jeffwass

71 ms·

691.
by jeffwass 10y ago
I worked for 3 yrs (as a joint EE/CS engineer) after finishing my Bachelors degree in physics at age 21. I went back to school at age 24, for PhD (in experimental condensed matter physics). On one hand it was hard going from earning a
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by jeffwass 10y ago
If anyone's curious, that series comes from the equation Arctan(1)=Pi/4 and the Taylor expansion around zero of Arctan(x) = x - x^3/3 + x^5/5 + ... where x=1. What makes this expansion particularly painful is that usuall
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by jeffwass 10y ago
That is awesome!
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Addendum from the bottom of the article : Update: An earlier version of the story indicated the purchase price was more than $350 million, according to a source. Multiple investors told Recode the purchase price was significantly above that
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Check out this artist that uses a typewriter as a medium! https://www.artrabbit.com/events/the-typewriter-artist Some of the pictures are amazing. I got to see her a few weeks ago doing a live "typing" event
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Cool, thanks a lot for that lxt.
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by jeffwass 10y ago
You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. But you cannot pick your friend's nose... Until now!
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by jeffwass 10y ago
What's the general difference in contract terms between tech books and novels? Or are they fairly similar? Also curious about the differences in how you do the writing.
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Is there a back story to the name Yoshi?
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Haha, thanks for that blast from the past! The quote was by Zlatko Tesanovic, a brilliant and witty theorist who sadly passed away a few years ago. Here's a link to a page of some of his other quotes, as recorded by his students. IIRC
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Yeah, many of the 'popular' discussions of Quantum Mechanics that show up here on HN do often diverge well into philosophical directions and away from hard science. It's true that science and philosophy did come from a common
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Yeah, Zappa is not just a counter-cultural icon with a knack for comic and witty lyrics, but he's also a musical genius. I think there comment by Warren the fan (and future guitarist) in "Intro Rap" opening track on the live
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by jeffwass 10y ago
I dealt quite a bit with nanowires during my PhD research a decade ago. E-beam lithography can be used for features this small but it's more for one-offs as in academic research like this. It's not an industrial scalable solution
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Hi mckoss, awesome to hear one of the main Excel architects is here on HN! Any interesting stories to share? I think we'd all be interested. Mind if I ask a question directly related to one of my comments a few days ago? I was lament
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by jeffwass 10y ago
It's worth reading the article for the third paragraph alone : There are times when I'll head into a bog-standard New York slice joint, see those pre-cooked squares with their flat disks of pepperoni, watch some poor sap order the
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by jeffwass 10y ago
In case people are wondering about "yield" : in a nutshell yields and prices are inversely related, so treasuries are priced at all-time highs. [+] Yield is effectively the return one would get by buying a bond at market price and
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by jeffwass 10y ago
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the prese
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Awesome article! When they were describing his research in the beginning of the article, I thought "I wonder if he worked at Lincoln Lab, this is just the kind of thing they'd be into". And sure enough he did work there later
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by jeffwass 10y ago
It's really too bad that the ASCII codes 29, 30, and 31 (Group, Record, and Unit separators) never took off, as this is exactly what they were designed for. When implemented, they'd let you include commas, line feeds/carriage
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by jeffwass 10y ago
It's not much different to businesses that make products which are sold at big box stores like WalMart or Home Depot, which have the final say on which products they want to sell in their own stores. One difference here is that by foll
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by jeffwass 10y ago
He's talking about the proposal to add a third runway at Heathrow Airport vs adding new runway capacity to other London airports. It's been a big topic in London for the past couple years. Personally, I'm against adding to
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Hello, I feel compelled to clarify some misleading comments here. I'm speaking as a former experimental physicist who routinely used liquid helium for cryogenic research. Firstly - BOTH isotopes of helium are important. Both are relati
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Let's assume the bikesheds are spherical, with radius r . They'll have surface area 4pi*r^2 and, oh never mind...
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by jeffwass 10y ago
>Does it help the pedagogy and understanding? Does it help form equations that match the form of other equations in some mathematically-meaningful way? Absolutely! In 3D systems. Particularly using spherical coordinates. It's ironi
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by jeffwass 10y ago
You wrote "This is to uniform a hole slew of previously unrelated equations that can now be represented similarly." You seem to be saying that introducing a new constant tau=2pi and redefining a slew of previously unrelated equati
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Argh, you may be right. I was actually thinking of a separate example from physics (years ago) calculating the classical flow of particles through an aperture. Where you assume particles have maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of speeds and con
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Ha, yeah I know. On rereading my comment, it does come across as somewhat defensive but I definitely wasn't meaning it to be that way. Actually I was smiling as I wrote it. See my other comments on this thread about sigma, for instance
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by jeffwass 10y ago
Your Cauchy argument is actually misleading and runs right into my joking example elsewhere in this thread about needing to define a new constant Sigma=4pi to work better with steradians. Pi doesn't always represent only a pure circl
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by jeffwass 10y ago
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
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by jeffwass 10y ago
It gets worse! When using solid angles over a sphere, you're still going to need to use 2Tau steradians to cover a sphere. This factor of 2 will continue to cause confusion for the Tau fans. Therefore we must also define a new constant

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