Steuard

36 ms·

271.
by Steuard 11y ago
My impression, which others may correct me on, is that he started down that road while in Los Alamos: I vaguely recall that his "You just ask them?" story was in that setting, anyway. I've always had the sense that he was d
272.
by Steuard 11y ago
I've gotta say, whether taken literally or metaphorically this sounds a little creepy. On the literal level, clinging to someone constantly so they can't get away is likely to come across as somewhere between desperate and terrify
273.
by Steuard 11y ago
If it were just about keeping exact measurements of time, there would be no need to regularly resynchronize the standard timekeeping system with the rotation of the Earth. The only thing that makes it important to tie clock noon to solar no
274.
by Steuard 11y ago
"Free Lossless Image Format": the quality metric for lossless images is "identical pixel by pixel to the reference format". (There's obviously a question about how to judge quality for a given partial download of
275.
by Steuard 11y ago
It's been a while since I looked into it, but I opted to stick with MacPorts rather than Homebrew in large part because I got the impression that Homebrew wanted to own /usr/local rather than sharing it with other software.
276.
by Steuard 11y ago
In this context, each region sends one member to the House of Representatives in Washington. So it is a "count total votes" process within the region, but there's no way to aggregate between regions (without fundamentally c
277.
by Steuard 11y ago
A colleague of mine described a method for assigning groups that I'd never considered, but that she says worked surprisingly well. On the first day of class, she gave out a survey, and one question was "How many hours do you expec
278.
by Steuard 11y ago
Careful: Pluto would not look like these latest pictures to the naked eye. This image is constructed from blue, red, and near-IR color channels that have been mapped to blue, green, and red in the pictures. There's a bit more about how
279.
by Steuard 11y ago
I love eigenvectors. For me, the rest of linear felt like a bunch of rote rules and algorithms for figuring out vaguely-interesting stuff. And then suddenly I find out that there's this amazingly non-obvious but remarkably powerful str
280.
by Steuard 11y ago
Even if you're cynical about peer review, there is a world of difference between a publisher that sends manuscripts to subject experts that it identifies on its own and a publisher that (as in the article) asks the author if they have
281.
by Steuard 11y ago
The followup post (evidently this was from last year) credits you with that addition. (I was surprised by the lack of support for Pages, too.)
282.
by Steuard 11y ago
First: it's nice to give arXiv links to the abstract/metadata page rather than straight to the PDF: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2720 Second, this paper is from 2012. And third, who is this guy? A quick Google s
283.
by Steuard 11y ago
The people that I tend to respect most in these areas tell me that (at least in fundamental physics/particle physics) fields are reality, and that it's our perceptions of particle behavior that are an illusion. (Just for example,
284.
by Steuard 11y ago
Wholeheartedly seconded. This book occupies a nearly unique position in the physics literature: it is neither a textbook nor a popularization. It assumes little more knowledge (of math or physics) than the typical popularization, but it exp
285.
by Steuard 11y ago
There is very little in common between the old concept of "ether" and any quantum field. Analogies like the mattress model described in the article are helpful in some ways (like describing particles as excitations or ripples in t
286.
by Steuard 11y ago
The nice thing about magnetic fields is that all charged particles are deflected: the positive ones bend one way, and the negative ones bend the other. In a lot of situations, the particles will actually spin along helical paths whose net
287.
by Steuard 11y ago
That's basically the idea behind HDR (High Dynamic Range) imagery in photography/photo processing. (And my understanding is that it's hard to figure out exactly what the best scaling function is in order to mimic typical huma
288.
by Steuard 11y ago
It's not quite what you're asking for (though I haven't looked around for alternate interfaces), but the NASA Photojournal site is really nice: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
289.
by Steuard 11y ago
Oh, man. This was pretty much the final straw for the couple of newsgroups that I loved dearly back in the day (rec.arts.books.tolkien and alt.fan.tolkien). The once-vibrant community was already atrophying (due largely to a lack of newcome
290.
by Steuard 11y ago
Sure, but the author was talking about being worried about long-term access to her favorite songs. I think she said that soundcloud still has most or all of them right now: the next two days are presumably not the big concern here. If she
291.
by Steuard 11y ago
The part that stuck out to me was when the author talked about her desire to have a long-term archive of her favorite music, but wasn't willing to "wait for 2 days for a CD to ship". I can understand not wanting to deal with
292.
by Steuard 11y ago
I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Servic
293.
by Steuard 11y ago
I'm not an expert in this subject area, but I know that I've sometimes seen the phenomena that are sometimes called "wavefunction collapse" described as non-unitary (and for good reason). Even if you buy into an interpre
294.
by Steuard 11y ago
Because experts with domain-specific knowledge tend to have better heuristics for this sort of thing than the average interested outsider. (They have to, or else they'd get nothing done except debunking flawed claim after flawed claim.
295.
by Steuard 11y ago
Adding to that, it will take time to develop models that can explain these unexpected features! Even with all the data in hand, it may take a number of years of intense study and perhaps simulation to make a convincing case for any single e
296.
by Steuard 11y ago
I think there's a case to be made even for "average hue applied to the whole image": it's very easy to look at a black and white planet photo and assume that the whole thing is made of grey rock (since our own familiar M
297.
by Steuard 11y ago
As far as I can tell, the upshot after scoring a million tweets is that the only one with all 26 letters was just "?????????????????????the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog??????????????????" This is considerably less inter
298.
by Steuard 11y ago
Oh, man. The argument to keep building it was that we would have had (in some senses) better knowledge of particle physics in the 90s than what we're currently waiting for from the LHC. I'm too young to have been part of the p
299.
by Steuard 11y ago
This sounds like a fantastic exercise to assign to physics majors in some sort of capstone class. What a neat idea. I may have to try this.
300.
by Steuard 11y ago
Nobody ever explains to grad students that they can ask the secretaries to do this stuff. I didn't figure it out until I got a tenure-track job.

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