lambdatronics

17 ms·

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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Wow, the "Authoritarianism" section is the essay I wish I had written, but better than I would have written it! Thank you!
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
I'd like to think I've gotten better about focusing on a relevant goal. I'm working in industry now, although still doing physics R&D.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
This seems like a pretty low-level detail that doesn't warrant being heralded as a "breakthrough." They apparently have a new, more efficient power electronics to supply electric current to the superconducting coils. The elec
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Great point. I clashed a bit with my advisor early on - they were trying to shepherd me away from a rabbithole, but I was a bit pigheaded and determined to fix something that I felt was sloppy. I ended up with a publication on it, but it pr
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
>In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening. What do you do in that situati
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Wow, that's very detailed. I can see it being beneficial, especially in the case of an unreasonable advisor who might demand late-breaking additions to the research. For me, I started from the slides I had presented in my immediate gro
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Yeah, I have seen instances where it's the student's lack of drive/progress, the PI being unreasonable, the student's project was too ambitious, plain bad luck (lab equipment caught fire & destroyed), or time taken o
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
>People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. Yes, so much of this. I think it's a direct consequence of your next poin
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Yeah, this is great advice for undergraduates considering graduate applications. I lucked out with my supervisor in terms of his advising style (rather hands-off, which suited me), but I could have easily gotten stuck with a bad match. I pi
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
In my field (experimental plasma physics) the general convention is that the PI's name goes last on the paper, while the first author is the one who did the bulk of the work and wrote the manuscript, with the other coauthors usually pl
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
>It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things be
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
> need to sex up the language to convince some editor. I hated this pressure. I wrote up the core of my thesis as a manuscript for a second-tier journal, but my advisor though I had a shot at a first-tier publication. I disagreed, but I
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Spot on! I had the same misconception, but it worked out OK b/c I was motivated at least in part by curiosity. When you're curious, you ask enough questions to get to the edge of knowledge and then pose a novel question. If you en
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
The sociology of science is so interesting. (Not the field, but the subject.) Here are some of my favorites quotes/thoughts: This one is a direct contrast to your advice (which speaks volumes about what's wrong with academia): &qu
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
>An odd thing about physics is that we don't have a lot of our own tools or techniques. We're opportunists and we borrow ideas from everywhere. Spot on! Do you mind sharing what kind of role/company you are with, and how y
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Elections swing on fairly small margins. Also, the older folks are more likely to vote than young ones, so the fact that the virus is more deadly to the elderly increases the effect.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Same. I'm one of a handful of people that have used Julia in my circles. It's an enthusiastic handful, but the ranks don't seem to be swelling that fast.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Yeah, it's phrased weird. In the inductive step, what you want to do is prove that "if all sets of horses with size n have the same color, then all sets of horses with size n+1 have the same color." In order to prove that, y
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
It's been done, although I doubt it's cost-effective. :D https://youtu.be/At3xcj-pTjg?t=87
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Why not skip the calcination bit? NaOH solution will directly absorb CO2. The chlorine byproduct issue is not trivial, though.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Synthetic fuels not only displace the emissions, they simultaneously develop the technology that is needed to actually go negative. Battery tech reduces emissions too, but it can't take us negative. If synthetic fuel can be cheaper tha
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Btw, check this out: https://usfusionenergy.org/opportunities
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Right, boil-off is a problem for general aviation, so compressed H2 is the hydrogen option there, which is less attractive. Although, Universal Hydrogen[0] has a wild idea: "... the development of a state-of-the-art uncooled liquid hyd
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Right, for large aircraft LH2 might be the way to go. General aviation is more likely to be looking at pressurized H2 due to boil-off.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
I think it's generally understood that densities are per unit volume, and if you want to refer to gravimetric density, you would talk about the 'specific energy.' [0] That said, you make a good point. The energy density advan
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
>Nukes can operate as peaker plants. Not in an economical fashion, though. Because the fixed costs dominate the variable costs, the less often the plant operates, the more it needs to charge for electricity when it is running. Gas peaker
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
Phys.org reporting is not great. Most methods for using ammonia in fuel cells rely on high-temperature catalysts to convert ammonia back to hydrogen, possibly in a separate unit from the fuel cell or else inside the fuel cell itself, if the
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
From the abstract[0]: they have a promising catalyst that could be used for a "direct ammonia fuel cell" operating at room temperature. It involves ruthenium, which is an expensive rare earth element. For context, it's possib
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
If you look frame-by-frame at 0:47 to 0:48 in the video, you can see the projectile is tumbling end-over-end.
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by lambdatronics 5y ago
How about liquid oxygen and aluminum tanks made from high-temperature electrolysis of regolith? Now you have rocket propellant and parts. 90% of the propellant mass that Starship uses is oxygen. If you could refuel Starship in space this w

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