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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Things that affect your way of life creep into your identity. Disabilities—including physical ones—change how you live, so they change how you view yourself and your relation to society (your identity). “A part of one’s identity” is maybe more fitting, but that’s pretty pedantic.

    Also, I’m not sure you should suggest that someone’s identity is somehow less real than a mental condition. Both of them are integral functions of the mind that deeply and directly impact a person’s life. While I grant that many see identity as ‘less important’ or ‘more mutable’ (and thus less impactful) than diagnosable conditions, I’m not sure we should accept that without argument, and this comment inadvertently accepts it a priori.



  • It (along with Stokes’ theorem (they’re actually the same theorem in different dimensions)) helps yield Maxwell’s equations; specifically, if you want to change the flux of the electric field through a surface (right hand side), you need to change the amount of charge it contains (the source of the divergence on the left hand side). In other words, if you have the same charge contained by a surface, it will have the same flux going through it, which means you can change the surface however you wish and the math will still be the same. Physicists use this to reduce some complex problems into problems on a sphere or a box—objects with nice, easily calculable symmetries.