adonovan

14 ms·

181.
by adonovan 3y ago
True, but even Feynman talks about "new photons" when describing scattering.
182.
by adonovan 3y ago
Historically a Masters degree was a license to teach, hence its name.
183.
by adonovan 3y ago
Along with every other goddam page on the web. Welcome to 2023.
184.
by adonovan 3y ago
Ya, that was the most memorable part of Dark Sun. IIRC the State department confronted the Soviet ambassador about the routine exfiltration of boxes and boxes of US R&D documents, and the response was something like "We're los
185.
by adonovan 3y ago
Priceless. Thanks for sharing.
186.
by adonovan 3y ago
My daughters recently showed me how easy it is to grow scallions: too easy. Just cut off the bottom inch (the white bit with little roots hairs) and stick in a jar of water by a window. A week later: a complete scallion!
187.
by adonovan 3y ago
Same! It’s amazing how many physical phenomena it accurately models: convection, boiling, pressure, temperature, capacitance, turbulence, tension, elasticity, gravity, and so on. Our phones really are supercomputers.
188.
by adonovan 3y ago
Helium-10?! I’m more amazed the half-life is nonzero.
189.
by adonovan 3y ago
It sure is a medium! One Denver (IIRC) gravitational experiment could measure the field distortion caused by 100,000 people and cars at a local sports arena. [citation needed]
190.
by adonovan 3y ago
In my UK high school in the 1980s, during a lecture from a visiting nuclear engineer to our science club (BAYS), we got to handle (and directly touch) various sources including a piece of Plutonium about the size of a 2p coin, edge-framed b
191.
by adonovan 4y ago
It all stems from the incident of that lizard and that mother-in-law, whom I shall not name.
192.
by adonovan 4y ago
Agree. By the time (spoiler) he threatens to set the house on fire at a specific time, you can’t help but realize the whole thing’s a metaphor for the civil war.
193.
by adonovan 4y ago
The alcohol industry would collapse almost overnight were it not for the top 5% of heavy drinkers. So much for “drink responsibly”…
194.
by adonovan 4y ago
If a typical large split system has about 10Kg of R410A (GWP = 2000x CO2) that's about 20 metric tonnes of CO2. Compare to 5 tonnes for an average passenger car per year. So a leak is like four years of driving a car. Is it a disaster
195.
by adonovan 4y ago
You can think of a Galois field as a specially chosen permutation of a set of numbers such as 0-255 and a redefinition or remapping of the arithmetic operators + - * / such that each one is reversible: if a op b = c, then given c and b
196.
by adonovan 4y ago
I added the original fast implementation in this CL https://go.dev/cl/2828 because I found it useful, clear, and efficient in tuple "less" comparisons like this: if cmp := strings.Compare(x.first, y.firs
197.
by adonovan 4y ago
My first job too! So true. Everyone knows how easy it is to make serious quoting mistakes in a Bourne shell script, but Tcl takes the risk to a whole new danger level. But any harm done by Tcl is more than redeemed by its creator being the
198.
by adonovan 4y ago
I've been telling people how great this idea is for years, because it's simple for organizations to plan around as it gradually ratchets up, easy to administer, and sort of progressive in the sense that the poor benefit more (rela
199.
by adonovan 4y ago
govulncheck builds a static approximation of the call graph using Variable Type Analysis (VTA), which dynamically tabulates the set of interface method calls and the set of concrete types that each interface value may hold, to discover the
200.
by adonovan 4y ago
It always blows my mind that when you look at the night sky, aside from 7 planets and only 2 galaxies, every point of light you see is a star; but when these space telescopes point at a patch of nothingness, we see a starry night where ever
201.
by adonovan 4y ago
Quite. It's easy to find fault, but if you could magically rank everyone who's ever lived by the indirect CO2 reductions of their actions, I'm pretty sure Al Gore would be near the top of that list.
202.
by adonovan 4y ago
Same with iPhone. My mind was blown when after years of tapping left-arrow someone showed me what happens when you hold down the space key. Or that dragging the iphone chat message app's background to the left reveals the timestamps of
203.
by adonovan 4y ago
> I detest the dehumanization of airlines; it is all very bureaucratic now, compared to when I was a child. Yup, but it's also a heck of a lot cheaper, largely due to mechanization, automation, homogenization, and bureaucratization.
204.
by adonovan 5y ago
The CLU book (Liskov & Guttag, 1986) talks about "parameterized types". Liskov's 1996 essay in History of Programming Languages II describes the feature under the heading "parametric polymorphism". The Modula-3
205.
by adonovan 5y ago
I've wondered about that question. Germany is not at war with Russia, Gazprom is a publicly traded company, and there are international courts that arbitrate such matters and could yet find the German government at fault. My non-lawyer
206.
by adonovan 5y ago
Identical algorithms (e.g. quicksort) run ~40x faster in Go than Ruby in a single thread due to more efficient CPU usage, even when you avoid the kinds of steps that would allocate objects in Ruby. Multiply by 64 cores and it’s easy to obse
207.
by adonovan 5y ago
> Although the fuel cells only emit water as a byproduct mixture of liquid and vapor, the ATI adds that a water storage system was added. This was done to avoid the potential for creating precipitation during initial climb or leaving liq
208.
by adonovan 5y ago
Should we assume that the boat is not large enough to fit them all, and that the dog will eat the suitcase if the human is not present? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
209.
by adonovan 5y ago
Regardless of original intent, at this point, it really is.
210.
by adonovan 5y ago
This seems to be a pet theory of one researcher (Vopson). Have any other physicists written anything about it, supportive or critical?

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