cygx

77 ms·

751.
by cygx 8y ago
Personally, I don't like the description of entropy as disorder. Mathematically, it's a measure of spread of a probability distribution (the more spiked a distribution, the lower the entropy, which is an 'ordered' state
752.
by cygx 8y ago
Well, it's wrong insofar that the federal government wasn't actively looking for projects to fund and then miraculously discovered W7-X in a drawer. Rather, W7-X people were looking for funding and shopping for locations, but fail
753.
by cygx 8y ago
Heap-allocated dynamically-sized NxM matrix in C99: double (*mat)[M] = calloc(N * M, sizeof (double));
754.
by cygx 8y ago
If confinement is easier in a large machine, why are not very large machines being built? Money and politics. You might want to take a look at the original logo of the ITER project: https://www.iter.org/img/resize-900
755.
by cygx 8y ago
It's all about the magnetic surfaces. Some pictures: https://images.slideplayer.com/33/10482660/slides/slide_9.jp... https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493/figures/1
756.
by cygx 8y ago
It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out. Possible, but unlikely (imo). It's just that private business doesn't really do large-scale multi-decade pure research efforts
757.
by cygx 8y ago
Hence my qualifier 'conventional approaches'. I wish those working on alternative approaches the best of luck, and some of the experiments look like a lot of fun (they get to blow things up - I've seen videos where plastering
758.
by cygx 8y ago
The promise of stellarators is continuous operation, whereas tokamaks traditionally rely on inductive pulses for the two-fold purpose of confinement and heating.
759.
by cygx 8y ago
Just for the record, you don't re-create stellar-core conditions with earth-bound fusion devices: We don't have the means, and the yield would suck. Now, it is true that there's still fundamental research to be done until ene
760.
by cygx 8y ago
Why aren't all birds as smart as crows? Because the Blind Idiot God of Evolution doesn't care that you think increased intelligence is an obvious 'win'.
761.
by cygx 8y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169128/ Abstract Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. Some have argued that spatial ability differe
762.
by cygx 8y ago
And 5 ½ years later, I'm still waiting for a paper or at least a video recording of the talk[1]. Maybe he did manage to "unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical t
763.
by cygx 8y ago
but none of the publications articulate his position or refute it Because as long as he doesn't publish, all we can do is speculate what his position actually is...
764.
by cygx 8y ago
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
765.
by cygx 8y ago
Rurban is working on modernizing Perl 5, eg http://perl11.org/cperl/perlclass.html It is doubtful this will ever be backported into the official distribution, because $drama...
766.
by cygx 8y ago
> "11 dimensions", "string theory", or "time dilation" One of these things is not like the others...
767.
by cygx 8y ago
The Feynman Lectures are not pop science, but a textbook series based on his undergraduate courses.
768.
by cygx 8y ago
Is there a silver bullet, though? The complexity of having to mess around with epsilon tensors is still there no matter which abstraction you use to sweep it under the rug...
769.
by cygx 8y ago
The 'geometric product' mentioned in the article is just Clifford's product. The 'geometric algebra' is the same thing as the Clifford algebra induced by the scalar product.
770.
by cygx 8y ago
The Hodge star isn't so bad: It's just the generalization of the idea that you can describe a plane by its normal vector.
771.
by cygx 8y ago
> the wedge product really doesn’t cut it What about the wedge product together with the Hodge star, ie the language that tends to be used in Riemannian geometry?
772.
by cygx 8y ago
Dynamic language designers have a tendency trying to reinvent the wheel, and eventually regretting that choice. Explicitly declared, lexically scoped variables are the sane choice. The Perl community realized this, and introduced 'my&#
773.
by cygx 8y ago
As a rule of thumb, that's probably still accurate. But there are specific areas where Rakudo on MoarVM already outperforms the Perl5 interpreter (eg an object creation benchmark was mentioned elsewhere). I suspect the scale will event
774.
by cygx 8y ago
It's true that AOT compilers can get most of the benefits of JIT compilers by leveraging profile guided and link-time optimization. In principle, we could get rid of shared libraries, ship LLVM bitcode instead and statically compile ev
775.
by cygx 8y ago
Which argument? The mug-throwing incident that initiated Perl6 development happened 2000-07-18, and it took a couple of years after that for the language to take shape...
776.
by cygx 8y ago
No, it's very likely about _Generic. <tgmath.h> was added to C99 in an attempt to steal Fortran mindshare, ie making numerics and scientific computing less cumbersome (the same is true for other features, eg complex numbers or re
777.
by cygx 8y ago
The idea of non-visible matter as a fix for stellar motion dates back to the 19th century, when our knowledge about the cosmos was far more limited (remember, we only learned about other galaxies in the 1920s - it post-dates general relativ
778.
by cygx 8y ago
This should, in and of itself, begin to cast down on the hypothesis even lacking a better alternative. Only if your search was exhaustive: Scooping up a spoonful of ocean is not enough to conclude fish do not exist...
779.
by cygx 8y ago
A medium can have independent dynamics (consider waves in a bathtub: you can pull the plug, or move the whole thing around; you can't do that with a fundamental field). It is true that from a slightly different perspective, modern phys
780.
by cygx 8y ago
Because such a minimal change to the model ("there's just some more stuff we can't see") fixes a number of problems in one fell swoop (off the top of my head, galactic rotation curves, observations of gravitational lensi

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