bkcooper

9 ms·

31.
by bkcooper 11y ago
Another good text for this approach (and it's also relatively cheap) is Mermin's It's About Time.
32.
by bkcooper 11y ago
Funding people over projects is the right approach to doing research I would argue this is already essentially the dominant model. There are already more plausible projects than there is money to fund all of them, and the credibility of t
33.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I was pretty astonished at how low the reported median rents were in the table near the end. Then I saw the footnote: "Median rent is for 2000, in 2012 dollars."
34.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I related to this a lot. Having somebody watching over my shoulder (especially in a judgmental capacity) means that when I inevitably make some stupid minor mistake, instead of just laughing it off as I normally would, I get anxious. This t
35.
by bkcooper 11y ago
The thresholds needed to achieve Quantum Error Correction are extremely close to being achieved nowadays Yes, they are quite close to surface code thresholds. However, being close to the thresholds means that you need to be on the pessimi
36.
by bkcooper 11y ago
Are there any experts here who can give a reason why error correction in quantum computing will scale polynomially or better? I'm not sure what kind of scaling you mean in this context, but let me try to answer this. I think the most
37.
by bkcooper 11y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, bits are probably the wrong way to think about it. Does it really double the size of your Hilbert space? Yes. Perhaps this will help clarify why it is different. In the classical case, adding one more spin is doublin
38.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I realize this is likely a translation error, but the amount of space required to keep the state of 300 up/down spins is 300 bits, or 38 bytes. What you're thinking of is a a single basis state. The state of a 300 spin system ca
39.
by bkcooper 11y ago
In the comments, Lee Smolin says something I agree with: A final word: where ever you go if you leave science you are likely to face the same fight, because it is in the nature of modern life and modern organizations. I've thought be
40.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I'm with you on the lack of review articles, and I think they are probably the aspect of conventional publishing that this could most likely replace. I think you'd need a very radical overhaul of how science works to replace the s
41.
by bkcooper 11y ago
"The scramble for position" is probably pretty universal. It's certainly common in academic science, especially since instead of scrambling "to be a founder instead of an engineer," a better mapping would be "t
42.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I find that editing text in a WYSIWYG word processor distracts me from the content and makes me tinker with the formatting. I still end up doing this in LaTeX, only now there's a time lag.
43.
by bkcooper 11y ago
One disadvantage of conda/anaconda is that you can't, or are discouraged from using virtualenv with conda/anaconda. True, but conda has its own virtual environments that work quite nicely. You can make a new one with conda
44.
by bkcooper 11y ago
I had the opposite trajectory. I loved the early worldbuilding but didn't really care for the magical powers invoked at the end.
45.
by bkcooper 11y ago
The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress Man, no kidding. It feels like a very inelegant info dump. While I realize those tend to show up in Stephenson books at some point or another, it's a rough way to start.
46.
by bkcooper 12y ago
Something I think would be useful is a beginner's guide to what you should want your text editor to be capable of. I feel like if you already know what you want to achieve, the main barrier to getting there in Emacs is just getting fam
47.
by bkcooper 12y ago
I liked your post and agree that this is a really fundamental problem. However, I disagree with this: Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training."
48.
by bkcooper 12y ago
. . . but while obtaining a PhD in a top program, I highly doubt tuition is reimbursed I'm with the GP here, your experience sounds very weird to me. Tuition remission is a pretty standard benefit, often handled by the department at
49.
by bkcooper 12y ago
People that want to pursue careers in research should be allowed to get the necessary training. Sure, but the argument is that we're training many more people for those sorts of careers than can realistically have them. Having the fi
50.
by bkcooper 12y ago
Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of&qu
51.
by bkcooper 12y ago
Cutting back on PhDs generated would be a good idea, but is probably an even harder sell (so much cheap labor!) If postdocs are so prized, then one obvious solution is to reward them. Both the 2014 National Academies report and earlier rep
52.
by bkcooper 12y ago
I wonder if that's a configuration thing. Mine gives me a "continuation line over-indented for visual indent" here.
53.
by bkcooper 12y ago
I'm sure there are some cases where this is useful, but I'm not really sold. The pitch at the beginning is "satisfying PEP 8 doesn't mean it looks good!" But then it seems most of the changes cleaned up in the code
54.
by bkcooper 12y ago
On either side of the "validate" button at the bottom are controls to rotate the puzzle to this end.
55.
by bkcooper 12y ago
D-K is real. The graphs he points out literally supports it. What the author says is: In any case, the effect certainly isn’t that the more people know, the less they think they know. And he's right; the data he shows does not demo
56.
by bkcooper 12y ago
That's an overstatement, but the gulf between the mathematician's mind-set and the mind-set of physicists and engineers is still far wider than most mathematicians appreciate, and it really would be valuable to have a different w
57.
by bkcooper 12y ago
The feeling I get from that page is: You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well this is a textbook that gets biz-zay . Consistently and thoroughly.
58.
by bkcooper 12y ago
And no multiprocessing is not a solution, as it does not allows to share memory between processes. You actually can. multiprocessing defines a few classes (e.g. Array) that store their data in a mmap kept in the module. Data there will be
59.
by bkcooper 12y ago
At least the whole endeavor has fueled public discussion about Mars exploration, which is valuable in and of itself. There's also a cost associated with having the most visible discussion of human travel to Mars be a scam.
60.
by bkcooper 12y ago
What's the current status of Bohm's hidden variable theory? Does it stand up in light of the Bell test? Yes. Bell's theorem doesn't forbid hidden variable theories (in fact, he has a publication preceding his famous re

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