Steuard

13 ms·

61.
by Steuard 5y ago
Well, hey. I don't see my site show up here that often. If anyone's got comments, questions, or suggestions, I'll try to stop by and respond at some point.
62.
by Steuard 5y ago
Harriet is a great kids' series (as is Dragonbreath). Just to include it here, most of Vernon's writing for adults (which is what her Patreon focuses on) is under the pen name T. Kingfisher. "Jackalope Wives"; Clockwork
63.
by Steuard 5y ago
I didn't downvote, but if I had to guess, I suspect it's because your comment seems to have very little to do with the article (apart from the fact that the article is about medical research and you are advocating for a different
64.
by Steuard 5y ago
It's an indictment of something that we've had this amazing new tool for vaccine production in existence for a decade but we never even tried to use it for that until COVID because "vaccines typically don’t make much money&
65.
by Steuard 6y ago
This article's focus seems very different than the experience that my 9-year-old has had playing both games for the past few years. At least for now, she's not really shown interest yet in programming either game: she plays them
66.
by Steuard 6y ago
That's _The Hobbit_. (I suppose Smaug gets mentioned here and there in LotR, and Gandalf makes an entertaining firework version of him...)
67.
by Steuard 6y ago
For main ingredients, sure: when baking bread, I measure flour and water into a bowl sitting on a kitchen scale, and it's great. But there's no way that I could measure the yeast with my kitchen scale! When a (US) recipe calls f
68.
by Steuard 6y ago
This is an entry from the "Starts With A Bang" blog. I think the author(s) (is it mostly just Siegel?) post regularly about physics/science topics, including newsworthy stuff, but clearly also sometimes just post about genera
69.
by Steuard 6y ago
There's a fair bit of truth to this, but it does leave out the fairly substantial number of faculty who teach in undergraduate or Masters-level institutions. I teach physics at a small liberal arts college so I never train grad student
70.
by Steuard 6y ago
You can't prove who you voted for today: that's a crucial part of the electoral system, not a minor feature. How are you thinking that you could you prove who you voted for? (Keep in mind that you can always request a new ballot i
71.
by Steuard 7y ago
The odd thing is, we physicists actually have a pretty solid understanding of why magnets repel each other. It's a fun story, one that I try to include every time I teach the subject, and I'm pretty sure that Feynman knew it! So i
72.
by Steuard 7y ago
Back in our Usenet days (wow, around 20 years ago now), Michael was firmly in the pro-wing camp: he insisted that Tolkien was using a rhetorical technique where vagueness gave way to clarity, and there were definitely wings, and anyone who
73.
by Steuard 7y ago
He so very much doesn't. Back in the days of Usenet, Michael was one of the best-read experts in our discussions, and I admired him for that a lot . There weren't that many of us who could go toe to toe with him in a debate about
74.
by Steuard 7y ago
Dare I ask: any particular story about what brought you to my site, and what led you to link it here? (I appreciate that you thought it was worthwhile enough to share!)
75.
by Steuard 7y ago
Last I heard, there were serious concerns that these cleanup devices would wind up absolutely devastating ocean ecosystems that naturally form in the same places that plastic piles up: https://www.theatlantic.com/science&#x2
76.
by Steuard 7y ago
Don't make the mistake of believing the sticker price of college/university tuition! It's quite routine for many colleges (private ones, at least) to offer "scholarships" covering a substantial fraction of tuition t
77.
by Steuard 7y ago
Yes? At least in some mathy/sciencey circles.
78.
by Steuard 7y ago
It would be cool to see exactly what sort of model would produce behavior like this. I'm a theoretical physicist, and at first glance I have absolutely no idea how one could write down a model that had "energy at a frequency that
79.
by Steuard 7y ago
Oh! I hadn't understood that the ion is what's being screened, but of course it would be. That begins to sound a lot more promising. I still have big questions, but maybe there are answers. Like... ...does the screening not have
80.
by Steuard 7y ago
I need to make a correction to my comments on plasma screening here, after a 4am realization that my mental model of what would happen to the potential was in fact pretty solidly wrong. That said, I feel like fixing my mistake just leads th
81.
by Steuard 7y ago
It's far too late to edit my original post, but I want to add a disclaimer here. I still don't see how this system can work, but (as suggested by T-A in a brief comment in that earlier thread) there's at least some chance tha
82.
by Steuard 7y ago
I suspect that we're only talking to ourselves at this point, so perhaps it's not worth a lot more time on this conversation. But a few notes: Regarding the infinite plate limit: Locally , it is absolutely true that as you increa
83.
by Steuard 7y ago
Hmm, this is a very interesting line of argument: I am very much focused on electrostatic reasoning here, and I haven't given significant thought to frames of reference at all. My instinct is still that it won't change my overal
84.
by Steuard 7y ago
I don't know much at all about ion drives. But in (e.g.) an x-ray tube, electrons are accelerated to high speeds by arranging for them to begin in a location with non-zero potential (a hot negative filament) so that they will gain sp
85.
by Steuard 7y ago
I'm very open to the possibility that I'm missing something important in all this. But I still don't feel like you've made any clear argument about why my energy reasoning about the fields outside of the parallel plates
86.
by Steuard 7y ago
Alas, I don't think I should make promises of free time that I'm unlikely to be able to keep: my fall term starts in just a couple weeks, and my available time is going to rapidly fall to zero.
87.
by Steuard 7y ago
I'm happy to discuss this stuff, but I think the conversation will be more pleasant if you avoid the snark, and maybe if you're a bit more willing to entertain the possibility that someone who's spent their career studying
88.
by Steuard 7y ago
None of that second commenter's objections even began to address the core of the original poster's point: whatever the exact details of the field configuration might be, it's inescapably true that the electric potential is ze
89.
by Steuard 7y ago
My 8-year-old daughter has paid a lot more attention to Roblox than Minecraft lately. Being able to connect with friends there is definitely a factor, but I think she's also drawn in by the seemingly endless supply of new content. One
90.
by Steuard 7y ago
Killing all your customers is clearly a bad market strategy. But I expect that to truly maximize profits, you'd aim to price the drug a little higher than what some patients can possibly pay. Sure, a few people will die as a result,

More ›