michaelrpeskin

11 ms·

91.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Digging deep into my memory here, but I always remember that when Zout==Zin that's what you want for maximum power transfer. My guess is that the 1/8 trick is for the typical characteristics of small-speaker headset. Big speakers
92.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I often work with a guy who's a pure computer scientist. He communicates in LaTeX and pseudocode only. I don't think he could find a compiler if he tried. What I've learned to do is keep his notation whenever I implement s
93.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Computational Physics Ph.D. here...I don't know about that. I have written lots of code (not just using off-the-shelf packages) to solve Hamiltonian mechanics and Quantum reactive scattering. OMG, I spent about 30 minutes going throu
94.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low
95.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yes. 40 years of debugging with print statement (or MsgBox in MFC during that one Windows project in the 90s...). When I'm mentoring juniors, I always see them stepping through the code with a debugger. They're not really under
96.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I do something similar for my reports. I write most of it in markdown using Typora and then I export the last draft to docx for fine tuning and distribution (the agencies I work with want docx submissions, not pdf, which always bothers me)
97.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Good point. However, the conglomerates just buy ad space on the the powerhouses such as the NYT and they're not as firewalled as you'd hope. The NYT will never allow a negative article go out against someone who has major ad buy
98.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Unfortunately, any one I pick will anger one side or the other of the isle, so I'll refrain from naming names. There area bout a half dozen good long form Substacks that I follow and I know my friends follow a few others that I don&#x
99.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Your first bullet is totally correct, barrier to entry has collapsed and it's easy to do high-quality journalism without the backing of an institution. The people who are good journalists that people want to read have gone to platfor
100.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Seconded. Especially since you're a veteran, look at government (and in particular DoD) contractors. The pace is slower and as an SME you could contribute in many areas.
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by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I did something similar, in fact, the math may be the same thing and just expressed differently. But when I've had to rank non-transitive things, I use Elo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system ) Many y
102.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yes. My company bills me out at roughly 3x what I see. And when I do a side project for someone, I bill the same 3x rate - and even though it's more money in my pocket than my day job, it's more hassle and not clearly a better a
103.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I love this! I typically use a separate text editor for things like this, but the block idea is great and works with how my brain likes to group things. I know this is expanding the scope and complexity and probably opposite to what you&#x
104.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
That's awesome! I totally would have used that as a young punk if I knew about it.
105.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculations to run (and I didn't have the fancy cloud to run tons of stuff in para
106.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I had forgotten about modem compression. Back in the BBS days when you had to upload files to get new files, you usually had a ratio (20 bytes download for every byte you uploaded). I would always use the PKZIP no compression option for t
107.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I live 10 minutes from my office. I still only go in 1 day a week. I prefer working in the comfort of my home and being able to take a walk or mountain bike at lunch.
108.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
But it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theo
109.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Actually, all cause is the right metric. Let's say the vaccine stops 100% of malaria but causes severe heart attacks. You'd probably want to know that. I didn't review _this_ study, so I won't comment on the quality o
110.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
And now there's this new article showing an actual mechanism (or at least more direct than just populational studies). https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bph....
111.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yes, good find. One description that always resonated with me is the tradeoff between capacity for repair and uncontrolled repair or cancer. Think of two extremes: 1) no capacity for repair: once something is damaged, the cells don't d
112.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yes, the heart really has no capacity for repair. It just simply scars over. That's why things like "transient myocarditis" are scary. The inflammation may be transient, but the damage is long lasting.
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by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I'm a principal so I rarely write code now. I probably do 6 PRs a year, basically when its directly related to my expertise and it makes more sense for me to do it. But when I do, I really try to guide the reviewer into my thought pr
114.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I always use p for pointers, but not p_. Mainly it's because of aesthetics when scanning code. The -> operator and the _ always break things up too much for my brain. If I'm in a well protected piece of code where I know I d
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by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Heh, I know exactly which town you're talking about. I host my own little "third space" workout group after the gyms closed for lockdowns, and it's been super successful. If you want to ever stop by let me know.
116.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yes, this is a hard calculation to make. A couple of years ago I would also have said that a PhD is not worth the opportunity cost. I look back to the the time when my wife and I were both fresh out of college and in our PhD programs. We
117.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I think the search for a magic diet is because of the weird industrial food landscape we're in. Most of our food is designed for cheap production, shelf stable storage, and easy distribution. Nutrition and health aren't really c
118.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
It may be growing in popularity, but I don't view it as a fad. I've been doing it for nearly 15 years.
119.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
The "setup this benchmark" happens in medicine all of the time, and it's super insidious and no one sees it. It's hard to tease out. For example, say you have a new (patentable) drug that you're trying to get appro
120.
by michaelrpeskin 3y ago
She was at the eye doctor and just said something passing about colors and they did an ad hoc test there. She never did anything like a DNA test because it really wouldn't change her life any. It's just an interesting fact that

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