How can you get through life reasoning as poorly as you have here? Your point and the OP's are orthogonal. The OP never said anything about Stanford denigrating its name, only you did. The OP inferred (incorrectly) that since Stanford offers an easy CS course online, American physics education is poor: "I’m definitely glad I stayed at home, where I will receive a proper education, even though it’s not a prestigious [one]." My post refuted this ridiculous line of reasoning.
If you truly believe "he is right in his analysis", I will simply call you an idiot and move along. However, I imagine you just meant to agree with his negative assessment of the courses rather than any specific point he put forth. The question you nearly ask, "why is this good for Stanford?", is an important one that I haven't seen addressed. Right now it gets them some publicity, I suppose, which ultimately nets applicants, prestige, and donations. What does the future hold, though? If every undergraduate could take half their courses online for free while still getting a high-quality education, academia (including Stanford) would shrink.
As for your random (..."craptacular"...) point about American education losing its honor (whatever that means) because a well-known university is offering low-level intro CS courses, it's not just Stanford. An intro CS course is a requirement for all majors at many highly technical schools because it's so useful to so many fields.
That's a pretty unfair (and sloppy) comparison. These are introductory CS courses which, as a rule, are quite low-level, so they're accessible to many people from different majors. Your Model Analysis course presumably builds upon several years of other courses--at least, I would be quite impressed if the necessary calculus and Lagrangian mechanics were taught in standard high schools. By that point you expect more from students, and almost no non-physics majors would have the background to take the course, so there's much less hand-holding. In any case, before you pass judgement on the quality of American physics programs in general, as you do in your blog post, you should at least read through some course requirements from actual physics programs and look at some problem sets.
To be completely honest, I hope your reasoning in physics is better than the reasoning you've written here. It stinks of confirmation bias and rationalization. Perhaps Slovenian universities really give a better education, but you haven't presented even remotely convincing evidence for that conclusion. The low quality of your reasoning gives the opposite impression, though of course it's just one data point.
the standards have fallen far from where they were, say, 50 years ago. If you need proof, try reading a book written in the 1800s.
Actually, you may have provided some proof yourself by implying that content in a 200-year-old book proves that standards have fallen in the last 50 years--unless you're in your seventies, I suppose.
In all seriousness, though, I would like to see some proof that educational standards have dropped in the last 50 years
I somewhat agree with your point about material from centuries ago, though it seems to me that rote memorization was much more common in the past. Many of the questions on this purported "8th Grade Examination from late 1800's" are superficially impressive, but really amount to rather useless memorization:
Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.
The arithmetic section I linked mostly consists of unit conversions, which are again superficially impressive. In 8th grade my classmates were covering conic sections, which are less "mechanical" than plugging numbers in to conversion formulas, and I would say they're more difficult. Oddly enough, in this UPenn catalog from 1852, conic sections were a junior level (in college) topic. To be fair, that catalog also lists basic calculus (I imagine the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2) in addition to a dizzying number of topics on history, philosophy, Greek, Latin, "natural philosophy", and chemistry.
Today, there's just far too much information to absorb. Learning how to understand things quickly as they come up is more important than memorizing small chunks of human knowledge, even if it's less impressive. Perhaps students in the past were more studious as well, though things aren't all bad.
I find it a little ironic that your error-ridden post advocates less classroom theory. "lot's" doesn't mean anything and should be "lots"; it's "hands-on", not "hands on"; it's "classroom", not "class room"; and your statement should really be two sentences, rather than one with two halves smashed together with an "and" thrown between.
(To be clear, I'm not judging the content of your post--I don't have enough experience with IT education to pass judgement--I'm just commenting on its irony.)
While your post is of course flamebait, it got me curious. According to this exceedingly reputable map, South Koreans (in fact, most Asians in general) do have below-average penis sizes. I wasn't able to find numbers on the prevalence of homosexuality in South Korean men compared to the rest of the world, though there is a Wikipedia article on this general topic. While the numbers vary wildly depending on when, where, and how people are asked, apparently something like 4% of people identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, with significantly more having had some homosexual experience at some point in their lives.
Of course, this has essentially nothing to do with the topic at hand. My apologies for the off-topic post.
I would guess some other collateral damage is the people who may end up with diseases because they drink water that isn't purified, and the percentage that die as a result.
Well, it's not as if there are no alternatives. The collateral damage is subject to an opportunity cost style calculation, where the real cost is that implied by people having to make an alternative choice (buying a similar product; not using anything). To use an example with made-up numbers and actions, if his customers all switched to an equivalent alternative that cost them a total of $10,000 more, and the extra production of this alternative doesn't affect the economy in any new way, this is the collateral damage. That is, the customers have to perform $10,000 worth of person-hours in extra work by giving up some free time, or they have to give up a similar amount in other things they value.
Actually, some numbers have changed their value. "Billion" (and long-scale friends) was redefined in the UK in 1974 (for most uses) to be 10^9 instead of 10^12.
Even mathematical definitions are not absolute. They change, or were obscure to begin with. An annoying example is "natural numbers". Some people include 0, some people include 1. Worse, many people aren't aware of the ambiguity when they use the term. "Ring" has a similar ambiguity. Does the algebraic structure have a 1? Can 1 = 0? Is it commutative? It all depends on what the author is interested in. Hopefully they let you know, but sometimes they don't, and you have to figure out whether these extra properties are being used from context.
Another example from theoretical physics is the term "direct product" when applied to vector spaces. Some physicists use that term in the same way a mathematician would use "tensor product" while others actually use "tensor product", reserving "direct product" for what a mathematician would call a "direct product". As far as I'm aware, there is no ambiguity in the mathematical community about these terms. A physics professor of mine preferred "direct product" in the ambiguous sense. When I asked him why, he told me that tensors were scary to some people, so he wanted to avoid the term if possible. Mathematicians, as a rule, are rather unsympathetic to emotional concerns, so this isn't a very good argument for getting the mathematical community to use the ambiguous definition.
These examples are all annoying, but that's life. Language is the imperfect result of evolution, just like humans are. Evolution usually makes something only "good enough" (examples: the ending of the words "cough", "though", and "rough"; the existence of mental disorders). Even in highly technical disciplines where words often do have immutable meaning, they don't always. The "ring" example is particularly good, since the ambiguity is actually helpful. One can state at the outset "the term 'ring' will denote a unital commutative ring where 1 != 0" without clashing with established notation. The annoyances it generates are from sloppy authors and are typically minor anyway. "Direct product" is rather similar, even if it caused me a few minutes of confusion once ("what? no, that equation is just plain wrong! At the least, those relations severely limit the structure of this object, probably to the point of uselessness! Oh wait. Those are tensor product relations, even though they said direct product. Huh. What a strange convention."). Words change all the time in response to societal factors, and that's not always a bad thing.
yay you put some free apps they could go get anyway.
Most of the trouble of getting good free software is finding it, so I'd say the value of the software part of the gift is mostly as a list of suggestions one can conveniently test out.
I believe you mean MS Office 2010 Home Trial. You know, 'cuz it's free.
Re:Worth it...just to see how wrong Q15 is
on
2011 Geek IQ Test
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· Score: 2
I'd go with "quantisation", but I agree, the answers are idiotic. They made me indignant enough to make a post ranting about it (but not indignant enough to post in the InfoWorld comments).
The observables don't even have to be multiples of some fundamental unit. Supposing energy were in multiples of Planck's constant, if I were interested in the square root of the energy instead of the energy itself, the resulting levels would not be so distributed. Using particularly convoluted functions, I could map the multiples of Planck's constant to the rational numbers and in fact allow arbitrarily small gradations between states. The question is wrong on several levels, and the answers are terrible. The author must have at absolute best an extremely superficial knowledge of quantum mechanics to have given them.
I had never seen the NG abbreviation (and I'm a Trekkie) until today, but when I googled it there were at least a few places that use it. Nothing remotely official, though. I think it's mostly an accident that's been rediscovered through the years.
If you meant to emphasize the need for Hilbert space as it's used in quantum, I suppose I agree. If you meant to emphasize normalization, then not really. Normalization is necessary, certainly, but the key insight is that there are countably many eg. energy levels, which are (as a rule) disconnected in the topological sense. That is, normalization alone isn't enough to capture the idea. To generalize a little, take a continuous, positive function f:[0, 1]->R whose integral over a to b gives (by definition) the probability of, say, a ball I threw of going up between a and b meters. The positions are still continuous, even though each individual position has probability 0 of actually being measured. Normalization forces the integral to be 1, but quanta are nowhere in sight. One needs the additional connections to Hilbert space provided by the process of quantisation.
Yeah, I found the question selection to be pretty silly, too. It was pretty much just a bunch of obscure things you'd google nowadays. Even the TNG reference I mentioned was obscure--that captain had about 12 seconds of air time at the very end of that episode.
I got 12 of the last 15 correct after missing 4 of the first 5. I'm not sure if that meant the author got lazier or I got better at spotting the wrong answers.
15. Related to quantum mechanics, what is the term for the observation that some physical quantities can be changed only by discrete amounts, or quanta?
The answers are just stupid. None of them (even the "correct" one) is a technical term. The actual correct answer would have been "quantisation" (or "realizing that quantisation is necessary").
18. When Kelsey Grammer appeared on "Star Trek NG"...
It's Star Trek TNG, not NG. Wikipedia and Memory Alpha agree with me (eg. there's a redirect on Memory Alpha to the correct page from "TNG" but not "NG"), though NG appears to be used sometimes by a few people.
It doesn't matter if one of the meanings is ridiculous; sometimes that's what makes a pun funny. I'm a bit amused by which insults you think will hurt me. For instance, choking (gagging, really) on a cock would likely indicate I'm deepthroating a man, which would probably be fine with me, depending on the man. The only thing I don't understand is the moderation here. Both top-level "not a pun" AC posts were modded +2 Insightful, and one other AC reply saying the same thing was modded +1 Insightful, while my original post was modded down from +2 to 0 as Overrated.
The moderation could be explained by a pair of misguided moderators. Two non-ACs have expressed the opinion that it's not a pun, and as far as I can tell those two opinions were misguided--they didn't appear to understand the two ways in which the summary's author meant "Universe" to be interpreted. Two other non-ACs (besides myself) have posted the opposite opinion, calling it a pun (well, one just implied that your original post made no sense, but I imagine that indicates agreement with it being a pun). So, I could believe that some people honestly believe it's not a pun, while being incorrect on that point.
On an unrelated note, I find the format of your posts interesting. There are so many short, declarative sentences ("Choke on a cock and die." "It's not a pun. Not remotely." etc.). They typically end with such a sentence on a line by itself. I suppose you're trying for emphasis, though that style is getting a bit boring. It occurs so much in online arguments.
In any case, thank you for providing some mildly interesting entertainment through analysis. Have a wonderful life.
because saying the "universe" is ending is not pun.
But it is a pun, as I've explained: there are two meanings to the word "Universe" here, which is the definition of a pun. I find it amazing that of the half dozen or so people who have expressed the opinion that this is not a pun, not one has given a clear and coherent reason for that opinion.
I'm not really a programmer by trade, and I'm not invested in the open source movement, emotionally or otherwise. I don't care enough to even investigate alternative OS's, let alone use them. If all the major alternatives could run the same set of software, I would still need a compelling reason to learn new things on a new OS. I'm fine with that; you can't learn everything (and if you can, please get back to me when you've computed, or at least understood the computation of, the sum of the roots of the minimal polynomial of the sum of the square roots of the first n positive integers [since nobody will and the result is rather beautiful, here's the answer: 2 to the number of primes less than or equal to n times the (floor(sqrt(n)))th triangular number]).
I've had to use other OS's before, and I'm fine with that too--modern Macs and Linux machines have been for the most part hassle-free. They've just offered me no compelling reason to switch.
There are two meanings of the word "Universe" in this context that give the sentence two interpretations.
First: "[Everything that is and ever shall be] is ending in the eyes of LEGO."
Second: "[The MMO Lego Universe] is ending in the eyes of LEGO."
Two meanings of a word are being used for humorous effect. How is that *not* a pun, which is "the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications...."? The first interpretation is (slightly) funny, and not all definitions of "pun" even require humor [eg. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son[/sun] of York"]. They aren't required to use homophones, either. Multiple meanings of the same word or phrase are fine.
Of all the AC's calling it not a pun, none have justified their view. I wish you would so I would see what common misconception you all have, or perhaps what I'm missing.
I find "universe" (standard usage) and "LEGO Universe" (the MMO) to be radically different. I don't think "LEGO Universe: Everything to infinity, just made of LEGO" was meant. I think "LEGO Universe: an online massively multiplayer game" was meant. In any case, thank you for at least giving your reasoning. I'm saddened by the moderation in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you get through life reasoning as poorly as you have here? Your point and the OP's are orthogonal. The OP never said anything about Stanford denigrating its name, only you did. The OP inferred (incorrectly) that since Stanford offers an easy CS course online, American physics education is poor: "I’m definitely glad I stayed at home, where I will receive a proper education, even though it’s not a prestigious [one]." My post refuted this ridiculous line of reasoning.
If you truly believe "he is right in his analysis", I will simply call you an idiot and move along. However, I imagine you just meant to agree with his negative assessment of the courses rather than any specific point he put forth. The question you nearly ask, "why is this good for Stanford?", is an important one that I haven't seen addressed. Right now it gets them some publicity, I suppose, which ultimately nets applicants, prestige, and donations. What does the future hold, though? If every undergraduate could take half their courses online for free while still getting a high-quality education, academia (including Stanford) would shrink.
As for your random (..."craptacular"...) point about American education losing its honor (whatever that means) because a well-known university is offering low-level intro CS courses, it's not just Stanford. An intro CS course is a requirement for all majors at many highly technical schools because it's so useful to so many fields.
Hah, thank you for that. You've converted me--I clearly did not understand the original post.
That's a pretty unfair (and sloppy) comparison. These are introductory CS courses which, as a rule, are quite low-level, so they're accessible to many people from different majors. Your Model Analysis course presumably builds upon several years of other courses--at least, I would be quite impressed if the necessary calculus and Lagrangian mechanics were taught in standard high schools. By that point you expect more from students, and almost no non-physics majors would have the background to take the course, so there's much less hand-holding. In any case, before you pass judgement on the quality of American physics programs in general, as you do in your blog post, you should at least read through some course requirements from actual physics programs and look at some problem sets.
To be completely honest, I hope your reasoning in physics is better than the reasoning you've written here. It stinks of confirmation bias and rationalization. Perhaps Slovenian universities really give a better education, but you haven't presented even remotely convincing evidence for that conclusion. The low quality of your reasoning gives the opposite impression, though of course it's just one data point.
the standards have fallen far from where they were, say, 50 years ago. If you need proof, try reading a book written in the 1800s.
Actually, you may have provided some proof yourself by implying that content in a 200-year-old book proves that standards have fallen in the last 50 years--unless you're in your seventies, I suppose.
In all seriousness, though, I would like to see some proof that educational standards have dropped in the last 50 years
I somewhat agree with your point about material from centuries ago, though it seems to me that rote memorization was much more common in the past. Many of the questions on this purported "8th Grade Examination from late 1800's" are superficially impressive, but really amount to rather useless memorization:
Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.
The arithmetic section I linked mostly consists of unit conversions, which are again superficially impressive. In 8th grade my classmates were covering conic sections, which are less "mechanical" than plugging numbers in to conversion formulas, and I would say they're more difficult. Oddly enough, in this UPenn catalog from 1852, conic sections were a junior level (in college) topic. To be fair, that catalog also lists basic calculus (I imagine the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2) in addition to a dizzying number of topics on history, philosophy, Greek, Latin, "natural philosophy", and chemistry.
Today, there's just far too much information to absorb. Learning how to understand things quickly as they come up is more important than memorizing small chunks of human knowledge, even if it's less impressive. Perhaps students in the past were more studious as well, though things aren't all bad.
I find it a little ironic that your error-ridden post advocates less classroom theory. "lot's" doesn't mean anything and should be "lots"; it's "hands-on", not "hands on"; it's "classroom", not "class room"; and your statement should really be two sentences, rather than one with two halves smashed together with an "and" thrown between.
(To be clear, I'm not judging the content of your post--I don't have enough experience with IT education to pass judgement--I'm just commenting on its irony.)
Images shown are for demonstrative purposes only.
While your post is of course flamebait, it got me curious. According to this exceedingly reputable map, South Koreans (in fact, most Asians in general) do have below-average penis sizes. I wasn't able to find numbers on the prevalence of homosexuality in South Korean men compared to the rest of the world, though there is a Wikipedia article on this general topic. While the numbers vary wildly depending on when, where, and how people are asked, apparently something like 4% of people identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, with significantly more having had some homosexual experience at some point in their lives.
Of course, this has essentially nothing to do with the topic at hand. My apologies for the off-topic post.
I would guess some other collateral damage is the people who may end up with diseases because they drink water that isn't purified, and the percentage that die as a result.
Well, it's not as if there are no alternatives. The collateral damage is subject to an opportunity cost style calculation, where the real cost is that implied by people having to make an alternative choice (buying a similar product; not using anything). To use an example with made-up numbers and actions, if his customers all switched to an equivalent alternative that cost them a total of $10,000 more, and the extra production of this alternative doesn't affect the economy in any new way, this is the collateral damage. That is, the customers have to perform $10,000 worth of person-hours in extra work by giving up some free time, or they have to give up a similar amount in other things they value.
Actually, some numbers have changed their value. "Billion" (and long-scale friends) was redefined in the UK in 1974 (for most uses) to be 10^9 instead of 10^12.
Even mathematical definitions are not absolute. They change, or were obscure to begin with. An annoying example is "natural numbers". Some people include 0, some people include 1. Worse, many people aren't aware of the ambiguity when they use the term. "Ring" has a similar ambiguity. Does the algebraic structure have a 1? Can 1 = 0? Is it commutative? It all depends on what the author is interested in. Hopefully they let you know, but sometimes they don't, and you have to figure out whether these extra properties are being used from context.
Another example from theoretical physics is the term "direct product" when applied to vector spaces. Some physicists use that term in the same way a mathematician would use "tensor product" while others actually use "tensor product", reserving "direct product" for what a mathematician would call a "direct product". As far as I'm aware, there is no ambiguity in the mathematical community about these terms. A physics professor of mine preferred "direct product" in the ambiguous sense. When I asked him why, he told me that tensors were scary to some people, so he wanted to avoid the term if possible. Mathematicians, as a rule, are rather unsympathetic to emotional concerns, so this isn't a very good argument for getting the mathematical community to use the ambiguous definition.
These examples are all annoying, but that's life. Language is the imperfect result of evolution, just like humans are. Evolution usually makes something only "good enough" (examples: the ending of the words "cough", "though", and "rough"; the existence of mental disorders). Even in highly technical disciplines where words often do have immutable meaning, they don't always. The "ring" example is particularly good, since the ambiguity is actually helpful. One can state at the outset "the term 'ring' will denote a unital commutative ring where 1 != 0" without clashing with established notation. The annoyances it generates are from sloppy authors and are typically minor anyway. "Direct product" is rather similar, even if it caused me a few minutes of confusion once ("what? no, that equation is just plain wrong! At the least, those relations severely limit the structure of this object, probably to the point of uselessness! Oh wait. Those are tensor product relations, even though they said direct product. Huh. What a strange convention."). Words change all the time in response to societal factors, and that's not always a bad thing.
Hah, that's hilarious.
you only make yourself sound like a douche regardless.
Pot? I'd like to introduce you to Kettle. Oh, you say Kettle is black? Why yes, yes it is....
The second central moment is the variance, not the standard deviation.
units of the standard deviation Ïf of a normal distribution
Now how'd that get in there?
yay you put some free apps they could go get anyway.
Most of the trouble of getting good free software is finding it, so I'd say the value of the software part of the gift is mostly as a list of suggestions one can conveniently test out.
I believe you mean MS Office 2010 Home Trial. You know, 'cuz it's free.
I'd go with "quantisation", but I agree, the answers are idiotic. They made me indignant enough to make a post ranting about it (but not indignant enough to post in the InfoWorld comments).
The observables don't even have to be multiples of some fundamental unit. Supposing energy were in multiples of Planck's constant, if I were interested in the square root of the energy instead of the energy itself, the resulting levels would not be so distributed. Using particularly convoluted functions, I could map the multiples of Planck's constant to the rational numbers and in fact allow arbitrarily small gradations between states. The question is wrong on several levels, and the answers are terrible. The author must have at absolute best an extremely superficial knowledge of quantum mechanics to have given them.
I had never seen the NG abbreviation (and I'm a Trekkie) until today, but when I googled it there were at least a few places that use it. Nothing remotely official, though. I think it's mostly an accident that's been rediscovered through the years.
If you meant to emphasize the need for Hilbert space as it's used in quantum, I suppose I agree. If you meant to emphasize normalization, then not really. Normalization is necessary, certainly, but the key insight is that there are countably many eg. energy levels, which are (as a rule) disconnected in the topological sense. That is, normalization alone isn't enough to capture the idea. To generalize a little, take a continuous, positive function f:[0, 1]->R whose integral over a to b gives (by definition) the probability of, say, a ball I threw of going up between a and b meters. The positions are still continuous, even though each individual position has probability 0 of actually being measured. Normalization forces the integral to be 1, but quanta are nowhere in sight. One needs the additional connections to Hilbert space provided by the process of quantisation.
Yeah, I found the question selection to be pretty silly, too. It was pretty much just a bunch of obscure things you'd google nowadays. Even the TNG reference I mentioned was obscure--that captain had about 12 seconds of air time at the very end of that episode.
I got 12 of the last 15 correct after missing 4 of the first 5. I'm not sure if that meant the author got lazier or I got better at spotting the wrong answers.
15. Related to quantum mechanics, what is the term for the observation that some physical quantities can be changed only by discrete amounts, or quanta?
The answers are just stupid. None of them (even the "correct" one) is a technical term. The actual correct answer would have been "quantisation" (or "realizing that quantisation is necessary").
18. When Kelsey Grammer appeared on "Star Trek NG"...
It's Star Trek TNG, not NG. Wikipedia and Memory Alpha agree with me (eg. there's a redirect on Memory Alpha to the correct page from "TNG" but not "NG"), though NG appears to be used sometimes by a few people.
It doesn't matter if one of the meanings is ridiculous; sometimes that's what makes a pun funny. I'm a bit amused by which insults you think will hurt me. For instance, choking (gagging, really) on a cock would likely indicate I'm deepthroating a man, which would probably be fine with me, depending on the man. The only thing I don't understand is the moderation here. Both top-level "not a pun" AC posts were modded +2 Insightful, and one other AC reply saying the same thing was modded +1 Insightful, while my original post was modded down from +2 to 0 as Overrated.
The moderation could be explained by a pair of misguided moderators. Two non-ACs have expressed the opinion that it's not a pun, and as far as I can tell those two opinions were misguided--they didn't appear to understand the two ways in which the summary's author meant "Universe" to be interpreted. Two other non-ACs (besides myself) have posted the opposite opinion, calling it a pun (well, one just implied that your original post made no sense, but I imagine that indicates agreement with it being a pun). So, I could believe that some people honestly believe it's not a pun, while being incorrect on that point.
On an unrelated note, I find the format of your posts interesting. There are so many short, declarative sentences ("Choke on a cock and die." "It's not a pun. Not remotely." etc.). They typically end with such a sentence on a line by itself. I suppose you're trying for emphasis, though that style is getting a bit boring. It occurs so much in online arguments.
In any case, thank you for providing some mildly interesting entertainment through analysis. Have a wonderful life.
because saying the "universe" is ending is not pun.
But it is a pun, as I've explained: there are two meanings to the word "Universe" here, which is the definition of a pun. I find it amazing that of the half dozen or so people who have expressed the opinion that this is not a pun, not one has given a clear and coherent reason for that opinion.
Two words: apathy and inertia.
I'm not really a programmer by trade, and I'm not invested in the open source movement, emotionally or otherwise. I don't care enough to even investigate alternative OS's, let alone use them. If all the major alternatives could run the same set of software, I would still need a compelling reason to learn new things on a new OS. I'm fine with that; you can't learn everything (and if you can, please get back to me when you've computed, or at least understood the computation of, the sum of the roots of the minimal polynomial of the sum of the square roots of the first n positive integers [since nobody will and the result is rather beautiful, here's the answer: 2 to the number of primes less than or equal to n times the (floor(sqrt(n)))th triangular number]).
I've had to use other OS's before, and I'm fine with that too--modern Macs and Linux machines have been for the most part hassle-free. They've just offered me no compelling reason to switch.
There are two meanings of the word "Universe" in this context that give the sentence two interpretations.
First: "[Everything that is and ever shall be] is ending in the eyes of LEGO."
Second: "[The MMO Lego Universe] is ending in the eyes of LEGO."
Two meanings of a word are being used for humorous effect. How is that *not* a pun, which is "the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications...."? The first interpretation is (slightly) funny, and not all definitions of "pun" even require humor [eg. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son[/sun] of York"]. They aren't required to use homophones, either. Multiple meanings of the same word or phrase are fine.
Of all the AC's calling it not a pun, none have justified their view. I wish you would so I would see what common misconception you all have, or perhaps what I'm missing.
I find "universe" (standard usage) and "LEGO Universe" (the MMO) to be radically different. I don't think "LEGO Universe: Everything to infinity, just made of LEGO" was meant. I think "LEGO Universe: an online massively multiplayer game" was meant. In any case, thank you for at least giving your reasoning. I'm saddened by the moderation in this thread.
So... you want to ignore the half of the statement that makes it a pun and therefore deem it not a pun? Alrighty then, moving along....