Steuard

96 ms·

721.
by Steuard 14y ago
Technically, that's not a bug: Tolkien gave instructions for converting "Shire Calendar" dates to modern calendar dates in one of the appendices. (All hobbit months had 30 days, with some extra "holiday" dates stuck in between months at mid
722.
by Steuard 14y ago
This article conflates all sorts of loosely connected ideas and buzzwords without really giving a solid explanation of any of them (least of all this new result). A more focused look at this particular (but quite preliminary) result can be
723.
by Steuard 14y ago
Heck, many of the doubts and questions raised there are commonly held among string theorists. (The days of people exclaiming "We're going to unify physics within a few years!" are at least two decades behind us.) In my experience, string th
724.
by Steuard 14y ago
I doubt it would be any different. LQG folks still seem to resent the greater attention that string theory gets. String theorists still mostly don't spend any time thinking about LQG. Neither has made any great breakthroughs or grand new pr
725.
by Steuard 14y ago
First, advice about arXiv.org links: for me, at least, it's nice to see a link to the main abstract page rather than directly to the full PDF. Here, that link would be http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077 And second, this isn't "When physi
726.
by Steuard 14y ago
I don't see this as an arms race at all. (Heck, it took a major outcry just to convince Mozilla to show the version number in a place where normal users could find it.) I agree that it's a redefinition of what "version number" means: now
727.
by Steuard 14y ago
I've heard many people say that it "reads like the Bible", or like a history book: there aren't any "viewpoint characters", or really any recurring characters at all (especially if inscrutable angelic beings don't count). Certainly if you'r
728.
by Steuard 14y ago
Absolutely. I was responding to the parent comment, not to the original article.
729.
by Steuard 14y ago
I had a professor assign his own text once (somewhere around 1996?). It was pretty expensive. At the start of the semester, he gave a $2 refund to everyone who had purchased a brand-new copy, since that was his share of the price we paid. I
730.
by Steuard 14y ago
Speaking as a professor, I'd be furious if some legislator told me exactly which textbook to use. I'm concerned about book prices, certainly, but mandating a specific text would immediately shut down the few attempts at innovation in textbo
731.
by Steuard 14y ago
I wonder if they'll use the existing CC-BY textbooks produced by OpenStax (or others) for some of these courses? http://openstaxcollege.org/
732.
by Steuard 14y ago
The value in this sort of compromise is that it's relatively painless to existing systems. You won't need to explain a whole new peer review system to a tenure committee, you won't need to radically restructure your grant spending, librarie
733.
by Steuard 14y ago
The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the jo
734.
by Steuard 14y ago
I've read your other posts, and they don't sway me. (And I put my initial "you" in quotes because you'd clearly separated yourself from this particular form of dishonesty.) As for your "real crimes" argument, BS. You absolutely do not get t
735.
by Steuard 14y ago
It's a lie. It's a deliberate, baldfaced lie. I don't want "you" working for me. Who knows what other lies you think are okay because they're "just how people work"? You compare this lie on your resume to being "accidentally inconsistent".
736.
by Steuard 14y ago
I've admittedly not worked through Geroch's paper thoroughly myself, so I won't make strong claims here. But based on my understanding, I'd say that his assertion is a bit stronger than what you're suggesting here. He's not just giving a so
737.
by Steuard 14y ago
I'm not surprised that Alcubierre addressed this point, though I'm glad to hear that for certain. (I've done little more than glance at his original paper... I never have enough time for all the cool stuff.) But my understanding is that his
738.
by Steuard 14y ago
That being said, I'm not certain whether there's any way to avoid causality violation if the hypothetical FTL travel results entirely from within relativity itself. (Geroch's argument, as I understand it, is based entirely on combining tw
739.
by Steuard 14y ago
[Background note: I'm a physics professor with a background in string theory and relativity.] You're raising a sensible point, and most of the objections raised here are invalid. But it nevertheless turns out (surprisingly, to me!) that you
740.
by Steuard 14y ago
Regarding upper case: I've taken to typing the first part of my work email address as "JensenS". My wife and I work at the same place, and when I wrote it as "jensens" there were honestly people who assumed that address was a plural and wen
741.
by Steuard 14y ago
Right, chaotic behavior is a valid issue. But in any realistic situation, you'll have lots of effects that inevitably get left out of simulations that contribute larger perturbations/errors than this rounding error would. (Heck, I suspect t
742.
by Steuard 14y ago
But for physics, that result is great ! An inaccuracy of just one part in 10^12 would be better than practically every physics experiment ever performed. That's like being off by the size of an atom when measuring the distance from LA to N
743.
by Steuard 14y ago
As far as I can tell, nothing that you've written here is at all relevant to the content of the linked article. (It's not a generic "people don't pay enough attention to science" article, though I suppose the headline could be misread that
744.
by Steuard 14y ago
Time is very much a dimension: spacetime is well described as a 3+1 dimensional manifold. Reading your link, I have no idea what those researchers are talking about (nor did it inspire me to look at their actual article). The "1 time + 3 sp
745.
by Steuard 14y ago
No. (That was easy.) I'll happily take that back if someone can point to mainstream peer-reviewed publications by at least two independent research groups claiming success with the same approach (or even just closely related approaches). Bu
746.
by Steuard 14y ago
Careful: as I understand it, the main point of this blog post is that they're going to update the spec to require, e.g., "color: var(myforecolor)" rather than "color: $myforecolor". (The rationale seems sensible to me, for what it's worth.)
747.
by Steuard 14y ago
I'm obviously lacking in imagination here. How would using an ID for styling a "clearly one-per-page" element lead to problems? I'm thinking of things like the main page title, or some sort of primary navigation block. The whole point there
748.
by Steuard 14y ago
As far as I can tell from the specification posts here, it's entirely to make implementation more feasible. Rather than some complicated calculation of precedence, you can just assign each rule a single score. As long as the weird exception
749.
by Steuard 14y ago
I really like the Unglue.it model, so I'm upset by this decision, too, but I suspect there aren't any legal grounds for complaining about it. I fully expect that Amazon's contract language gives them plenty of latitude to refuse services at
750.
by Steuard 14y ago
This is neat to see, though I'll admit I was hoping to see broader views of what the sky would look like if, say, Jupiter or Saturn were that close to us. If you're interested in a direct size comparison like this, I've recently made a post

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