Steuard

17 ms·

91.
by Steuard 7y ago
Off the top of my head: * If the design of your car makes you a less safe driver, you are more likely to crash into me. * The US as a society has committed (surprisingly recently) to providing emergency care to anyone who shows up at a hosp
92.
by Steuard 8y ago
For several years in grad school I had income that varied significantly in different parts of the year (I got a large scholarship check as a lump sum). So every year, I had to fill out some obnoxious, moderately complicated form detailing m
93.
by Steuard 8y ago
LIGO was able to detect gravitational waves, which I'm pretty sure must require non-zero transfer of energy in one form or another. (I'm hedging a little only because I know LIGO was measuring relative changes in metric distance,
94.
by Steuard 8y ago
I suppose that gravitational waves may be ever so slightly attenuated as they pass through matter, but the coupling is so weak that we probably wouldn't notice. (Think of how hard LIGO had to search before they found the first black
95.
by Steuard 8y ago
I'm not sure that I understand your question. Certainly all of our understanding of astronomical effects includes (and often depends on) the effects of intervening clouds of gas and dust: that hasn't been overlooked or omitted fro
96.
by Steuard 8y ago
I am a native speaker, and "promiscuous" is definitely a negative, pejorative term. (Dictionary definitions are good at capturing the denotation of a word, but are sometimes less good at explaining its connotations. If your dictio
97.
by Steuard 8y ago
I was shocked when I first heard a colleague in my college's biology department talk about this. He said that when he puts nets up to collect birds for banding, it's essential not to leave them up too long at a time: if you do, pa
98.
by Steuard 8y ago
The point of the article, as I read it, is that 50 years ago there basically weren't instructors: very few college/university classes were taught by anyone other than (tenured or tenure-track) professors. That model has been inc
99.
by Steuard 8y ago
Most college instructors in the US today don't, either, and aren't in positions that will ever be eligible for it. That's the point.
100.
by Steuard 8y ago
That's the point: the majority of college classes in the US today are not taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, but rather by adjunct faculty who are paid by the course rather than an annual salary. My wife used to teach five clas
101.
by Steuard 8y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist. Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smart people are all spending their careers on pointless work. Those naysay
102.
by Steuard 8y ago
This interpretation of the reproducibility crisis is not supported by this massive international study, at least according to the last paragraphs of the original article (which quote someone directly addressing your concern). The results th
103.
by Steuard 8y ago
Full disclosure: I'm a college physics professor. You're making it sound like writing a good textbook (or notes to take the place of one) is somehow straightforward or easy. Believe me, it is not. I've taught out of half a do
104.
by Steuard 8y ago
I wonder if this is included in the SCOAP3 categories? (The vast majority of high-energy physics research is now open-access, due to collective negotiations between researchers, libraries, and publishers: https://scoap3.org/
105.
by Steuard 8y ago
I think so! The "Magic Planet" is a digital projection globe that can display all sorts of different datasets. I've been more interested in its planetary science, astronomy, and geology applications, but I believe they'v
106.
by Steuard 8y ago
I should probably write this up more formally somewhere. But have a look, and it would be cool if you'd give me credit somewhere if you use these notes in your own stuff (I'm Steuard Jensen, and I'm a professor at Alma Colleg
107.
by Steuard 8y ago
My main point was the same as yours: that the event horizon looks more and more "normal" as a region of space the larger the black hole is, so if you want to get close to a black hole's event horizon to test its properties (e
108.
by Steuard 8y ago
There actually is at least one interesting and potentially important difference between a supermassive black hole and a stellar mass one. Counterintuitively, even though the total gravitational effect of a huge black hole is larger, the str
109.
by Steuard 8y ago
I was going to make exactly this same comment. (And the third text being compared was The Feynman Lectures , which is another entirely different sort of book and level.) This was the example that made me decide that this list's approa
110.
by Steuard 8y ago
N here is a function , not a constant. I was confused at first, but I think the "-N" in that post wasn't intended to mean "minus N" but rather ", where N is the function called...". The "norm" o
111.
by Steuard 8y ago
I just finished teaching a Jr/Sr undergrad Quantum Mechanics course last semester, so I'll take a stab at answering this. There are two approaches to answering this question. One of them invokes the concept of "the collapse o
112.
by Steuard 8y ago
When I teach relativity, I offer my students extra credit for playing each of these two games. They capture rather different aspects of the structure of spacetime, and I think both are interesting and worthwhile. (As an aside, I fairly cons
113.
by Steuard 8y ago
Very belated reply: I don't consider a magnetic field to be an "action at a distance" explanation at all, so I'm not sure how to answer your first question. In classical E&M, a magnetic field is a local property of s
114.
by Steuard 8y ago
That seems like the other possibility, yeah. My eye sees what looks like a meaningfully different number or density of bacterial clusters on the "detergent" sample in that comparison, but I could pretty easily imagine it falling
115.
by Steuard 8y ago
The article claims "The Crystal wash did not seem to do BETTER or WORSE than regular detergent", but I'm really curious to know how the author was scoring that. At least to my eye, the density of bacterial colonies in the &qu
116.
by Steuard 8y ago
This sounds a lot like the card game "New Eleusis": http://www.logicmazes.com/games/eleusis/index.html http://matuszek.org/eleusis2.html http://matuszek.org/eleusis0.htm
117.
by Steuard 8y ago
We don't actually buy in to action at a distance anymore, not really. In Einstein's general relativity, the "fabric of spacetime" is an active participant in the dynamics of the universe, and for one object to affect ano
118.
by Steuard 9y ago
Yeah, that really surprised me: for a font in particular, why wouldn't you use em? (Is there a benefit to using pixels that I'm overlooking?)
119.
by Steuard 9y ago
I once had similar thoughts about, say, movie rating systems like IMDB. But you can pretty quickly convince yourself that straightforward ways of implementing this would open themselves up to horrific levels of system gaming very easily: a
120.
by Steuard 9y ago
On a quantum level, when a photon encounters a material you have to ask whether the material is able to absorb a photon with that wavelength. When electrons are bound to a specific atom (or are in specific molecular bonds) then there are on

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