Everything's linear

If you'd like to be a physicist, but want to skip 6-10 years of graduate school, here's a short-cut: Read the above headline while putting your hands up to block the sides of your vision and then go "La la la..." If you don't want to pretend that everything is a simple harmonic oscillator, you can try to add a cubic or quintic term to the restoring force. Then work out the math. Anything higher-order than that you usually do numerically. Ta da.

Anyway, here's a neat story about the 728-ton stabilizing tuned-damped oscillator at the top of a skyscraper in Tapei. Check out the video of it during an earthquake.