Steuard

41 ms·

331.
by Steuard 12y ago
Huh. I only have the initial-scale entry, and I think that my sites always show up with page width matching device width as a result. Is there something important that the extra width specification does that I'm missing?
332.
by Steuard 12y ago
My students regularly show me how easy it is to calculate extremely precise results. Now, whether they should trust that precision is a rather different question, and one that even the good ones struggle with for a while. (In other news,
333.
by Steuard 12y ago
Even including things like floating figure placement? I'll admit, I haven't kept up with all the features along these lines that Word provides these days: I know it's been catching up. (In fact, I'm curious to know: do m
334.
by Steuard 12y ago
Previous discussion of the original source of this comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002 (My take on the short version: Of course it's very difficult to use LaTeX to reproduce a document's speci
335.
by Steuard 12y ago
Sometimes that instinct serves us well, though. My understanding is that dented cans really can be dangerous: if the dent includes any level of break in the can's airtight seal (even something too small to see) then you're at ri
336.
by Steuard 12y ago
Sure, but why this book? I mean, it seems like a nice review guide and all (though probably too terse for someone trying to learn the material for the first time), but what about it is catching peoples' attention? If I post about Tom
337.
by Steuard 12y ago
I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until I'd been using this technique for multiple years that this occurred to me. I've kept doing it out of inertia ever since. I'd say "it works if you make sure that no le
338.
by Steuard 12y ago
This isn't just about earning market share in China. Just about any organization that operates in China (or hopes to) has a vested interest in, e.g., having reliable email access there. If your company uses Google products for email, e
339.
by Steuard 12y ago
The US and many other countries have laws establishing the idea of a "compulsory license", which is (legally) required any time you cover someone else's song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_licen
340.
We are losing a generation of historical records(slate.com)
5 points by Steuard 12y ago|0 comments
341.
by Steuard 12y ago
Certainly not. But they're common defaults. The worry is that if someone picks a non-standard interval, it suggests that they gave conscious thought to what interval to pick and came up with that one. The natural question in that case
342.
by Steuard 12y ago
This is really cool! It's a nice explanation of the topic (including some very effective diagrams), and the resulting visualizations are great. [Side note: In discussing the distortion of the event horizon, the author says "I susp
343.
by Steuard 12y ago
As a formal title, "Professor" in most US institutions is the highest academic rank, above "Associate Professor" [frequently granted along with tenure after about 6 years and a successful assessment by the institution]
344.
by Steuard 12y ago
Evidently this is being blown way out of proportion, and other researchers have been studying this region for some time (to say nothing of the actual people living there, who have known about these "lost cities" all along): http:
345.
by Steuard 12y ago
I'm a physics professor at a liberal arts college, and yes, we do very much value teaching here. Research is important, too, as a way for faculty to remain engaged with their disciplines. But we actively look for ways to get undergradu
346.
by Steuard 12y ago
This is complicated. Given the accelerating expansion of the universe, there's an eventual "horizon" where light beyond that limit will never manage to get here, simply because the empty space between here and there will ex
347.
by Steuard 12y ago
I don't think that you've really understood the sort of limits that the previous commenter (and the original article) were trying to describe. To a very good approximation, QM does describe our universe: any "better" t
348.
by Steuard 12y ago
> I could easily make up another theory based on quantum mechanics and relativity [...]. The trivial other theory would not be in the form of math[...] Can you clarify that at all? I honestly don't know how to reconcile your first
349.
by Steuard 12y ago
I really don't agree with that conclusion, though I recognize that it's not far from the traditional definitions of science. The point is, let's pretend for the sake of argument that this article's main idea winds up bei
350.
by Steuard 12y ago
"A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years." Maybe it's just that I'm an academic, but this sounds less like a job for a company and more
351.
by Steuard 12y ago
What would it mean to make Firefox for iOS? My understanding was that iOS requires all browsers to use the same rendering engine under the hood, so "Firefox" there wouldn't be much more than a different skin for Safari. (Has
352.
by Steuard 12y ago
The article indicated that the fraudulent returns seemed to be based on last year's returns for the individuals in question, so it sounds like a lot more than name and SSN were involved here.
353.
by Steuard 12y ago
Have a look at the Matter & Interactions textbook by Chabay and Sherwood. It's a really cool concept for a first-year physics course, and it incorporates a lot of programming (and even just programming-inspired perspectives). (Th
354.
by Steuard 12y ago
I'm quite fond of differential forms, but the first time that they came up in my undergraduate math major was late in an optional second semester math analysis course (and even the first semester of of that course was more advanced tha
355.
by Steuard 12y ago
When I'm talking about the Planck scale being "blown up" to observable size during the Big Bang, I'm not talking about any need to look past the CMB, I'm talking about right here, where we're sitting. If there&
356.
by Steuard 12y ago
Counterargument to "the Planck scale is blown up to be visible": The expanding universe itself has (or very probably has) stretched by a factor starting to push into "practical infinity" territory since the Big Bang. (As
357.
by Steuard 12y ago
I'm not entirely averse to the world you describe, and you may be right that it's in our future no matter what we choose today. But... Citizens of oppressive governments are in very real danger if they have no privacy. When the se
358.
by Steuard 12y ago
Speaking as a high energy physicist, they're absolutely a legitimate publication. I don't read it regularly, but the CERN Courier has been part of particle physics culture for a very long time (maybe since CERN was founded).
359.
by Steuard 12y ago
Alas, the trouble is that it's tremendously hard to learn (or teach!) the qualitative ideas without also learning the equations. (The only counterexample to that I've ever seen in physics is Feynman's amazing little book &q
360.
by Steuard 12y ago
That's right: the voltage in this case will be proportional to the separation between the plates, so if you discharged them across a light bulb it would (briefly!) glow much brighter if you pulled the plates apart first.

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