evanb

51 ms·

1. 601.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   Not the one in Mount Pleasant!
2. 602.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   It also makes everybody take twice as long at the sink, which is a problem in a high-traffic bathroom.
3. 603.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   I've been thinking about this some recently. Is some scheme like the following remotely plausible? - Have a piece of hardware in-frame that can show hashes that is hooked to the operating cameras. - In each frame show the hash of the
4. 604.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   That he has greater name recognition amongst lay people doesn't make him a monumental physicist.
5. 605.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   I don't think Higgs is really widely considered monumental in the same was as those other people. He had one good idea (at essentially the same time as Brout, Englert, Kibble, ...) which got his name attached. But I am a professional
6. 606.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   Relatedly, people seem to love taking names from physics, too. Atom, electron, and hydrogen are the most frustrating ones. But there are a lot of libraries. It makes finding the actual physics information I'm interested in annoying.
7. 607.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   If they're worried about leaks, it seems much more likely that they're interested in who is talking to who, which they can figure out if the email with the tracking pixel gets forwarded.
8. 608.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   As part of this SI redefinition, the Boltzmann constant is also getting an exact definition 1.380 649 e-23 J/K (thereby defining the Kelvin). If we identify the entropy formula S = kB ln W as really being about bits, we see th
9. 609.▲
   by evanb 7y ago

   I didn't see, for example, the circling-a-group for taking derivatives.
10. 610.▲
    by evanb 7y ago

    You're probably better off with some kind of Penrose graphical notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation
11. 611.▲
    by evanb 7y ago

    No better source than the master: http://www.feynman.com/science/qed-lectures-in-new-zealand/
12. 612.▲
    by evanb 7y ago

    When I graduated I bought my PhD advisor two boxes. It's great stuff. But beyond how dense and smooth it is, particularly good is the colored chalk. Most colored chalk doesn't erase well. Hagoromo erases completely, easily.
13. 613.▲
    by evanb 7y ago

    Well, it's the base in which we label all other bases. In base twelve, 'base 12'(decimal) is written 'base 10'! :D
14. 614.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    First words of the abstract: > In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<137, ... z is the letter often used for redshift, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift , a stand-in for cosmological time that's easy to ext
15. 615.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    The Integral Trees (Larry Niven, 1984) is about a society living in a ring of gas around a neutron star. Not quite the same, but a similar interesting astrophysical idea.
16. 616.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    This reminds me of "The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe" https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 where it is pointed out that for some time during cosmological evolution, the universe would have been quite comf
17. 617.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    LANL has a lot of high-level description. You can use neutron-reflective material, or magnetic fields. https://lansce.lanl.gov/facilities/ultracold-neutrons/experi...
18. 618.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    There are 3 generations of 4 fermions, each has a mass. One sets the scale of the theory, meaning we should express all the dimensionful quantities in terms of that mass. So, that gives 11 parameters. Then there are the mixing angles in t
19. 619.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Naturalness is the criteria by which people criticize fine-tuned theories. I agree that the comment would be better with a fuller explanation.
20. 620.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Everything but gravity seems exquisitely described, if you look close enough, by 22 parameters.
21. 621.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Maybe they're big because they're a lot closer than we realize.
22. 622.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    I have a PhD in nuclear astrophysics, did a three years postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Lab doing lattice QCD, and am 2/3rds of the way through a three year postdoc at Forschungszentrum Jülich, between Aachen and Cologne, German
23. 623.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Jena is a city in the eastern part of Germany. It is historically famous for its university and optics innovation, and as an epicenter for bauhaus architecture.
24. 624.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Nima's slides are also always a treat. The hand-drawn pictures are always spare, elegant, and crystal-clear.
25. 625.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    I've listened to the version available at http://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A_Canticle_for_Liebowitz.... and it's great.
26. 626.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    I'm left handed but when I have had a physical mouse (or... trackball) it's always on the right. My left hand, at this point, is essentially incompetent at mousing. That's partly because in the computer lab at school the mi
27. 627.▲
    A Different Kind of Theory of Everything(newyorker.com)

    80 points by evanb 8y ago|38 comments
28. 628.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Physics Today isn't for laymen. It's a trade journal, for physicists.
29. 629.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    This could be useful for generating cyclic color maps [0], of which there is a dearth in matplotlib. Cyclic color maps are great for coloring angles where one wants 2π periodicity. [0] https://matplotlib.org/gallery/c
30. 630.▲
    by evanb 8y ago

    Citation needed! Consider, eg. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/655/the-not-so-great-unknow...