alecst

13 ms·

121.
by alecst 3y ago
At what age do you think it’s appropriate to read about sex, and at what age do you think it’s appropriate to read about gay sex? If those are different. For my part I read It, by Stephen King, when I was pretty young. Maybe 13-14 ish. Ther
122.
by alecst 4y ago
4 cents an image is ridiculous?
123.
by alecst 4y ago
How can I learn more about this?
124.
by alecst 4y ago
I think I see. Is it like: "Man, how am I able to fuck this up so bad, and so consistently. Life should be a lot easier. I'm a failure." That kind of thing?
125.
by alecst 4y ago
Ok follow-up then. Is it that you're afraid of failing etc., or afraid of not living up to your expectations of yourself? Just trying to get a feel for what you mean.
126.
by alecst 4y ago
Since it's not in your post, can I ask what you think is causing your fear and anxiety, and what it feels like?
127.
by alecst 4y ago
I have a friend working on lidar for a military contractor. He uses these exact theorems to design beam pulses for measuring distances of asteroids and stuff. The idea is to construct beams so that you can tell by the autocorrelation functi
128.
by alecst 4y ago
“At risk of refeeding problems” is not the same as refeeding syndrome. This is something that applies to holocaust survivors and hunger strikers.
129.
by alecst 4y ago
I’m willing to burn my karma on this to push back on some misinformation. Fasting for 10 days is safe. You won’t get refeeding syndrome. Pretty much any person can do it barring obvious exceptions. I’ve done it a bunch of times and I’ve rea
130.
by alecst 4y ago
My impression was that the weight gain phase was partly to assure that the healthy participants could comfortably lose the weight. They were also taking a small amount of vitamin D. Not sure how much that matters, but it's worth mentio
131.
by alecst 4y ago
Link to open manuscript: https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271131/1-s2.0-S875632822...
132.
by alecst 4y ago
Absolutely unexpected. A clarification though, which maybe you were aware of: the fasting period studied is no eating for 10 days straight, not intermittent fasting Ramadan-style. Given how counterintuitive this result is, I'm not sure
133.
by alecst 4y ago
It has to do with representations and quantum mechanics. The energy eigenvalues of the hydrogen atom are tied to L values of the spherical harmonics.
134.
by alecst 4y ago
If a quantum system is spherically symmetric, like the hydrogen atom is, then its energy states are gonna correspond to certain groups of spherical harmonics. That's why they're used when you study the hydrogen atom. This comes ou
135.
by alecst 4y ago
I think I saw one of these during a meteor shower, ten years ago, in Georgia. It was so fast, and so unexpected, that I question my own recollection of it. When I tell people I saw a fireball, they shrug. They don't know how it's
136.
by alecst 4y ago
What do LLMs produce that counts as non-language?
137.
by alecst 4y ago
> They do not; there are studies which Chomsky cites involving trying to learning "impossible" non-structural languages that give strong evidence that this is not the case. I was looking for these studies. I found some similar
138.
by alecst 4y ago
I asked an Italian native speaker about this and she said she calls him “da Vinci.” She has a PhD in linguistics, and in general she’s pretty precise with her language. She doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. Just as a datapoint.
139.
by alecst 4y ago
You can have a sharp corner and you still won’t get a Norton’s dome in every case. There’s definitely something there, but it’s not obvious to me what it is. It does sometimes happen in physics that we throw away valid solutions to differen
140.
by alecst 4y ago
Another fact I came across while reading about Greasing the Groove was that the strongest predictor of muscle growth was total weight lifted over time. So, you lift 5lbs 100 times over a week, or 25lbs 4 times a week, and you get similar gr
141.
by alecst 4y ago
Energy is guaranteed to be conserved if the Hamiltonian has time symmetry. The Hamiltonian of the universe may not have that property, and probably doesn’t. You can Wikipedia Noether’s theorem for more info.
142.
by alecst 4y ago
I think that’s the gist actually. Unitarity does seem to raise problems in the cosmos (information loss) but naively violating it by adding a photon gets you this ridiculous paradox of black holes turning into photons. So if you’re going to
143.
by alecst 4y ago
If all probabilities have to sum to 100% at all times, it limits how you can go from one state to another. I think an additional fact you’re unaware of here is that states transition into each other smoothly. So if you’re at 80% state A and
144.
by alecst 4y ago
I took away from that example that, even though unitarity clashes with cosmology to an extent, you can’t just naively break it or you get “even worse” paradoxes like this one. Plus, conservation of energy doesn’t apply to the universe as a
145.
by alecst 4y ago
I’m a descriptivist as much as the next guy, but fewer to me sounds better with countables. Like I still use things like “less cars” to sound casual but it does sound wrong to my ear.
146.
by alecst 4y ago
I worked in this field for a minute (XENON1T) and I heard a few talks about MOND. We were all pretty open minded but it failed to stick because it didn’t convince us, for a number of reasons. Curious about your background here.
147.
by alecst 4y ago
At a Buddhist monastery we chanted before lunch (our one meal): “Wisely reflecting, I use alms food. Not for fun. Not for pleasure. Not for beautification. Not for fattening. Only for the maintenance of this body. For keeping it healthy. Fo
148.
by alecst 4y ago
Ok so you want the flaw in your reasoning. Imagine a hula hoop. It’s spinning, but otherwise not moving. Mentally divide it up into lots of little chunks. Each chunk has a little bit of linear momentum. 1. Is each chunk’s linear momentum co
149.
by alecst 4y ago
Love that tidbit about formiga. Same in Italian: formica (ant) and formicolare (“to ant” or “to tingle”).
150.
by alecst 4y ago
Asking a lot of strangers a loaded question like this you're bound to get some iffy answers. Let's consult with some famous faces in the community. I've provided some short excerpts so that you can skim each link and get a fl

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