lesson will be; "Tolerances and you"!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Second lesson: Pi is around 3.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Never, in any engineering field, have I EVER seen anyone simplify pi to 5. For that matter, I have never seen anyone simplify to 3. It is always 3.14. I feel like pi simplification is a weird meme that people think engineers do but is never practiced anywhere.

It's like if there was a meme about chefs saying they always replace eggs with grapefruit. No they don't, and it's nonsense to think they do.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's a lot of weird stereotypes out there that make no sense. Like the whole "programmers wear thigh high socks" thing. Where did that even come from?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There's less and less reason to do it (and it's never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to round it a bit, but only if the specific thing you're doing allows it, and even then you're more likely to do a fixed-point approach by using e.g. 314 and dividing by 100 later, or adjusting that value a bit so you can divide by 128 via bitshift if you're on a chip where division is expensive. However, in 2025 you almost certainly should have picked a chip with an FPU if you're doing trigonometry.

And while rounding pi to 3 or 4 is certainly just a meme, there are other approximations which are used, like small-angle approximations, where things like sin(x) can be simplified to just x for a sufficiently small x.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 days ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If it fits, great! If it doesn't, you didn't use enough tape.

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