>>>>>>It must be cozy in whatever dimension you reside.
>>>>
>>>>I tend to reside in at least 4 dimensions, though I wish the 4th one would go away at least some of the time (if that's not a circular statement)
>>>
>>>If it is a circular statement, then you know some temporal physics that we don't. In that case, I wonder which tense would be appropriate for the previous sentence. As Douglas Adams said, the trouble with time travel isn't the physics, it's the grammar.
>>
>>Static physics is the new bane of my younger daughter's existence. She is a freshman engineering major at Wisconsin-Madison. The first semester it was a math class she was placed into based on high school work and test scores. It turned out to be the most flunked class at Madison and the first washing-out point for engineering majors. School was always easy for her right through high school and she didn't believe me when I warned her this was not going to be an easy gig. A month into fall semester, she believed me. She called me in St. Louis one evening, or I called her, one or the other, and she said Dad, I'm afraid I'm going to flunk this class. She worked really hard on it, went to tutoring sessions Monday and Wednesday evenings, and wound up getting a B. She said when I saw that grade I was literally jumping up and down. She's sweet on the outside but also competitive.
>
>Some friends at the mechanical engineering (which was in the next building, and during my first two years they had a cafeteria and we didn't, so we often went there for a snack) said their maths was harder than ours. This baffled me for a while, but then I realized the truth of it: in all engineering courses, maths was a tool - so they didn't get a course they could understand (with the full proof of everything, and the explanation of why is this so and how that works), but rather they got a cookbook full of recipes they needed to apply, without actually getting the logic behind it. Which is why I hated statistics - it was such a cookbook, with recipes picked out of thin air and not properly analysed to prove their validity ("where the hell did he pull that one out from?").

Hmm, that's completely different from my experience in mechanical engineering school. We were always complaining we were taking more math than we needed to know to get the job done. But our profs said we needed to understand how the formulas were arrived at, so we would have faith in them - in many cases lives are at stake.

One summer job, shortly after spring exams I was working at a semi-remote fishing resort. This was 1979, no Internet, no TV nor VCR/videotapes. One day, someone idly wondered how much the 500m hill behind the resort weighed. Everyone looked at me, I said "No problem, it's roughly coned-shaped, I'll just use the formula for the volume of a cone". Except I couldn't remember that formula.

But, because of the recent exams, multivariate calculus *was* fresh in my mind, so I was able to derive that formula from first principles.

We had to take some basic stats courses, too - AND understand the underlying math :-/