firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
firecat (attention machine in need of calibration) ([personal profile] firecat) wrote2013-08-28 01:07 pm
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Dinos!

The latest MOOC I've signed up for:

Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology
https://www.coursera.org/course/dino101

The course description says that no specific science background is required; all are welcome.

In my experience so far with MOOCs, this sometimes means they really explain everything (e.g. "A Brief History of Humankind"), and other times it means "We don't really grok what background is needed to understand these lectures."

For example, I am taking a course on volcanoes which was advertised as no background needed, but I'm not getting as much out of it as I might, because it assumes a higher-than-I-have level of knowledge about statistics and, oh I don't even know, physics? minerology? I'm continuing it anyway because as a tech writer/editor I am supposed to be able to make sense out of material I don't have a strong background in, and I like the challenge of trying to do so.
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trascendenza: ed and stede smiling. "st(ed)e." (Default)

[personal profile] trascendenza 2013-08-28 11:56 pm (UTC)(link)
I've appreciated your posts about MOOCs — I had no idea they existed and they seem really cool.
firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)

[personal profile] firecat 2013-08-29 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
Yay! They are definitely really cool!
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)

[personal profile] kaberett 2013-08-29 01:16 am (UTC)(link)
If you want any more explanations on volcanoes, you know where to find me!
firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)

[personal profile] firecat 2013-08-29 01:58 am (UTC)(link)
Oh cool! I missed the part where you are a geologist.

I'm having trouble with "Arrhenius plot" and "Maxwell body."
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)

[personal profile] kaberett 2013-08-29 02:29 am (UTC)(link)
Volcanologists 'r' us :-)

Oh, hah, chemistry stuff. CHEMISTRY STUFFFFF. Or at least, things I was taught more in the chemistry side of my course than the geology.

Maxwell body -- having difficulty dredging stuff up from memory. Is this viscoelastic wossnames, or something else?

Arrhenius plot -- what sort of context have you been given/how comfortable are you with maths/etc? Is it just a term that's been thrown in that you don't understand, or have you been working with them some? And so on.

[bed now but will more answers tomorrow!]
firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)

[personal profile] firecat 2013-08-29 06:22 pm (UTC)(link)
You know what, it makes me feel better just knowing an expert has to dredge for some of that stuff.

The prof mentioned those terms without defining them clearly enough for me, and Wikipedia wasn't helpful.

I finally found a definition of Maxwell body that makes sense to me: "A liquid whose rate of deformation is the sum of a term proportional to the shearing stress acting on it and a term proportional to the rate of change of this stress. Also known as Maxwell body."

Arrhenius plot: OK, I see that it's a way of graphing the effect of temperature on the speed of chemical reactions.

Thanks for providing the impetus to dig further :)
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