Steuard

30 ms·

211.
by Steuard 11y ago
I don't think that you're quite conceptualizing the issue in the right way. This isn't necessarily about rape or sexual assault (though even those can be hard to get the police to take seriously). There's a huge range of
212.
by Steuard 11y ago
This is certainly in line with everything that's come out of physics education research over the past few decades. (I'm a physics prof, and I try to pay attention to this stuff.) Passively sitting back and listening to lectures ca
213.
by Steuard 11y ago
Well, whether it's obvious or not, I think it's in the paper. Immediately under equation (1.1) of http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720 , the authors are discussing the second correction term to the distribution of
214.
by Steuard 11y ago
I'm pretty solidly convinced of the pattern at this point: I've checked the "reflect across the anti-diagonal" pattern for the first 10 million primes, expressed in every base from 3 to 20, and it seems to hold up. (I ha
215.
by Steuard 11y ago
Framing this differently, a prime congruent to x mod b is as likely to be followed by a prime congruent to y mod b as a prime congruent to - y mod b is to be followed by one congruent to - x mod b .
216.
by Steuard 11y ago
It took me embarrassingly long to notice that Last[IntegerDigits[x,base]] is just Mod[x,base] (which ought to be faster). I guess the author wanted to avoid discussing modular arithmetic in an article for general audiences?
217.
by Steuard 11y ago
Wow, that's really interesting. The same seems to be true for base 7; I haven't tried any other prime bases yet (and I don't know how it might extend to non-prime bases). Anyone have an idea why this seems to hold? Edit: This
218.
by Steuard 11y ago
Yes! To a first approximation, my government doesn't have the power to put you in jail for, say, hacking into a local server in your hometown. (Yours doesn't have that power over me, either.) So (again to a first approximation)
219.
by Steuard 11y ago
> If we find new particles and also come up with a theory that extends the SM to describe them, that new theory _becomes_ the standard model. I don't know enough history to know if this was the case in the 1970s or 80s, but I strong
220.
by Steuard 11y ago
I expect you already understand this, but to be clear: the risk appears to be that even one forgotten old server (or service) running SSLv2 can put your up to date, highly secure servers at risk (if you've shared keys between them). To
221.
by Steuard 11y ago
To a first approximation, this is what one would expect of index funds, right? They're literally incapable of beating the broad market (they have some expenses, so they have to lag a little). One point that's not addressed by th
222.
by Steuard 11y ago
Proponents of index funds have been proposing exactly this sort of portfolio for about 40 years. (Well, okay, 40 years ago was the origin of the first index fund, Vanguard's S&P 500 tracker; a portfolio amalgamating three market se
223.
by Steuard 11y ago
I don't know the answer to this question, but it's clearly related to the fact that work done to maintain one's own household gets left out of pretty much every measure of costs or productivity. (I suppose it's probably
224.
by Steuard 11y ago
I took it as a humorous(?) play on the dual meanings of the word "snapshot". What originated as a term for a quick photograph[0] evolved to have a metaphorical meaning of "a record of something as it existed at a single momen
225.
by Steuard 11y ago
I like this analogy: Twitter intrinsically isn't Facebook, and it wouldn't make sense for it to try to be. Having that diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and soft drinks demonstrate that such situations can absolutely
226.
by Steuard 11y ago
[0. A long history of theoretical and experimental discoveries lead to a specific, well-motivated theory (General Relativity) describing gravitational phenomena.] 1. Theory predicts a very specific and recognizable class of gravitational
227.
by Steuard 11y ago
Even with just two LIGO locations, they were able to give a very rough estimate of the source location during the livestream this morning. (It was somewhere kinda in the direction of the Magellanic clouds. Probably.) Once advanced VIRGO com
228.
by Steuard 11y ago
Huh. That sounds entirely sensible and correct, and at the same time it's bugging my physical intuition a bit. I guess they're not trying to do this measurement by absorbing energy, but much more directly by just watching the ch
229.
by Steuard 11y ago
Even before this discovery, it's been pretty solidly established that any alternative theory to General Relativity would need to behave essentially identically to GR in the limits where we've been able to test it. So, for example,
230.
by Steuard 11y ago
Both! As others have said, intensity (power per unit area) decreases according to the same inverse square law that governs most effects due to localized sources in three dimensions of space. In this case, you're looking at a distance o
231.
by Steuard 11y ago
It's by far the most explicit verification we've ever had that black holes exist in pretty nearly the exact form predicted by Einstein's equations of general relativity, which is pretty cool. It provides the tightest limits o
232.
by Steuard 11y ago
LIGO is based on two detectors, one in Louisiana and one in Washington. With those, according to today's talk, we can get a rough idea of the direction of the source: it was in the southern sky, vaguely in the direction of the Magellan
233.
by Steuard 11y ago
Aside: I'm not signed up for the site (not interested in tying that login to other accounts), but I wanted to comment that luisb's explanation of Eq. (13) seems to miss the point a little. That equation doesn't need to be de
234.
by Steuard 11y ago
That's an excellent explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys with lightsabers early on. To my eye, it falls a bit flat as an explanation for why they didn't sell Rey toys without a lightsaber (since Rey didn't hav
235.
by Steuard 11y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't mean to imply that LQG researchers had no interest in proving their framework to be compatible with Yang-Mills theory: that's obviously an essential test of any realistic theory of gravity! M
236.
by Steuard 11y ago
Quantum field theory is a framework for building models. You can choose a largely arbitrary symmetry group structure and a largely arbitrary collection of matter fields in representations of that group (subject to a handful of mutual-cons
237.
by Steuard 11y ago
[Disclaimer up front: I'm a string theorist, so add grains of salt appropriately.] First impression: this article's title (and some of the phrasing within the article) feels a little misleading to me. In the conversations I'v
238.
by Steuard 11y ago
We haven't seen direct evidence of gravitational waves yet (unless the current LIGO rumors pan out!), but there's already compelling indirect evidence. The most specific example I know of comes from the Hulse–Taylor binary syste
239.
by Steuard 11y ago
I haven't seen the original research myself to judge, but it sounds like they're being careful about these effects. Looking at their discussion on the main page of http://www.findplanetnine.com/ , the claim seems
240.
by Steuard 11y ago
As I understand it, this is one of the main reasons that there are two detectors thousands of miles apart, in Washington and Louisiana. There will be a whole lot of false alarms at each one separately, but it's extremely unlikely tha

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