5 ms·

This is one of the reasons I love HN. Occasionally there's a headline like this one that I understand 0% of.

by UberFly 3y ago

danparsonson 3y ago
If you like that, you'll love the abstract! It makes me feel like I've forgotten what words mean.
- loxias 3y ago
  Me IRL. I like to think of myself as a reasonably clever person, multidisciplinary science nerd. Not unusual for me to comfortably read through papers in acoustics, astrophysics, applied math, computer science, biology... This abstract is like a nice swift kick.... :) After spending a while looking up terms and hurting my head I'm reminded how much I hate quantum. Bullshit academics trying to make particles out of the acoustic waves I know and love. ;)
- eternityforest 3y ago
  That's how I feel every time I stumble into a math thread. It's always interesting to see real people discuss this stuff. Like, I don't have any close friends who have likely multipled a matrix in the last year or probably decade. It seems so far away from ordinary life. Then you go on HN and there are people just casually chatting about it. They're speaking English but neither the words nor the relation to other words means anything to the uninitiated. But then there's a few that stand out, like someone will say "You don't really need Bloof tensors, you can model it just as well as a Randolph set of quadrispheres", and it's recognizable as technical discussion comparing the merits of models, but thats about it.
  - danparsonson 3y ago
    Hehe indeed; I had a similar experience with this article - "...its plasmon ... is a quantized (OK) collective (right) oscillation (yup) of its electron (got it) density (fine)" ... it's a what what of its what? It is indeed humbling and gratifying in equal measure to be keeping such company!
- rubidium 3y ago
  I have a PhD in Physics and got a little lost in the abstract myself, so don’t feel bad! It’s very dense sentences with pretty technical jargon. After a few re-reads and spot checking some forgotten condensed matter terms of art it made (some) sense.
FredPret 3y ago
The only common words in this one are “3D”, “as”, “a”, and “observed”

This is one of the reasons I love HN. Occasionally there's a headline like this one that I understand 0% of.

danparsonson 3y ago

If you like that, you'll love the abstract! It makes me feel like I've forgotten what words mean.

loxias 3y ago
Me IRL. I like to think of myself as a reasonably clever person, multidisciplinary science nerd. Not unusual for me to comfortably read through papers in acoustics, astrophysics, applied math, computer science, biology... This abstract is like a nice swift kick.... :) After spending a while looking up terms and hurting my head I'm reminded how much I hate quantum. Bullshit academics trying to make particles out of the acoustic waves I know and love. ;)
eternityforest 3y ago
That's how I feel every time I stumble into a math thread. It's always interesting to see real people discuss this stuff. Like, I don't have any close friends who have likely multipled a matrix in the last year or probably decade. It seems so far away from ordinary life. Then you go on HN and there are people just casually chatting about it. They're speaking English but neither the words nor the relation to other words means anything to the uninitiated. But then there's a few that stand out, like someone will say "You don't really need Bloof tensors, you can model it just as well as a Randolph set of quadrispheres", and it's recognizable as technical discussion comparing the merits of models, but thats about it.
- danparsonson 3y ago
  Hehe indeed; I had a similar experience with this article - "...its plasmon ... is a quantized (OK) collective (right) oscillation (yup) of its electron (got it) density (fine)" ... it's a what what of its what? It is indeed humbling and gratifying in equal measure to be keeping such company!
rubidium 3y ago
I have a PhD in Physics and got a little lost in the abstract myself, so don’t feel bad! It’s very dense sentences with pretty technical jargon. After a few re-reads and spot checking some forgotten condensed matter terms of art it made (some) sense.

FredPret 3y ago

The only common words in this one are “3D”, “as”, “a”, and “observed”