bkcooper

11 ms·

61.
by bkcooper 12y ago
I think the first half of the article showing how this works with a given sample distribution is pretty good. I don't think it's really doing much to build intuition at the end, though. It's also worth pointing out that there
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think. This is possible. But I think it's less about this and more about status marking. Joining th
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I'll also note [self promo!] that I wrote on book on High Performance Python I've really enjoyed this book so far, so thanks!
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Your activities sound useful and worthwhile. A comment on this: And, as it has been seen on our entry level numerical physics course, learning programming, numerics and physics the same time is really quite hard. Yeah. My feeling is that
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I am intrigued by this approach (I have Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics on my lengthy to-read pile) but I do wonder whether expecting ~sophomores to be trying to pick up Haskell and the physics at the same time is a bi
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by bkcooper 12y ago
If you liked Axler, you might check out Abbott's Understanding Analysis, also in the Springer UTM series. I think it covers somewhat less than Rudin (e.g. looking at baby Rudin's contents, I'm pretty sure Abbott doesn'
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by bkcooper 12y ago
This is a good book, although I agree with others that truly learning from it would be difficult. If you like this, another book you might really enjoy is the Princeton Companion to Mathematics .
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Good stuff. There's a bot with several wins in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, another roguelike. The combinations it has won are pretty rote, but it's still very impressive, particularly since I don't think it's even capable
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Strongly agree on Spook Country. It is my second favorite Gibson by quite a bit and I feel it's generally underappreciated.
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Note that in a real paper or textbook, such a detailed description explaining each term would most definitely be absent, even without the color coding. I disagree. In a textbook, it is very unlikely (and would be a sign of a badly written
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Given the description, it sounds like this problem was given to a club of kids who do recreational/contest problems, which makes a pretty big difference. I think they probably get the spirit in which it is offered and understand the im
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I get interested in the response to these sorts of problems. Both in the comments here and over at Tao's post, there are a lot of examples of brute force solutions. This seems like a common response to recreational mathematical problem
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by bkcooper 12y ago
He rented a time machine so that he could buy the 36 chickens sold in the afternoon and then sell them in the morning at a $2.50 premium per chicken.
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by bkcooper 12y ago
As far as I can tell from reading various articles (including the Aviation Week article linked elsewhere in the comments), they haven't. The expectation is that they will have a prototype in five years. For that reason, I wouldn't
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Really, the only people I see likely getting caught out on this are tourists leaving with unused balances. The argument that "they get the money sooner" seems like nonsense to me. They get the money when you put it on the card, ei
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by bkcooper 12y ago
The examples given highlight the three sucky things about academic jobs: (i) less money than top-tier alternatives, (ii) insane competition at the start of your career, and (iii) difficulty maintaining work-life balance if you want to be s
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by bkcooper 12y ago
That's an excellent response. In one of the comments on it, there is a link to a paper[1] by Thurston that is well worth your time. I found it an inspiring read. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I'm pretty intrigued by this. Martinis is very good, and I already thought it was interesting when I saw earlier today that Google had picked him up. That he will be trying to improve D-Wave style designs (by dropping in transmons, fro
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by bkcooper 12y ago
if this beam does carry information about the image then we would have FTL communication possible. See Michael Nielsen's answer elsewhere in the comments for why this is not the case. Another question is why L3-L3' red beam - t
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by bkcooper 12y ago
What are some examples of the questions that got this answer?
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I've only skimmed the arXiv link briefly, but the method does not rely on interference between photons of two different frequencies. In optical experiments, entangled photons are frequently generated through a nonlinear process in a cr
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by bkcooper 12y ago
That's a tough question. One of the most appealing things about the Feynman lectures is the breadth and how self-contained it is. I don't think there are really good analogues for that. The closest thing I can think of is one of t
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by bkcooper 12y ago
The Feynman lectures certainly will teach you a lot, but I think it would be a fairly trying textbook for learning a lot of the material for the first time. Among other things, a very serious deficiency for self-education is a complete lack
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by bkcooper 12y ago
I think the overall advice here is pretty solid. I might add a couple comments: --- The time budget is extremely sensitive to how much you already know about the subject. If you're generally up on the literature in an area, it is often
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by bkcooper 12y ago
It might be different in the browser, but in Zotero Standalone (which is what I use), right clicking the name of the collection in the left sidebar will give you an option to Export Collection. BibTeX will be one of the options. It works pr
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Looking at the other comments, it seems like most people really like the cheat. I admit it's very cute, and you're absolutely right that this sort of thinking can be helpful in artificial situations like exams and games --- I&#x27
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Your second example looks fine to me. EDIT: My best guess as to what's going on is that they want to display the for-else idiom which could be useful in other contexts (e.g. if you don't want to return anything from inside the loo
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Also, as a physicist I'm disappointed that the paper asserts that physicists disdained statistics in 1903. For the most part, statistical mechanics was developed in the late 1800s! Sure, but Boltzmann's ideas were famously contr
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by bkcooper 12y ago
The threshold for the 1% is "centi-millionaire," eh? I'm apparently substantially more baller than I realized.
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by bkcooper 12y ago
Painkiller does feel more like Doom than most other more modern FPSs, but I never felt like the bunny hopping really measured up evasion wise. The game that I felt captured this dynamic really well, at least in multiplayer deathmatches, was

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